Arthur Silber: The Dynamics of Rising American Fascism

I respectfully doff my hat to Stan Goff, and offer him my thanks. In a fascinating article that I urge you to read, "Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America," Goff pulls together a number of underlying elements and demonstrates how they add up to a sum that ought to cause grave concern for all those who experience great anxiety when contemplating our country's future. As he also shows, our most influential elites, across the political spectrum, all reinforce different parts of this particularly American version of incipient fascism.

One of the specific developments that grounds Goff's analysis was reported by the New York Times this past July:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

But as Goff shows, this particular story hardly occurred in a vacuum, and it feeds into immensely destructive wider political-economic factors.