The Lapham Left, Fascism, and Daschle

When I came home yesterday, the new Harper's had arrived. The timing was good because earlier in the day I had read the new book "Gag Rule" by the editor of Harper's, Lewis Lapham. Lapham is a fixture of the left, of course, so there's much to be learned about what he says. Not surprisingly, Lapham spends some time criticizing Bush for not being sufficiently redistributionist when it comes to wealth and for being pro-life, for two examples. Economic egalitarianism has been a staple of the American economic left since the early 20th century and the right to an abortion has been a staple of the American cultural left since the 1960s, so no big surprises on that front. What's amazing about the book, to me, is how much it obsesses over an impending police state in the US. The subtitle of the book refers to the "suppression of dissent" and the book describes how the Patriot Act and the Iraq war makes all this possible. On p. 25, Senator Daschle is mentioned as being "smeared [] with the mud of treason" by Trent Lott after Daschle suggested the war was being driven by domestic politics. In an all too familiar gesture, Lapham then compares Lott to a Nazi: "The majority leader borrowed from the cynicism of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, who diagrammed for the judges at Nuremberg the simplicities of successful propaganda: 'All you have to do is tell them that they're being attacked, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.'" On the war, Lapham also says that the "American people apparently had become [] heavily sedated with the drug of fear." For Lapham, the Daschle's US Senate caved on the war, the press abetted Bush's war policy ("glad to do the king's bidding, quick to repeat the gossip heard on the palace stairs"), and the people were fooled into a war to distract them from real issues. In the final chapter entitled "Democracy in Irons," Lapham says the war in Iraq was a "test market for a reconfigured American political idea matched to Benito Mussolini's definition of fascism." Lapham compares the US at present to Weimar Germany and says that the "failure in Germany is one that comes most readily to mind when I read in the papers that President Bush reserves to himself the right to declare any American citizen an 'enemy combatant'..." Lapham invokes Milton Mayer's famous book "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945." With the Bush administration, Lapham fears a "collapse into the rubble of tyranny." If Lapham and large chunks of Moore/Dean Left actually believe we're on the brink of sliding into a fascist police state, then it's clear why there is so much hatred of Bush. This "paranoid style" in American politics, as Richard Hofstadter called it, cannot be discounted as a minor factor in the coming elections. The number of stories this year about the Bush administration being compared to the Nazis--even by Al Gore ("digital brownshirts")--is very alarming. After Sidney Blumenthal's recent designation of Bush as an international gulag-manager, one commentator wisely wondered 'what happens when there really are people as dangerous as the Nazis and there really are new gulags, then what do we call them.' Senator Daschle could be speaking out against all this absurdity--and thereby be consistent with his May speech about the "startling meanness" in American politics--but, alas, he's opted for cynicism and survival. He's riding the tiger of the left to stay in power--and you know what they say about jumping off. As I've said before, when Daschle said nothing critical about Michael Moore after he attended the Washington premiere, he missed a "Joseph Welch moment." Today, the editor of the Argus Leader, Randell Beck, makes some sport of bloggers for going on about one of the "burning questions of our time: Did South Dakota's senior senator really hug Michael Moore?" Of course, the "hug" isn't the issue (although the conflicting stories of Daschle and Moore is odd). The issue is the general embrace of Moore by the Democrats, as Jason Zengerle's piece in last week's New Republic discusses. That's serious, and scary, business.