Sowing the seeds of Fascism
Josh has written a couple of posts today ruminating on just why John McCain has run such a nasty, negative campaign, and why it has descended to another level of filth in just these last few weeks. Josh even quoted a commenter who asked aloud whether McCain shouldn't just "give it up" rather than continuing to allow these robo-calls and "anti-American" smears to continue.
The tactics are turning the majority of voters off, to be sure. It's reasonable to ask, "why is McCain doing this when it seems so detrimental to his chances?" (And by "McCain," I really mean the greater GOP message machine.)
If the tactics seem counter-productive to their ends, perhaps we should give more thought as to what the GOP's actual ends are.
Two things have become very clear to me over the last four weeks: Barack Obama is going to win this election, and the next four years are going to be some of the toughest we've ever faced as a country. We're looking at a crippling depression, high unemployment, continued geo-political destabilization, and the messy obligation of ending two wars.
Let's not be short sighted. The GOP is using the last few weeks of this election season -- when their base is paying attention -- to frame the terms of their opposition to the Obama Presidency. In the euphoria of a post-Bush Obama world, we Democrats will take a "bygones be bygones" view of the tactics of this campaign. McCain himself will go back to being the irascible uncle of the Senate. Palin will be the butt of gentle jokes and tabloid headlines about her daughter's wedding/childbirth/divorce/etc.
But meanwhile...
Meanwhile, that very angry 30% of the country, those who have been receptive to this attempt to cast Obama as the "Other," are going to have a huge amount of grist for their mill. Once Obama is President, the inevitability of his rise will become gospel: the Obama Age will be said to have started in January 2007, when he declared for the Presidency (just as 9/11 was cast as a continuation of Clinton foreign policy). And the narrative that "everything in America started to fall apart when the Obamas of the world started to take over" will be pushed very, very hard.
And once we don't have Bush to kick around anymore -- once Obama has taken on the mantle of the Presidency, Americans are going to be focused on their own very real problems. It's going to be tougher than any of us can imagine right now. And it's going to be a lot easier for those in the center -- not just the hard-right 30% but the vulnerable, suggestible middle -- to blame Obama than to blame Bush. Because if you think it's hard to find Bush now, just wait until January 21st.
Barack Obama, in his acceptance speech, asked Republicans to "own their failure." On the contrary, they are doing everything in their power to cast Obama as the emblem and the cause of everything that has gone wrong and will go wrong with the economy and the country as a whole over the next four years.
What happens when a country descends into dire economic circumstances, and the party in opposition bases their attacks on questions of patriotism, nationalism, "true identity," and the like. Do I have to spell it out for you?
You might say, "So wait a minute -- are you saying that the McCain campaign is actually trying to lose because they don't want ownership of the next four years?" While I could make a pretty good case based on his decisions that McCain's been trying to lose this election from the start -- that all he wanted was the salutatorian honor of the GOP nomination, which he's thought was his by right since 2000, before strolling off to pasture, I'll stop just short of that argument. I'll argue instead that as it's become increasingly clear that McCain will lose, the GOP attacks have become less and less about the election and more and more about the next four years.
Think of the most recent memes in the McCain/Palin campaign as an attempt to build a firewall of jingoistic, racist hatred between the actions of the Bush administrations and the consequences of those actions.
And thus are the seeds of fascism sown. Because once you build that wall of hate, you have to keep building it until it becomes a labyrinth.
