Help, Barbarians at the Gate!!

I just realized that, from British Columbia's eastern border, the barbarians are in control all the way to Quebec.  Scheer and Kenney, Moe, Pallister and Ford. Two thousand miles of knuckle-draggin' mouth breathers. We don't need pipelines. We need a wall.

Quebec, come in Quebec.

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Public intellectual and McMaster prof, Henry Giroux, has a few ideas on how to drive back this tide of velvet-glove fascism.

Something sinister and horrifying is happening to liberal democracies all over the globe. Democratic institutions, such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions, and higher education are under siege worldwide.

...Two worlds are colliding: First, as a number of scholars have observed, there is the harsh and crumbling world of neoliberal globalization and its mobilizing passions that fuel different strands of fascism across the globe, including the United States. Power is now enamored with amassing profits and capital and is increasingly addicted to a politics of white nationalism and racial cleansing. Second, as Charles Derber argues in Welcome to the Revolution, there is the world of counter movements, which is growing especially among young people, with their search for a new politics that can rethink, reclaim and invent a new understanding of democratic socialism, untainted by capitalism.

...Education, both in its symbolic and institutional forms, has a central role to play in fighting the resurgence of fascist cultures, mythic historical narratives and the emerging ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism. Moreover, at a time when fascists across the globe are disseminating toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, particularly in the United States, matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of a fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, hatred, social cleansing, the suppression of dissent and white supremacy. Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom, and its pedagogical influence, while often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas. 

Against a numbing indifference, despair or withdrawal into the private orbits of the isolated self, there is a need to create those cultural apparatuses and formative cultures that do the pedagogical work of promoting civic courage, fostering the capacity to listen to others, sustaining complex thoughts and engaging social problems. We have no other choice if we are to resist the increasing destabilization of democratic institutions such as those regulatory institutions that provide for people’s basic needs and their personal and political rights. In addition, there is also the need to resist the increasing assault on reason, the collapse of the distinction between fact and fiction, and the taste for brutality that now spreads like a plague across a number of countries, including the U.S.

What Then Must We Do? Canada's Place Alongside the United States in Turbulent Times.

Do you ever wonder how close the United States may be to abandoning democracy? Do you ever wonder what that might mean for Canada? Are you familiar with the word, "anschluss"?

Even The Economist recently rated the US as a "flawed democracy."  That might have been overly generous. A paper released by Princeton in 2014 written by two professors, Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern), contrasted the voting record of Congress to the public will and reached the compelling conclusion that democracy had yielded to plutocracy in the American state. America's "bought and paid for" Congress had been "captured" by narrow, powerful interests and had ceased to serve the public interest. America was in the process of transforming into an oligarchy.

We watched as America's legislatures, state and federal, were captured. The telltale signs included the thwarting of campaign finance reform, the rise of a dominant corporate media cartel (think Sinclair Broadcasting) and the arrival of organizations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, where captured legislators made pilgrimage to be given industry-drafted bills to take back and pass into law.

This sort of big money corruption is gangrenous and, true to form, it quickly spread to regulatory capture where representatives of regulated industries come to control the quasi-judicial boards that regulate those same industries. Trump's poster boy for this is EPA head, Scott Pruitt, who is out to dismantle most environmental regulations.

A lot of the corruption-fueled decline in American democracy predates Donald Trump but the Mango Mussolini has been a powerful catalyst who may propel the United States into a new level of authoritarianism, possibly extending into outright fascism.

When it comes to global leadership, Trump spurns America's traditional allies but has revealed a preternatural affinity for tyrants including some of the most murderous. Trump sees the retreat of liberal democracy through much of the world and will not come to its aid or defence.

Trump has little time for America's vaunted system of checks and balances. He does not recognize three co-equal branches of government. He regularly attacks law enforcement and the judiciary. He is intent on contaminating the US Supreme Court by transforming it into a partisan political agency. Neither Congress nor the American people seem to realize that a partisan political Supreme Court cannot uphold justice in the land. The Rule of Law becomes meaningless. Trump insists that the Department of Justice works for him, not the nation. When impartiality is extinguished what remains is one party rule and when that is coupled with an imperial presidency you have one-man rule.

As American public intellectual, Henry Giroux, recently wrote:

While the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas, policies, passions and ruthless social practices of fascism, wrapped in the flag and discourses of racial purity, ultra-nationalism and militarism, are at the center of power in the Trump administration. 

When selected elements of history are suppressed and historical consciousness and memory no longer provide insights into the workings of repression, exploitation and resistance, people are easily trapped in forms of historical and social amnesia that limit their sense of perspective, their understanding of how power works and the ways in which the elements of fascism sustain themselves in different practices.

Before America's Electoral College handed Trump the presidency, several scholars who listened to his campaign rhetoric observed that Trump's vision of reforming the United States government strayed well into the extra-constitutional. Trump would have to go rogue, unconstitutional. To do that he would need to subdue or disable both the judicial and legislative branches of government. He's done a good job with House leader, Paul Ryan, and Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. With two, possibly even three more, Supreme Court vacancies in the near future, he can probably capture the already compromised judiciary also. Then it's just a matter of a Reichstag Fire.

These are problems that the American people will have to address. Perhaps they're willing to accept a post-democratic authoritarian government, strong man rule. That's their call.  Canadians, however, will be impacted by developments south of the 49th parallel perhaps more than ever in the history of our two nations.

We need to start considering how the decline of American democracy will alter the relationship between our nations; how it may impact us as individuals; whether we need to formulate some bottom line or red lines that will limit or regulate dealings between our countries. Are we at risk of succumbing to this American contagion? Should we be taking steps to rehabilitate and renew liberal democracy in Canada? Is democracy really all that secure in the True North or are we deluding ourselves? Can we afford this "open border" policy we once took such pride in? There are doubtless many issues we need to consider, questions we need to ask.

We're going to have to figure this out somehow. America is changing. It already has changed. It's not the beacon of democracy any more. To ignore that, to pretend that it's still Ozzie & Harriet and that the 2020 presidential elections will provide some magical reset button is delusional. Being next door neighbours leaves us uniquely exposed and vulnerable to this new America that seems intent on trying to forestall its decline by throwing out the rule books and exacting tribute from friend and adversary alike.

Churchill famously opined that America could always be counted on to do the right thing, after it had exhausted every other option. I wish that still held true. It doesn't. The right thing seems to have lost its currency in Washington.

This is as good a time as any to start talking among ourselves. We have a lot of catching up to do.

Imagine a World Where Every Leader Was a Variation of Donald Trump

Donald Trump likes to pretend he's shaking everything up. In fact he's tearing everything down and what he can't tear down his instinct is to bog it down. You could say that he's the first poster boy for the Age of Entropy.

Yesterday I reviewed an article by political scientist and historian R.L. Schweller published in the June, 2014 volume of Foreign Affairs.

International politics is transforming from a system anchored in predictable, and relatively constant, principles to a system that is, if not inherently unknowable, far more erratic, unsettled, and devoid of behavioral regularities. In terms of geopolitics, we have moved from an age of order to an age of entropy.

...How did we get here? The shift began in the twentieth century, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the spread of economic globalization, which together have made war among the great powers unthinkable. ...The absence of cataclysmic wars among great powers has obviously been a great boon. But it has also come at a real cost.

In their absence [wars of  major power ascension], we no longer have a force of “creative destruction” capable of resetting the world. And just as seas become foul without the blowing of the winds, prolonged peace allows inertia and decay to set in.

Too much peace. Too little war. Mutually assured destruction. Neoliberalism. Stagnation. Failure of the world order. Chaos. In this Age of Entropy, Schweller thinks Trump is all America needs. Many would disagree.

Merkel, Macron, Trudeau and Abe are trying to bolster the international order but they've been virtually powerless to arrest the decline of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism - Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Austria and even America. It seems chaos is indeed overtaking the world order. Authoritarianism has not only taken hold in these countries, it is a rising force in most others - Germany, France, the Netherlands, Britain and, yes, even our own Canada.

The longer leaders like Trudeau obsessively cling to globalism, the greater the appeal of authoritarian voices. People lose faith in their central governments as being under the sway of corporate interests and not in service to the public interest. If that was a crime you could convict every prime minister going back all the way to and including Mulroney. Democracy stagnated with the adoption of the neoliberal model and now democracy has succumbed to "inertia and decay."

As long as Trudeau's focus is on expanding trade and perpetual, exponential growth in the GDP he cannot focus on what ails us. He needs to be putting all his efforts into restoration of progressive democracy and there's an enormous amount of work that needs to be done in a shrinking window of opportunity. We have seen how other countries have succumbed or are at the cusp of illiberal democracy and worse. Doug Ford's victory yesterday is a wake up call. The election of Stephen Harper was a wake up call. Yet we sail into this becalmed, stagnant and foul sea and pretend nothing is wrong.

Giroux - How the Left Aids and Abets Authoritarianism

Among those who imagine they populate the left and centre-left are a good many who are all too ready to denounce neoliberalism even if they have only a vague and incomplete grasp of what that really is. Unfortunately, when it was foisted on the West nearly 40 years ago, it didn't come with an operating manual or even, for that matter, a name.

Neoliberalism has run a course that a few predicted from the outset. It has seen liberal democracy succumb to a new form of authoritarianism, the end result of a progression of the surrender of state sovereignty; political capture and the rise of "bought and paid for" legislatures implementing transactional democracy; regulatory capture and the usurpation of government powers by the industrial sector; all culminating in today's neo-fascist populism.

As I've written so many times, the public have been quietly, almost unnoticeably, conditioned into a malleable state, what Henry Giroux calls the "moral coma." This numbing down of the public conscience has facilitated the wholesale transfer, theft of both economic and political power out of the working classes and onto the ledger pages of the new aristocracy, our very own autocrats. Giroux writes that the left has unwittingly and, at times, even wittingly aided and abetted the rise of this new authoritarianism.

A neo-fascist politics of emotional brutality, militant bigotry, and social abandonment has reached new heights in the United States. Think about the Republican Party call to eliminate essential health benefits such as mental health coverage, guaranteed health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions, and the elimination of Meals on Wheels program that benefit the poor and elderly.
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As the Trump regime continues to hollow out the welfare state, it builds on Obama’s efforts to expand the surveillance state but with a new and deadly twist. This is particularly clear given the Congressional Republicans’ decision to advance a bill that would overturn privacy protections for Internet users, allow corporations to monitor, sell, and use everything that users put on the Internet, including their browsing history, app usage and financial and medical information.

This is the Orwellian side of Trump’s administration, which not only makes it easier for the surveillance state to access information, but also sells out the American public to corporate demagogues who view everything in terms of markets and the accumulation of capital.
...

..the relative silence of the American public in the face its government dropping the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan and unloading endless weapons of death and destruction in Syria testify to the amnesiac state of the country and the moral coma which has settled like a dense fog on so many of its inhabitants. As historical memory is erased, public spheres and cultural spaces are saturated with violence and the endless spectacles of civic illiteracy.
...

The supine response of the mainstream press and the general public to ongoing acts of state and corporate violence is a flagrant and horrifying indication of the extent to which the United States government has merged the corporate state with the military state to create a regime of brutality, sadism, aggression, and cruelty. State sovereignty has been replaced by corporate sovereignty. All the while, militarized ignorance expands a culture awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat making it all the more difficult to recognizes how authoritarianism appears in new forms.

The established political parties and politicians are nothing more than crude lobbyists and shock troops for the financial elite who believe everything is for sale. The boundaries of humanity are now inscribed and defined exclusively through the metrics of the twin logic of commercial transactions and the politics of disposability. The horrors unfolding under the Trump administration are not only abetted by white supremacists, religious evangelicals, but also by liberals who still believe that capitalism and democracy are synonymous, and who appear to delight and rush to support any military intervention or act of aggression the United States wages against a foreign power. Liberals are affronted over alleged charges of Russian spying but say nothing about their own country which does far more than spy on other countries it disagrees with, it overthrows them through either illegal means or military force.

Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is a combination of the savagery of neoliberalism and civic illiteracy on steroids. This legacy of neo-fascism represents more than a crisis of civic literacy and courage, it is a crisis of civic culture, if not politics itself. As civic culture wanes, a market based ideology increases its grip on the American public. This militant ideology of sadism and cruelty is all too familiar and is marked by unbridled individualism, a disdain for the welfare state, the elevation of unchecked self-interest to an organizing principle of society, the glorification of militarism, and a systemic erosion of any viable notion of citizenship.

This ideology has produced over the last forty years an agency killing form of depoliticization that paved the way for the election of Donald Trump and an updated version of American authoritarianism. This homegrown and new edition of neo-fascism cannot be abstracted from the cultural spectacles that now dominate American society and extend from the trivializing influence of celebrity culture and the militarism of video game culture to the spectacles of violence that dominate Hollywood and the mainstream media.

 ...

Clearly, resistance to this impending and ongoing reality of neo-fascism is more urgent than ever and necessitates challenging not only the commanding structures of economic power but also those powerful cultural apparatus that trade in the currency of ideas. A formidable resistance movement must work hard to create a formative culture that empowers and brings together the most vulnerable along with those who inhabit single issues movement.

The power of such a broad-based movement could draw inspiration from the historically relevant anti-war, anti-racist, and civil rights movements of the sixties and the ACT UP movement of the late eighties. At the same time, current social movements such as Podemos in Spain also offer the possibility of creating new political formations that are anti-fascist and fiercely determined to both challenge authoritarian regimes such as the Trump regime and dismantle the economic, ideological, and cultural structures that produce them. What all of these movements revealed was that diverse issues ranging from the war abroad to the racist and homophobic wars at home were symptomatic of a more profound illness and deeper malady that demanded a new understanding of theory, politics, and oppression.

...

A moral political coma now drives an authoritarian society that embraces greed, racism, hatred, inequality, stupidity, disposability, and lawlessness, all of which are celebrated as national virtues. The dark present is now the endpoint of a history of violence and barbarism that can no longer be camouflaged, in part, because it is unapologetic about the viciousness of its practices and the savagery of its effects. I want to hope that this moment of unmitigated violence, this period of punitiveness, and era of unimaginable cruelty will provoke people to wake up from the nightmare that has befallen the American public. Hopefully, in that wakefulness, in a resurgent act of witnessing and moral outrage will grow and provide the basis for a new kind of politics, a fierce wind of resistance, and a struggle too powerful to be defeated.

Pope Warns We May Already Be In "Piecemeal WWIII"

Has the world already stumbled into a third world war?  Pope Francis thinks that could well be the case.  Denouncing war as "madness", the Pope made his remarks while visiting Italy's largest military cemetery.

In Saturday's homily, standing at the altar beneath Italy's fascist-era Redipuglia memorial - where 100,000 Italian soldiers killed during WWI are buried, 60,000 of them unnamed, the Pope paid tribute to the victims of all wars.

"Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep," he said.

"Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction," he said.

I don't know about you but I'm thinking Francis might just be right.  What's going on today around the world, the brutal chaos, the clash of state and non-state actors, the "new war" type of warfare is very much in keeping with the models of warfare for the 21st century canvased in a recent course I took from the war studies department of Kings College London.

Gone are the days of Haig and Kitchener, Rommel and Patton.  Gone are the days of massive armies clashing over reasonably understood objectives.
Gone are the days of victors and vanquished, of declarations of war and treaties of peace.

Today's warfare sees parties mix and blur, sometimes drifting in and out of conflict, with often ill-defined objectives or no particular purposes at all. Conflict has become more fluid, actors are apt to change sides or vary allegiances.  The distinctions that once separated crime, terrorism, and insurgency are increasingly meaningless.

The Afghanistan debacle demonstrates how ill-prepared the West is for this transition in warfare.  Despite our claims to the contrary, we went into Afghanistan to fight a conventional military war - heavy on firepower, weak on troop strength.  It wasn't for lack of bombs or strike fighters, tanks, artillery or any of the other accoutrements of modern warfare that we failed to defeat a bunch of illiterate farm boys equipped with Korean war vintage rifles and light machine guns.  We failed because we stupidly never had remotely enough soldiers to fight their war and because they chose, not stupidly, not to fight ours.   At the end of the day the only war that mattered was theirs, the only one still in play when the clock ran out on our war.

Wars of theology seem to have supplanted wars of ideology as the new expression of nationalism.   The rise of religious fundamentalism as a driving force even in the halls of grand palaces and national legislatures has introduced a new element of zealotry and an acceptance of brutality that might have been unacceptable previously.  Who needs morality when you follow the fierce burning light of religious extremism whether Muslim, Christian, Judaic, Hindu or whatever?

Warlordism and tribalism often frustrate both the ability to conduct an effective war and any prospect for achieving peace from conflict.  We in the West have exacerbated those tensions by the manner in which we carved up so much of the world as our spoils of war, drawing lovely neat borders to suit our convenience and without concern for the ethnic realities of the people we were corralling together.

In contemporary warfare before the turn of the 20th century, fatalities were roughly 85% military, 15% civilian.  A century later those ratios had been reversed.  Today the brunt of warfare is inordinately borne by civilian populations as the laws of war intended to protect them are routinely flouted by non-state actors and state actors alike.  Even in Canada we sit by complacently as our allies deliberately target civilian populations with impunity.  They do it and, by our silence, we condone it and become complicit in it.

Morality has gone straight out the window.  There are more failed and failing states, ever more illiberal democracies (we're not all that far off either) ushering in a new era of authoritarianism.  And we have collectively arrived at this tragic place just at the moment when we must decide if mankind can find some means of equitably and peacefully sharing this biosphere, our one and only habitat, through what promises to be an increasingly challenging and dangerous century.                                        

Of Zombie Politics and Culture War

In a system that reduces life to a chain of disconnected reactions to shock, personal communication tends to lose all meaning... The individual under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone.  He becomes numb and rigid not only in relation to his neighbor but also in relation to himself'; fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction.  Thinking becomes a stupid crime/ it endangers his life.  The inevitable consequence of that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population.  Human beings live in a state of stupor, in a moral coma.
                                 - Leo Lowenthal on authoritarianism rooted in modern civilization.

If you're looking for a dark read to round out your summer, you won't be disappointed to pick up Henry Giroux', "Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism."  Giroux, an American intellectual who now camps out at McMaster University, focuses on how authoritarianism is creeping into our body politic, rendering democracy powerless and meaningless.  At just over 160-pages it's no tome yet I've been digesting it, chapter by chapter, for a few months and I'm still not halfway through.  It's the sort of book you might read and then ponder until you've had your fill and then put it down, meaning to pick it back up soon but not quite doing it.

A quick look at Giroux' opening comments about the rise of "Authoritarianism with a friendly face."

In the minds of the American public, the dominant media, and the accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there is no sense of how authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as anything other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm troopers, rigid modes of censorship, and chilling spectacles of extremist government repression and violence.  That is, there is little understanding of how new modes of authoritarian ideology, policy, values, and social relations might manifest themselves in degrees and gradations so as to create the conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly cruel and oppressive social order.  As the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, there is a willful ignorance of how emerging registers of power and governance "dissolve politics into pathology."  ...there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkable - that such an [authoritarian] order in its contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with  manipulative modes of consent - what one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character.

Giroux goes on to touch upon a theme raised occasionally on these pages - the 'depoliticizing' of society.  In Canada it's a product of the spread of neoliberalism throughout the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats.  We wind up staring at a row of grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard and turn on our heels away from politics entirely.  Never in my lifetime has the political spectrum of my country been so compressed, political discourse so stilted and political vision so abnegated.  One of the consequences of this, according to Giroux, is an everyman-for-himself culture.

Agency is now defined by a neoliberal concept of freedom, a notion that is largely organized according to the narrow notions of individual self-interest and limited to the freedom from constraints.  ...It is an unlimited notion of freedom that both refuses to recognize the importance of social costs and social consequences and has no language for an ethic that calls us beyond ourselves, that engages our responsibility to others. 

...This merging of the market-based understanding of freedom as the freedom to consume and the conservative-based view of freedom as a restriction from all constraints refuses to recognize that the conditions for substantive freedom do not lie in personal and political rights alone; on the contrary, real choices and freedom include the individual and collective ability to actively intervene in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down on everyday life - a notion of freedom that can only be viable when social rights and economic resources are available to individuals.

...the formative culture necessary to create modes of education, thought, dialogue, critique, and critical agency - the necessary conditions of any aspiring democracy - is largely destroyed through the pacification of intellectuals and the elimination of public spheres capable of creating such a culture.

Zombie Politics and Culture is a truly worthwhile read for anyone with a sense that our democracy can no longer be trusted to those who march beneath Conservative, Liberal or New Democrat banners.  While we're still a good distance behind the violent authoritarianism practised openly today across the United States, democracy in Canada is badly in need of restoration. 

The Face of Corporate Feudalism

Democracy is reeling.  Corporatist authoritarianism is quietly ascendant.  Rights and freedoms are now being issued with price tags and, if you can't afford them, you don't get them.

Zoe Williams, writing in The Guardian asks, "When did being lowly become a criminal offence?"

It's a new world order that you probably have not seen and yet it is setting in all around us.  It's the very sort of order that appeals to soulless authoritarians like our own Steve Harper.

Please, follow the link, read the article, and then try to think about how we stop this because, if we don't, it will get worse and that could become our children's "normal".

Update - If The Guardian piece isn't enough to make you think twice about Amazon, check out this report from The Independent an anonymous commenter here brought up.

CCCP, Meet CPC3

For years  Stephen Joseph Harper has shown certain instincts reminiscent of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.

The way Comrade Steve "reformed" the Prime Minister's Office was a dead giveaway.  His appointment of political commissars to disrupt public access to the civil and armed services was a masterful coup, entirely Stalinist.   Henceforth his political minions would decide what communications from the public should be allowed to reach their government, what unwelcome communications would not.   These same commissars would filter communications to the public, ensuring they were tailored to conform to the Chairman's policies and interests.

Steve Inspects PMO Commissars

 In so doing, the Chairman transformed both the public service and the armed forces into his personal and oh so partisan political agencies.   Gagging the public service and armed forces was also instrumental in Comrade Steve's campaign to choke out any residual vestiges of transparency and accountability.   Everything that impedes One Man Rule was to be suppressed, even Parliament itself.   Truth, reality were what the Chairman prescribed them to be.

As Joe Stalin reigned over the Soviet Union, the CCCP, S. Joe Harper reigns over Canada, the CPC3.   What's that?   It is the face of Canada today represented by the Conservative Party of Canada, the Calgary Petroleum Club and the Communist Party of China, the Unholy Trinity that charts the future of Canada for us and for our kids.

Canada today has the most undemocratic, authoritarian, ideological prime minister perhaps in our nation's history.   That cannot be overlooked or discounted when considering his dealings, supposedly on our behalf, with other undemocratic, authoritarian and ideological regimes.   And that is the light we need to shine on Comrade Steve's Canada-China trade pact.  We may regret it if we don't.

The Peril of the Authoritarian Mind

"They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result.... And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away."

- Robert Altemeyer, "The Authoritarians" 

There was a time when fundamentalists were considered quirky types who assembled in their covens on Sundays in their Sunday-Go-to-Meetin' clothes for a dose of Revivalism.   That was, of course, before they began their rise to the top levels of political power.

Our own Stephen Harper is a fundamentalist and there's a sprinkling of like-minded in his caucus.   Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there are a lot of fundamentalists in the Liberal or NDP ranks.

There's an interesting essay in AlterNet on the rise of authoritarianism in politics and the role fundamentalism plays in that.   Mike Lofgren, a former Republican Senate Congressional staffer, seeks to explain why right-wingers have so little compassion.   Lofgren says that, to make sense of them, we must  "leave conventional political theory and enter the realm of psychopathology."   He notes how today's right wingers are driven by religious fundamentalists who make up 40 per cent of  Republican voters.  Lofgren claims this hard-core base welcomes authoritarianism.

"An observer of the right-wing phenomenon must explain the paradox of followers who would escape from freedom even as they incessantly invoke the word freedom as if it were a mantra. But freedom so defined does not mean ordinary civil liberties like the prohibition of illegal government search and seizure, the right of due process, or the right not to be tortured. The hard right has never protested the de facto abrogation of much of the Bill of Rights during the last decade. In the right-wing id, freedom is the emotional release that a hostile and psychologically repressed person feels when he is finally able to lash out at the objects of his resentment. Freedom is his prerogative to rid himself of people who are different, or who unsettle him. Freedom is merging into a like-minded herd. Right-wing alchemy transforms freedom into authoritarianism."

Lofgren cites Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer's study of fundamentalism and the far right from the book "The Authoritarians".

"They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.

"...Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds."

In politics today where winning or losing is commonly a difference of a few percent of the overall vote, this minority is easily large enough to swing elections.   As John McCain learned, if you're not saying what they need to hear, they'll just stay home on voting day.  It's an object lesson powerfully understood by those riding the clown car in the Republican presidential race today.

As progressives, we need to start taking heed of fundamentalist authoritarianism and its practice within the ranks of our government and institutions.   Steve Harper rides this bus.   His authoritarian instincts are at the very core of his administration and erupt like pustules at the mention of reproductive rights or capital punishment.  Steve is a shrewd bugger, an accomplished dissembler and concealer.  He knows to drive Canada into his corral he must move incrementally because small steps invariably appear less threatening than seismic shifts.  But he and his are radicals and they are authoritarians and "nothing you can say or do will change their minds."

By the way, if you would like to plumb the depths of your inner fascist instincts, there's a fun test here.

Is The Era of Authoritarianism Coming to a Close?

Barack Obama's committment to transparency and accountability in government may call the curtain down on the era of authoritarianism and the oligarchs who thrived on it.

Stephen Harper promised Canadians transparency and accountability when that suited him but, once in power, quickly reneged and instead imposed a system of government as authoritarian, secretive and uncommunicative as any in postwar Canadian history.

Stephen Harper didn't govern Canada, he didn't lead the Canadian people. Stephen Harper ruled us. He rules the Canadian people just as he rules his caucus - with an iron hand and sealed lips. With the collaboration of a pitiful national media, he simply gagged critical government departments such as National Defence and the Environment Ministry. Our media sat by like complacent stooges as he installed political commissars in the Prime Minister's Office to clamp down on communications between citizen and government and to skew and politically filter what little information the public was able to get from its government. That's despotic, tyrannical and yet we sat by and allowed it to happen - allowed it to happen to us.

Transparency and accountability are fine - for those who would lead - but they're anathema to those who seek, instead, to rule. That's why Harper wasted no time ditching both promises. Information became something that flowed from the citizen to their government, not from the government to the public. That is what suits authoritarian rule. That is the guiding principle behind such odious legislation as America's Patriot Act. It's all about degrading individual freedoms and rights while expanding government powers and secrecy, all in the name of collective security.

Barack Obama has proclaimed the era of authoritarianism at an end in America. We should finally stand up and demand an end to it in our own country as well.