Bad Days Ahead

By Tom Kando

Republicans have deliberately made the Super Committee fail. This was the congressional committee which was supposed to help the federal government tackle the budget deficit, take the first steps out of our ruinous indebtedness, and start the road towards long-term economic recovery.

But to Republicans, none of this mattered. To them, failure is success. With the 2012 elections around the corner, their plan is to complete the electoral sweep. And of course, the worse the economy is, the more Obama gets the blame. So the Republicans plan to take over the Senate and the White House. The House and the Supreme Court they already got.


Once the Republicans control all branches of government, there is only one thing left to the people: the streets. The OCW movement and campus demonstrations such as the one at UC Davis, just down the road from where I live, will look like a picnic in comparison. A repeat of the 60s?

But what actually happened in the 60s? The protest movement resulted in the election of conservative Republican Richard Nixon! I campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (and also for George McGovern in 1972). Both elections were won by Richard Nixon!

Nixon was shrewd. He diffused the protest by abolishing the draft and by winding down the Vietnam War. The latter was a slow and painful process, primarily Henry Kissinger’s project. Nixon’s divide-and-rule strategy worked well for him, at least until Watergate.

In his classic Politics of Mass Society, William Kornhauser discusses the factors which generate totalitarianism. In times of crisis, the working and lower classes tend to move to the Left (Communism), while the middle class veers to the Right (Fascism). That is how middle-class people tend to respond to downward mobility and economic frustration.

Today, the new Republican front-runner is Newt Gingrich. Two of his recent statements are that “the OCW demonstrators should get a job, after they take a bath,” and that “school kids should be hired to clean the schools’ latrines for pay,” (in other words, let’s abolish our child labor laws). Appropriately, Gingrich’s critics have dubbed him the new Marie-Antoinette.

However, the problem is that there may be more people who agree with Gingrich than those who support OCW and the UC Davis students. Alas, this includes many of my own acquaintances. During the days following the UC Davis pepper spraying incident, a majority of the letters to the Sacramento Bee supported the police!

The classic example of Right-wing totalitarianism triumphing in response to downward mobility and economic frustration in a largely middle-class society was Nazi Germany. During the 1930s, Fascists and Communists confronted each other in the streets of Germany, and the Fascists won.

I am not saying that America is going to turn fascist. Everything in life is a matter of degree. The question is not whether, but how far to the right the country is going to move. Whatever happens, I am afraid that we can expect strong elements of a police state in our future. If I am proven wrong, I’ll be hilariously happy to apologize. leave comment here