Reviving the Vital Center

Trying to make sense of it all. I think now will be as good a time as any to give up following current events so closely and try to make this more of a blog about history that occasionally comments on the present instead of a political blog that occasionally references the past. I can't really remember how to do that, but it is probably time to try because the present is basically lost. There's just not a whole lot to talk about in a one party state. Sure I could jump on the blame game train but I think there's enough of that going on already and it is quite disgusting. I kept thinking that the center has not held, all of our institutions could not restrain the cancerous growth of fascism. And when confronted by the reality of a strongman backed by a flood of racists, authoritarians, and reactionaries all of those institutions folded. The Democratic party could not, or would not accept that their fellow Americans had really gone off the deep end and try to fight them on those grounds. The children of darkness lie, cheat, intimidate, bully, break all unwritten rules, they fight dirty and the children of light just couldn't meet them on the same terms.

Of course I am talking about going back to my roots and studying Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr anew. Also it will be helpful to study the works of anti-communists like James Burnham and anti-fascists who will most likely become reintroduced into the popular mind as they have not since before the Second World War. Beginning with Schlesinger's idea of the Vital Center, which he defined in an article for Society from May/June 1998 which revisited the book of 1949 as:

[A] contest between democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests within democracy between liberalism and conservatism, not at all to the so-called "middle of the road" preferred by cautious politicians of our own time. The middle of the road is definitely not the vital center--it is the dead center. Within democracy the argument adheres to FDR's injunction to move always 'a little to the left of center.'"

 We are still too close to the event to judge when the definitive break from that vital center began, the point at which our political discourse was no longer between liberalism and conservatism, but democracy and totalitarianism. Most historians are hard-pressed to judge the point when descent into totalitarianism in Weimar Germany became inevitable, dictatorship and the loss of freedom was mostly assured before Hitler became chancellor. And because democracy's death in Germany lurched and heaved about like a storm, the anti-fascist parties could not concentrate to resist the Nazis. I remember reading a book called The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town by William Sheridan Allen where he described how the Nazis slowly arrested a person here, a person there, installed party members in private clubs and trade unions, and never presented a single huge event or action that could unify resistance. Allen wrote that the Social Democratic party had their own paramilitary forces, lying in wait for the big moment to make their stand but it never came. The Nazis co-opted other right wing political parties and clubs, planted members in local media and law enforcement, and generally consolidated their power slowly and methodically until there was nothing left to resist them.

That isn't to say that this time it will be the same with the trump republicans, but as I wrote previously non-authoritarian Americans have to be prepared for anything. It is possible that the vulgar talking yam will surround himself with such incompetent sycophants that they won't get much oppressing done, but I won't be holding my breath. It is an incredible turn of events though, that during the 1930s and 1940s Americans were on guard against extremism from the right and left, however brutal it might have been, but today our institutions are either collaborating or acting like nothing is wrong.

What would it take to actually revive that tenacious defense of freedom? To return to the politics Schlesinger wrote about so long ago will first require recognizing that none of this is normal. Today's republican party is unprecedented in it's rejection of democracy and desire to harm as many of us as possible. We can't wait for the fascists in our midst to self-destruct, they have to be resisted... somehow.