It's always good to know that I'm not the only one* who thinks the Powell memo was a critical turning point away from the direction this country needed to go.
The featured essay on the Weekly Sift is called Why fascism? Why now? In it, Doug Muder synthesizes two recent posts that addressed that question.
The gist is that after World War II, Europe purposely rebuilt itself on social and economic equality in order to push fascism to the edges of society because its leaders knew that raging inequality was what had caused the cataclysm those countries went through since World War I.
"Fascism," Muder writes, paraphrasing one of his sources, "is a political technique for gathering up the misery of the masses and focusing it on scapegoats rather than solutions. The primary purpose of the fascist leader is revenge..."
Postwar social democracies in Europe provided solutions, and therefore prevented the need for scapegoats. In the U.S., first the New Deal and then its postwar continuation did a fair amount of the same, at least for white people, with high tax rates on the wealthy creating programs that led to expanded prosperity, like home ownership, cheap education, family-supporting wages, and all the things Baby Boomers remember as being "normal." The ultra wealthy elites recognized the bargain they were making: give up some of their money to create a stable system.
That started to end with the Powell memo, which told the rich they could have all the cake if they just bought-off the correct institutions. Reagan was elected within 10 years, and the slide began.
It has taken a few decades for this planned inequality to build up to the point where despair made fascism seem like the best option, but here we are. And most of the people who've already responded to its call don't even acknowledge the impacts of climate change still lying ahead of us. So that's more blame to misdirect.
Still, as Muder concludes, he says:
One lesson is to keep our own resentment tightly focused on the people who deserve it. Working class Americans who see little hope for their children are not our enemies, even if they vote for our enemies. We shouldn’t want revenge on them, we should want them to have better prospects, so that they lose their own need for revenge.
Us against Them is the fascist conversation. We can’t let ourselves be drawn into it.
Our salvation will not come through their misery. Quite the reverse. If we are to be saved, it will have to be through happiness — everyone’s happiness.
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* I know I'm not the only one who thinks the Powell memo was a turning point, but at the same time, every time I mention it, a voice in the back of my head says, "You sound like a conspiracy theorist."
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