Can this period (past 4 years) be compared to any other in U.S. history?

[bobweaver]

[saltpoint]

1. Really good post, bobweaver.

(as usual)

I don't think there is a direct parallel, but I think of Gore's and Kerry's defeat at the hands of an intellectually inferior man somewhat similar to Stevenson's losses to Eisenhower.

In the U.S. then, the status quo voters, still flush from the war victory, voted Republican and bought Sears washers and driers.

In the Beat community, Burroughs and Ginsberg weren't exactly walking around with "I Like Ike" buttons.

Today the red states sent Dubya back to the White House, but some of the bloggers and boards have become the strong opposition. The pendulum may swing again.

The bloggers may be Bush's Beats.

[LynnTheDem]

2. Harding for corruption, Nixon for lies. But bush has killed far more ppl

and has taken corruption and lies to an incredibly new & low fascist dictatorship level.

And it's about to get worse.

[NYC]

3. I agree re Harding and Nixon.

The question was "compare", and that's all we can do is compare. Bush is worse than Harding and Nixon.

[punpirate]

4. In some ways, it can...

... to McKinley's period in office. McKinley won twice, the second time by a larger margin than the first time. McKinley fabricated a war with Spain, in which he was able to seize Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Shortly after seizing the Philippines, a domestic resistance rose up and US troop presence was increased there. Losses of insurrectionists and civilians have been estimated at between 200,000 to 600,000 between the years of 1900 and 1914.

He promised that Cuba would be given its freedom after the conclusion of the war, but it remained a US protectorate for about thirty years. He annexed the Hawaiian Islands, and tried to improve international trade by strongarming the Chinese through the "Open Door" policy.

McKinley was aided in reaching the presidency by Mark Hanna, an industrialist turned Senator who was perhaps the most corrupt and devious man to ever sit in the Senate. Mark Hanna is Karl Rove's idol.

McKinley was thought to be one of the most self-important and boring speakers ever to occupy the White House, and many thought that Hanna controlled his every move.

McKinley had little appreciation for the little man, and he and Hanna continued to cultivate the favors of the industrial titans, often by using the Marines to invade Central American countries, including Nicaragua, when it looked as if some bankers might lose money on the change in the canal location from Nicaragua to Panama, I believe, after the French abandoned their project in Panama.

Edit to add info on Philippines insurrection.

[TankLV]

5. I go back to the last time the repukes cheated and installed their guy

over the popular vote.

Samuel Tildon?

some time in the 1800's.

I believe this period closely resembles the time leading up to the Civil War, unfortunately.

And you know where that lead to!

[Journeyman]

6. "Eadem sed aliter." . . .

History's motto. "The same things differently." From Schopenhauer.

There are elements of the past four years that correspond to a variety of time frames in America's past. The Civil War witnessed similar judicial abuses and arbitrary arrests. The Great War saw many restrictions on the rights framed in the Amendments, and in the Red Scare of the War's aftermath the abuses multiplied.

The HUAC and McCarthy assaults on our rights were concentrated and extensive, and elements of fascism were easily discernible in much of the nation, especially in regards the debate and initial formulation of the CIA and the development of the Military-Industrial Complex.

The Vietnam Era saw a rise in domestic surveillance, and with the creation of so-called "Enemies Lists," the White House took steps toward a vindictiveness unseen in prior times.

These are but a few of the comparable events and times similar to our own. There are a host of others. Thomas Jefferson's campaign for President elicited reactions from the religious factions of his day the equal of anything we've seen in recent years. The corporate abuses of the Gilded Age were shameful to a degree we haven't seen in many years.

With all this said, the challenges of our day seem more radical and determined than any we've encountered as a nation. There are many who compare what is happening today with previous eras in other nations, periods when governmental abuses passed "beyond the pale of human sinfulness." Are we in fact at such a time? The determination must be made by each individual and the action necessary decided in similar fashion.

Ultimately, we are always faced with the same ancient challenge humanity has struggled with since the beginning of time, the charge that has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

[Hissyspit]

7. Schopenhauer

I always paraphrase him: "History Repeats Itself, But Never In The Same Way"

[DivinBreuvage]

10. Thank you for this insightful and well-written historical commentary

Beautifully written, I wanted to say, but couldn't fit it all in.

Honestly it gets a little tiresome to read the constant stream of "Bush=Hitler" and "It's more worser now than ever before" threads.

As much as I agree with everyone else here that the Bush Administration is an unqualified disaster, I really believe that it is little more than the logical evolution of a strain that has been very powerful and prominent in America since the day the first Puritans and Cavaliers got off the boats; a strain that over and over again, as you point out, has worked far more real harm to Americans in the past than it is doing to Americans today. Hitler, Nazism, and Fascism have nothing to do with it (although of course everyone has to drag them into it because Nazis are "sexy"): the Bush Administration is purely and distinctly American, or else purely and distinctively human.

This is not to say that everything is fine. Obviously it's not. People are suffering as a result of this Administration's policies. This should not be accepted and it should be changed, and I admire and respect the brave and noble people who actively work to bring about that change. All I do is fume about it and bitch on the Internet.

But this is no Great Depression. This is no Civil War. This is no century of lynch mobs and jim crow. We may have one or all of those things soon, but they are not here yet. Anyone who complains about the last four years as being the end of America as we know it should try the 1836 "Gag" Rule, The Fugitive Slave Act, Roger Taney, and the Lecompton Consitution on for size (all of them dealing with that mythical topic that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Civil War). I wish more of us had a greater awareness of the fact that past generations had to suffer and endure much bigger crises than the Bush Administration, and that those past generations triumphed over those crises and left America a better place.

[tavalon]

11. Sadly

Fascism has been morphed in most peoples minds into something synonymous with Hitler and Nazis. And so when we bring up fascism, the example that is inevitably brought up is that one. But American fascism is uniquely, well, American. See, fascism is a trend that comes out of whatever a given nation's national identity is.

Perhaps those of us screaming fascism are a bit early but since this is a path that will, at some point, reach the point of no return, it is a far better thing to speak of it earlier rather than later.

Fascism is an inhuman manifestation of something very human, something embodied in the idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I tend to see fascism as a demonic force searching for human conduits. Only when it finds places ripe for the strident, nationalistic fervor it encourages does it emerge. It only becomes a world issue when the place it finds is a powerful nation. Fascism has reared its head in many small third world countries with few outside of that given country's border giving it much scrutiny.

But it has now come to the world's most powerful country and we will extract our blood sacrifice from the rest of the world. I just hope that in 100 years, it won't be America (instead of Germany) that is used as the ultimate example of the horrors of fascism but will instead be held up as an example of a country that was able to bring itself back from the brink of such a national psychosis.

That there have been other dark times in this nation's history is indisputable but that we are currently in a very dark time is also indisputable.

[DivinBreuvage]

13. I don't disagree with anything you wrote

In fact I think your explanation of how fascism works, and why an American manisfestation of it will be so dire, is extremely insightful.

But as I said in my post, and as I've said several times before on this forum, Neoconservatism, Christian Dominionism and so forth are merely the latest manifestation of sociopolitical strains that have always existed in America. Were John Endicott, Jefferson Davis and Herbert Hoover fascists? Is Bush a fascist? Who cares? The terminology is not really the point. A lot of people here seem to think that it's of critical importance to pin the label "fascist" on 21st Century American politics. I think this obsession with labels is a waste of time.

It is wiser and more productive, surely, to focus on why this worldview (whatever you choose to call it) has survived and flourished right here in America, and how Americans of past generations have managed to suppress it in a native American fashion. The answers lie there, not in the melodramatic conflation of Bush's America with Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, Fulgencio Batista's Cuba or whatever. That is why the historical ignorance expressed in these threads is so disheartening to me.

[tavalon]

15. That is an extremely good point

I think that those of us who scream fascism (I'm one of the guilty ones) hope that it will spur the masses to action. So far, we have been quite wrong on that count.

[Cornjob]

8. Remarkably similar to Nixon's first term...

with a cabinet loaded with paranoid idealogues, a White House occupied by a detached and delusional personality, and a rapidly splitting American population. Oh yes, and a vicious VP.

Folks, Nixon was a real screwball and his egomania created an incredible anti-war backlash that ultimately led to his resignation.

Bush has now set the stage for a very angry backlash of Americans who are sick of war and our current "holier than thou' national persona.

[Lexingtonian]

9. it is a rerun

Roughly 1959-1973 isn't a bad fit.

Gary Powell's U2 shot down ~ E-3 takedown/landing on Hainan
election buyings of '60 ~ corporate scandals
JFK election ~ Jeffords switch / narrow Pres. election
mercenaries&planes/Bay of Pigs ~ mercenaries&planes/Afghanistan
Cuban missile crisis panic/violation/vanity ~ 9/11 panic/violation/vanity
JFK assassination ~ '02 elections
Civil Rights Act ~ faith based crap

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution ~ Iraq War Resolution
Victory in Vietnam ~ Iraq invasion
Tet offensive ~ Iraqi resistance offensive of late summer '03
destruction of Hue ~ destruction of Fallujah
My Lai ~ Abu Ghraib
Saddam Hussein ~ Ho Chi Minh
1968 anti-feminism/anti-Semitism ~ attacks on the Kerrys as Liberal
American selfrighteousness re Vietnam ~ Swift Boat Liars for Bush 'cred'
Nixon/Kissinger/McNamara ~ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush Jr
Westmoreland ~ Franks
'conservative' ~ Republican/'Christian'

bailing out of Vietnam ~ bailing out of Iraq

We'll be at the Reagan era by the '06 elections. Hope for a liberal backlash to that.

[underpants]

12. Strangely (sadly) simliar to "Polk's War" US-Mexican War 1845

When Mexico declined to negotiate, the United States prepared to take by force what it could not achieve by diplomacy. The war was heartily supported by the outright imperialists and by those who wished slave-holding territory extended. The settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute (June, 1846), which took place shortly after the official outbreak of hostilities, seemed to indicate British acquiescence, for it granted the United States a free hand.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/MexicanW_Causes.asp

[IndyPriest]

14. VERY informative thread. Thanks, everybody! n/t

[Stop_the_War]

16. Yeah, the period of the 1770s

Both tyrants were named George. King George III mirrors today's George Bush. Arrogant, stupid, totalitarian. We must decide whether we will resist the tyrant or we will be silent. It is our choice.