In my writings on Societal Regression, I have made the point that societies regress in the face of powerful stressors. This can occur during time of war (the confinement of Japanese-Americans during WWII) or during periods of intense economic stress (Germany during the Depression.) We are currently in a time of significant stress, though our economic woes have not yet approached the extremes of the 1930s and our current military involvements do not come close to the existential struggle of WWII, and the evidence of regressive tendencies can be found if one looks.
The clearest evidence for societal regression, as noted in my original post on Terror and Societal Regression, include:
3) Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.
10) Dehumanization. Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process. Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus' degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as cafrads, or insects. Interestingly, the Tutsis were also called the "Jews" of Rwanda.
(It might be worthwhile to review the entire panoply of signs of large group regression because there is so much of it going on today; that could be a future post.)
The tendency to splitting is ubiquitous. The healthiest societies always need to work to maintain awareness of such tendencies to divide people between "us" and "them." We accept as a necessary part of the functioning of our democracy that, especially during election times, political opponents will be characterized as "them" while allies are defined as "us" yet traditionally, the attempt to re-fuse into a single polity is made post-election.
[Under duress such attempts at re-fusion can fail or can be covertly or overtly sabotaged; such efforts are one of the reasons that the current administration is losing support. People recognize we are in a stressful time, yet the administration seems to spend more time and energy demonizing its opponents than working to restart the economy. The lack of any discernible effort at re-fusion is a potentially dangerous omission by the Obama administration. This can be contrasted with George Bush's work with ted Kennedy early in his administration on No Child Left behind. Thus far, Obama has found no area for compromise with his political opponents.]
In ways large and small, signs of splitting are becoming troublingly evident. Consider Jeffrey Goldberg's post, Anatomy of a Smear:
Dalia Mogahed, the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and a member of President Obama's faith-based partnerships advisory council, is in a bit of a pickle these days for speaking on a British television show hosted by a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an extremist Muslim group. Fox News, and others, have been after her for this appearance, in which she said, "I think the reason so many women support sharia (Islamic law) is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media... The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance."
...
One key difference between American Muslims and British Muslims -- and this is a massive over-generalization, of course -- is that American Muslims seem to like their country very much. Obviously, there are pockets of Muslim extremism in America and I'm all for watching the extremists, and arresting them if needed -- but Dalia doesn't live in one of those pockets. In fact, she is quite often criticized by Muslim radicals as a "sell-out." Most recently, she was attacked for speaking at an iftar (the Ramadan break-fast meal) at the Pentagon. She's stuck in the responsible middle, in other words. Right where many thinking people find themselves these days.
Compare this to the comments of Wafa Sultan to Andrew G. Bostom:
The final chapter of "A God Who Hates" includes Wafa Sultan's devastating critique of remarks Colin Powell made during the latter phase of the 2008 US Presidential election campaign. Appearing on NBC television's "Meet The Press," Powell glibly asserted nothing would be wrong with Americans choosing a Muslim President. Wafa Sultan's analysis of this comment exposes both the terribly dangerous flaws in Powell's limited, naïve understanding of Islam, and how that ignorance is compounded by obligatory allegations of "anti-Muslim prejudice" (or "Islamophobia"), precluding any rational discussion of the very real threat mainstream Islamic doctrine poses.
I know that Mr. Powell, who lives by the American moral code on which he was nurtured, refuses to judge people on the basis of their religious affiliation, and that is his right. But he does not have the right to be ignorant or to disregard the fact that Islam is not just a religion: It is a political doctrine that imposes itself by force, and we have to subject to microscopic scrutiny any Muslim in America who ascends to the heights of this sensitive and supremely important post.
I would not want anyone to regard what I am saying as anti-Muslim prejudice. Muslims, like any other national group, can be either good or bad, and the best among them do not act in accordance with the teachings of their religion, either because they are not familiar with them, or because they have deliberately progressed beyond them; but to understand what it would mean for a Muslim to become President of the United States, one must search through Islamic history-the history of the Arabs, which is my own history-for a Muslim leader and look at his actions.
The first and most obvious Muslim leader we meet in our search is Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. Had Mr. Powell read the life of Muhammad, as it is recounted in the Arabic sources and as I learned it in my schooldays, he would fall down in a dead faint. In third grade at primary school I read with pride in our religious primer how Muhammad had beheaded 800 Jews from the Bani Quraiza tribe in one night, then taken their wives and children hostage, and spent the same night with the Jewish woman Safia, whose husband, father, and brother he had just killed. This is only a drop in the ocean of what was written about the crimes of Muhammad in the Arabic sources, but, unfortunately, Mr. Powell-it seems-has never troubled to familiarize himself with the most malicious enemy ever to have confronted him or threatened his safety. Once Americans understand that the Koran insists that Muhammad is the ideal that every Muslim male should imitate, they will realize that a Muslim candidate for the American presidency is a very serious matter.
I do not know if Dalia Mogahead is in "the moderate middle" (though I am willing to take Jeffrey Goldberg's word for it) and I do not know if Wafa Sultan is correct with her implication that the Koran is the ineradicable source of Islamic terror, but the ideas both express suggest that the tendency to splitting into all-good versus all-bad is percolating below the surface of the current and previous administration's insistence that Islam is a religion of peace. By Bush and Obama both insisting that Islam is all-good, we have lost the opportunity to press the Islamic world to confront their own Manichean tendencies and as a result, even as we remain targets of radical Islam, the stresses which press toward splitting remain underground, to grow over time.
The sense of subterranean movements along regressive fault lines can be found both here and in England, in two recent articles. First, Thomas Sowell worries about a President who he believes does not privilege America's ethos or history:
Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.
Second, Shannon Love worries about The Collapse of the British Liberal Order, apparently much further along in its regression:
Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.
How did Britain come to this state?
Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces. As I wrote three years ago, liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.
The major problem in resisting authoritarian orders is the simple fact that they usually work quite well in the short term. In the 1920s, Mussolini was widely admired across the political spectrum for saving Italy from imploding after years of red socialist strikes and violence had all but shut down the country. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression spectacularly. The communists did manage to rapidly industrialize peasant economies (albeit at a staggering cost in lives). Less dramatically, authoritarian corporatist/state-capitalist regimes in South Korean, Taiwan and Singapore raised the population out of poverty and led to democracy in the former two.
The BNP could very well rise to power by quickly and easily fixing problems that many Britons see going unaddressed by the left.
For both fascism and socialism/communism, splitting is the sine qua non. Regression to such totalitarian, even soft totalitarian liberal fascism, is facilitated by societal stress. The longer untoward trends continue, the more likely the worse outcome and the more difficult the task of re-fusion.
As Richard Fernandez notes in his response to Shannon Love's post
What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed. In the long run there is little reason to think that Nick Griffin will allow any more freedom than Gordon Brown. What is likely to happen is the substitution of one set of sacred cows for another. When the Left and fascists contend for power, the surveillance cameras are in every case fully employed.
Regression always includes a move back from more mature to less mature functioning. A regressed society is one which looks for a powerful leader to rescue and protect it. The greatest problem with one party rule in a democracy is that the one party never recognizes its own tendencies toward authoritarianism when stressed, which is how we lose freedom "for our own good" during such times.
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