``...Now if you want to step back from wretched rhetoric excess and have a discussion about how terrible and alarming is the wave of government repression, I will probably agree with you completely, even down to the echoes of fascism...'' Chip Berlet
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Okay (ignoring a great deal of insulting tripe). My argument goes like this. The Nazis put into place legislative police state powers first, and then proceeded to carry out their program as the rule of law and governance. I maintain it is the establishment of broad police powers of governmental institutions and their sweeping legal authority itself that puts the US at the threshold of Germany in the 1930s.
There is no legal means to stop the US government from rounding up any, some, or all non-citizens and putting them in indefinite detention and or processing them through secret kangaroo courts then executing them. Nothing, get it? Citizens are subject to unlimited surveillance, investigation, arrest, held incommunicado in detention, and tried in secret, if they are identified (by pronouncement, without evidence) as supporting or involved in some overly broad category of unspecified crimes, termed terrorist activities. These powers are granted under the patriot act, to the US Attorney General, officials of the Justice Department and federal law enforcement agencies to use at their discretion. Many of these powers have been placed beyond judicial oversight or review.
Even if an effective, well constructed series of court cases are generated, these would mostly likely end up before a Supreme Court that has already discredited itself. The court would mostly likely rule to support the very executive, the court itself installed by default.
This isn't a question of being alarmist, engaging in loose rhetoric, making fallacious arguments, doing poorly researched sociology or ignoring the oppressions of an unbridled capitalism. These are laws and formal political realities.
I am not claiming we live in a police state. I am saying absolutely we live in a police state, period. It's already accomplished fact.
Now, the argument against this view of affairs is to say, well yes, technically, since the 2001 patriot act, we live a police state, but nobody in government is going to carry that out to extremes.
But what does this argument really amount to? We do not live in a police state because those in power lack the will to use the police state powers they have given themselves? Or more broadly, that various sociological conditions have not been met, even if many of the objective legal structures are in place?
Regardless of what it is called there are some theoretical or academic issues that it seems to me need examination. In particular there is an implicit division between the formal social, political, and economic institutions that create the objective framework of society, and the more loosely defined or narrative characterizations that compose their study as sociology.
This division is what I think is the basis of this disagreement. You want to keep the categories of fascism and nazism restricted to their narrative sociological and cultural features, and yet you have not taken into account the more formal or legal features that are their necessary concomitants as expression of state.
In a sense this situation is similar to the division between de facto segregation and legally enforced segregation. The concrete results might be appear similar, but there is, despite appearance, a fundamental difference.
It is as if we had legally enforceable segregation with a segregationist government in power, but for the moment everybody on the street was just ignoring it---so there is no segregation on the ground. In this imaginary example, since the concrete social conditions of segregation are absent, in terms of a social narrative it could not be characterized as a segregationist society. And yet, viewed as the structure of law, such a society should be termed segregationist.
So in parallel, I think we now have the formal apparatus of a police state, that is for the moment behaving as a de facto republic.
Chuck Grimes