There’s a small item on the Daily Caller about Bloomberg reporter Ryan Donmoyer asking fellow JournoListers whether it was okay to call the “teabaggers” fascists since they seemed to be aping the “brownshirts.” Historian Michael Kazin shot down the idea. But Rick Perlstein responded:

I’m always extremely reluctant to deploy the “F” word. But this essay is a good one on which to hang a discussion, I think. Most usefully, it points out that fascism is a variety of coalition politics; and that elements for that coalition are visible on the horizon.
http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009083205/fascist-america-are-we-there-yet

Several readers asked what I think. Here’s what I think: It’s all very dumb. The Sara Robinson essay Perlstein links to is silly (though, yes, coalition politics was involved in the rise of fascism; coalition politics was also involved in the rise of, well, every political group). As is pretty much everything I recall seeing by her on the topic of fascism. She claims to be running through Robert Paxton’s five stages of fascist transition. So pretty much at this time last year (her essay was posted in early August, 2009) we were at the tipping point:

All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it “fascism” because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America’s conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations — passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of “mainstream” conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn’t act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips’ Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas — the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer — being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans.
We’ve seen Armey’s own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process — and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We’ve seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to “a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.”
This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.

So, are we there yet?

By the way, I think it is amusing that Rick Perlstein takes this essay seriously. Actually, I find it amusing that anyone does. But I think it is outright hilarious that Robinson claims that “all through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it ‘fascism.’” What on earth is this woman talking about? Why would anyone bother reading past that sentence?