“Interestingly, it was a military man, a prominent retired general assigned the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who blew the whistle after pondering the grotesque implications of the undemocratic installation of a fascist dictatorship in Washington. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud.
“The president might have used the occasion to alert the public to the anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the capitalist class. But this of course would only have bolstered the fortunes of Communist, Socialist and other anti-capitalist political tendencies here, which were already gaining some ground among artists, intellectuals and a surprising number of working people. It is well known that Hollywood screenwriting in the 1930s was replete with Communist-inspired sentiment.
“And of course we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat renegade) member of the very class that would have toppled him. While FDR was open to watered-down Keynesian policies in a way that very few of his class comrades were, his commitment (like Keynes’s) to the ‘free enterprise’ system was unconditional. He had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He therefore refused to out the plotters, and sought no punitive measures against them. In the end, class solidarity carried the day for Roosevelt. …
“Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of the U.S. ruling class were effectively left to develop unhindered by mass political mobilization.
“Might this grisly episode have important implications for our understanding of the current political moment? One may be inclined to think so on the basis of the fact that one of the architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government of Chancellor Adolph Hitler, and was designated to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with that government.”
FDR knew that had the American people found out about this plot, that the repercussions for the capitalist class being seen as patriots only when the posture suits them and as died-in-the-wool cheerleaders for Capital Then, Now, and Forever, screw the people and screw democracy and liberty, might be devastating, especially in a time when capitalism was being revealed in all its naked glory as indifferent to the needs of the many. A time a little bit like now.
Like FDR, who Obama has been not infrequently compared to, Obama takes office in a time of extraordinary danger for the US financial system. Unlike FDR, Obama’s already got two wars going on. While FDR did not campaign on a platform of change, he didn’t have to, Obama had to adopt that posture to win.
Unlike FDR, Clinton, Bush Sr., and Ford, the transgressions of the previous administration are not violations of certain laws and abuse of public trust. The Bush Regime’s transgressions are in whole and in every single part consciously and consistently aimed at the very idea of the law itself.
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