Fascism, Democracy, E.B. White and FDR’s Four Freedoms

I’ve been searching for perspective in these politically lunatic times, reading a lot of E.B. White and Margaret Randall lately and thinking about FDR’s “four freedoms.” My view was focused more sharply last week when I saw the response of a conservative federal judge, William Smith, to President Trump’s recent tweet about this year’s election being “the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history.” Judge Smith, appointed by George W. Bush, called Trump’s remarks “fascistic” and a form of “creeping authoritarianism” that threatened the very essence of our democracy, the validity of the vote and the peaceful transfer of power.

For a sitting president to cast doubt on the validity of an upcoming election is to blatantly violate his oath of office, which reads: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The Constitution mandates a peaceful transition of power based on votes. To threaten that is the act of a would-be dictator.

At the end of World War II, a war fought against global fascism and its dictators, many Americans were worried that their country was unaccountably showing early tendencies of fascistic totalitarianism. E.B. White, the great New Yorker essayist, was sensing the national apprehension in 1943, when he defined “Fascist ideals.” “These are,” he wrote, “a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus … a general feeling of elation.”

Watching the president’s violence-threatening, fear-mongering white supremacist rallies, one can’t help but get a Whitean shiver.

Facism stands in direct opposition to what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called in his State of the Union address in 1941 “the Four Freedoms” — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Freedom, in both Roosevelt’s and E.B. White’s eyes, is the essence of democracy and an abomination to fascism. White, writing in support of FDR, summarized this view in his own gentle, penetrating way: “Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. … The concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable, I don’t care who he is, or how nutty he is.”

Later, in 1954, he perceived the American future as being threatened by what historian Jon Meacham called “undemocratic forces in our own era.” Meacham is the editor of a collection of White’s essays, “On Democracy.” The first antidemocratic reality, White thought, was “political tribalism.” He wrote, “We doubt there ever was a time in this country when so many people were trying to discredit so many other people.” A second, and equally antidemocratic, threat was “media saturation.” White wrote that “this country is on the verge of getting news-drunk … a democracy cannot survive merely by being well informed, it must also be contemplative, and wise.”

Antidemocratic forces, like Trumpism, have regularly managed to create small but dangerous beachheads in American life and culture. A case in point is the fascistic McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 that almost prevented one of the world’s greatest living writers, New Mexican Margret Randall, from regaining her American citizenship when she returned to this country from Latin America in the Orwellian year of 1984.

While the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act effectively ended the odious Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it also contained provisions for deportation that were so egregious and offensive to the Constitution and the First Amendment that President Truman vetoed the bill, only to have Congress override his veto.

Among the ugliest provisions were those that basically forbade making critical remarks about the United States. They were contained in what was known as the “ideological exclusion clause.” In Randall’s fascinating memoir published this year called “I Never Left Home: A Memoir of Time and Place,” she describes the nightmare fascist interrogation of her political beliefs in 1985, conducted by U.S. Federal agents in downtown Albuquerque.

Randall was “ushered into a small room,” she wrote, “where a dozen or so of my books lay open on a table that also held a tape recorder. Passages were highlighted in yellow magic marker. The polite official interviewed me for several hours, asking what I meant by this or that opinion. All the passages he pointed to concerned U.S. governmental policy in Southeast Asia or Central America. My writing clearly showed my disagreement with those policies. I freely admitted to my opinions and said that, as far as I knew, freedom of expression and dissent existed here, that democracy protected a person’s right to disagree.”

Her immigration court proceedings dragged on for five painfully troubling years until 1989, when an immigration court judge named Ruth Bader Ginsburg provided the swing vote to grant the reinstatement of Randall’s citizenship and avoid deportation. A far richer account of these events and many others can be found in the beautiful storytelling and compelling language of Randall’s memoirs.

Searching for perspective, I ran across a quotation, from an aging Sigmund Freud, a remark described as one of the “great moments in sarcasm.” In 1938, in Vienna, after his daughter Anna had been arrested by the Gestapo and released, Freud and Anna were allowed to leave Austria by train for England. At the last moment at the train station, Gestapo officers presented Freud with a document to sign that affirmed he had not been mistreated by them. In extremely fragile health, Freud took out his fountain pen and signed the document with a flourish using these liberating, sardonic and grimly comic words: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.” The SS agents reportedly seemed pleased.

In the few weeks before the American presidential election of 2020, humor and courage, I hope, will rise up in all of us to create a hybrid spirit of critical resistance and democratic focus that comprehends the crippling moral price of political lying that is trying to turn our democracy into a con game, one that curtails our freedom by diverting us from reality and forcing us to waste our time and mental energy on phantoms, tricks, slander and mirages.

Deceit in the form of propaganda is the fundamental tool of a fascist mentality. Sigmund Freud knew exactly what to do with such tangles of deception — laugh them out of the room! Freud gives us an image of bravery and daring to cherish and perhaps even emulate if antidemocratic forces try to invalidate the result of our upcoming election, when it goes against them.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image of Four Freedoms Monument by Lori Spindler)