Bonus points if, after reading the title, you correctly deduced I was talking about Naomi Klein. I've never much liked Klein; her books tend to spend too much time overstating the obvious, and her solutions are relics from the 60's. She even admitted as much on KUOW last week, telling the host she updated tactics advocated by Abby Hoffman. She's prone to hyperbole and, some how, always misses the really core economic issues that inform all the tragedies she can't stop lamenting. She's written books about the failures of capitalism, but each time comes back from the brink and says, 'Oh, no, it's not capitalism's fault. It's just all these capitalists that keep messing things up.' I'm not sure if it's so funny it's sad, or so sad it's funny.

I'm sure I'm not making any friends by picking on Klein, but it has to be done. Her analysis is shoddy and her solutions don't even target the cause of our problems, never mind any questions about the efficacy of mass protests. I'm not sure how she can simultaneously argue that we're at risk of having the First Brigade deployed to intimidate Congress while encouraging mass protests as a way to prevent the government for exercising tyrannical power. When you have a government set on using violence, they will shoot you. See Myanmar, China, Saudi Arabia. Go ask the people in Darfur to use civil disobedience to overthrow Khartoum.

Either America is sinking into a violently oppressive fascist state, or it is a democracy that responds to popular outcry. Klein wants it both ways: she likes the feel good, simple, personally exciting but still non-violent options available to protesters in a democracy, but wants the thrill and urgency of being one step away from apprehension by the Thought Police. She, and many like her in the modern activist movement, fall prey to what's called the Spectacle of Resistance. Well meaning people, concerned citizens, leave their homes and take part in some kind of spectacle that trumpets the evils of (fill in as appropriate) and demands immediate action against (fill in as appropriate). Well meaning concerned citizens then go home, filled with the warm satisfaction we get when we take part in mass gatherings with other people, and promptly do nothing more. Why would they? They've already taken part in an action.

Protests are fun. A lot of groups that organize them try to make them parties, with dancing, puppets, music and catchy chants. Even without the accoutrement, there's something viscerally powerful about joining together with hundreds or thousands of other people towards a common goal. There's a shiver that runs up your skin as you feel the collected determination, the sense of purpose, the power that stands gathered around you. The problem is that these feelings aren't dependent on achieving your goal, just the trying. Take the 1999 WTO protests; people came back proclaiming victory, bragging how they'd spat in the eye of global powers and struck a blow for the real people of the world. Nine years later, how's that working out for you? Globalization still good and stymied? The protests were just one more spectacle at work, a city sized tantrum where people with legitimate grievances decided if they weren't allowed to play no one was going to.

Not that I'm defending the WTO, but can we at least be honest and admit the protests didn't achieve anything other than giving activists something new to talk about? We've become convinced that spectacle is success, that being seen is the same as being heard or being in control. Google the phrase 'spectacle of resistance' and you'll find the reversed meaning: spectacle as resistance. Our reality television society has finally penetrated the activist world: all people want any more is to be on tv. At least activists can now honestly say they have something in common with Joe Sixpack.

Klein's vision of America on the brink of fascism is based less on any real threat and more on her need to tap into the heritage of actual revolutionaries and inflate her own work to heroic proportions. An author talking about abuse of power by W is just another disaffected liberal, but one who stares down police in 'reptillian S&M gear' (her words, not mine) is something more. The world is more interesting when there's danger around every corner, and only the timely reading of her book will give you the tools you need to rise up (with her help, of course) and save the world. It's like the Zombie Survival Guide, except Klein doesn't get that World War Z isn't coming.

If you think I'm being hard on Klein, ask the question I started with: What will she do when Obama wins? That's not an endorsement, it's a fact: all reliable polling puts him ahead in the popular vote and comfortably ahead in the electoral vote. Bradley Effect notwithstanding, it's realistic to project Obama as the winner, barring acts of unitarian higher powers. So with all this power concentrated in the liberal messiah, will Klein still be calling for mass protests, general strikes, for every day people to shut down business as usual? Or will she suddenly proclaim victory and write a new book about Karl Rove's secret laboratory inside a dormant volcano?

The fact is that Klein's scenario is outrageous specifically because, push come to shove, she'll advocate working with Obama, to push him towards her views, rather than shut down the government. What kind of fascist doomsday can be overturned with a simple vote? She's said, multiple times, that the 'coup' has already happened, and that America is being reduced to the 'wallpaper of democracy.' If that's the case right now, then it will be the case on November 5th, regardless of who wins. If you believe Klein then don't bother voting because, hey, you're just voting for red or blue wallpaper. Not like it means anything.

Full disclosure, though, in 2004 I wrote an essay in which I argued that the US had already fallen into fascism. I wasn't alone; along with the panic mongers who just love to claim the world is ending, many well reasoned essays examining the similarities between W's policies and fascism were written. You won't find that essay on this site for two reasons: I backed off the word 'fascist,' and historical comparisons are an intellectual short cut that simply doesn't do our current predicament justice. The first reason is pretty straightforward: people simply couldn't get over the word fascist, and were more interested in talking about how I was calling Bush a Nazi (I wasn't) than the merits of the argument. The second reason is more interesting.

Klein's fascism argument is based on examples of the rise of totalitarianism in other countries. She references points along a continuum, political snapshots of a slide into tyranny, and compares America of 2008 to these various examples. But how can we compare America in 2008 to anything? Did these examples exist within a globalized world? Were they countries of three hundred million people? Were they global economic, political and military powers? Were they in the midst of a thirty year decline in real wages? Were they being hollowed out by outsourcing and for profit production? We exist in circumstance, that while familiar, are utterly unique.

America is caught within a political tempest, but it's not fascism we're dealing with. There's a popular list of 14 characteristics of fascism that people use to critique Bush, and Umberto Ecco has his own list of 14 signs of 'eternal fascism', and both are worth a look. I personally like Ecco's list because it emphasizes the philosophical origins of the more obvious signs of violence and oppression. In my own essay, however, I boiled it down to three criteria:

1) A single party state

2) An authoritarian state

3) A state allied with private capital

I, unlike progressives and eager Obama voters, believe America currently qualifies for all three, but especially the first. I've used the flippant label 'Republocrats' to express my disdain for the supposed differences between the parties, but ultimately this is a single party state because of the common devotion to capitalism. Between the people involved with Project 2050, we have a very diverse range of stances on issues like abortion, gun ownership, energy security, food security, housing development and so on, but we're united around the proposition that our present economic system needs more than change, it needs to be replaced. We are a single party because, while we disagree about many issues, we are each devoted to the same core goal.

Given the bailout, can there be any doubt which class the members of our government represent?

So we're not fascist, we're something far more interesting and difficult to explain. We're caught between a government that's too large to effective represent everyone, corporations we depend on for goods and employment for whom their US operations are merely one branch of a larger tree, complicated trade interdependencies, the voluntary silencing of the press, increased tolerance for police brutality and a dozen other 'warning signs' of fascism. But Klein's warning about fascism is, ultimately, chimera obscura - a made up thing that distracts us from the real problem at hand.

Remember, Klein is not against capitalism. She, just like Obama, just wants it managed more humanely, but actually talking about the economics of how that would be done (or rather, why that is impossible) is boring and doesn't involve fantastic spectacles of resistance. It's much more fun to focus on impending! political! doom! and engage in creative and (surely) effective protests than the stodgy world of thinking of new solutions to our problems. Make enough noise and you're sure to wake up all those ignorant people blindly plodding through their lives.

Note to Naomi: working people aren't silent in the face of outrage because they don't care or have been trained to be silent, it's just that the have more pressing concerns at home, like budgets and the threat of being laid off. Not that these people are your key demo, since you're still charging sixteen bucks for your book. People on the verge of bankruptcy don't have the time or money to hear you tell them about all the problems that they don't have any time to worry about.

I could be wrong, it could be that come January, Klein will still be calling for mass protests and will simply adjust the argument to include whatever Obama is doing.

Yeah right.