The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism
2001-2022 was written in 1994-95 in 1996 under the pseudonym Jonathan
Westminster and originally published by the Thomas Jefferson Press of Port
Jefferson, NY. Beginning in January,
2010, the book is being serialized on BuzzFlash.com, TPJmagazine.us,
and several other webmagazines. It
is a fictional “future history,” purportedly published in 2048 on the 25th Anniversary of the Restitution of Constitutional Democracy in the United
States.
The text on the front-cover fly-leaf begins thusly:
“In 1996, Patrick Buchanan said: ‘We're on the verge of
taking [the Republican Party] back as prelude to taking back our country as
prelude to taking back the destiny of America, and when we get there, my
friends, we will be obedient to one sovereign America and that is the sovereign
of God himself’ (The Nation, D. Corn, 3/11/96).”
Dealing solely with domestic politics, the projected historical
scenario begins in 2000 with the election of a not-too-bright Republican
totally beholden to the Christian Right. Facing a weak Democratic Party, the 2004 election is won by something
called the Republican-Christian Alliance. Major policy foci for the R-CA are: concentrating power in the Executive
Branch; putting homophobia into the law; banning abortion under any
circumstances; severely limiting judicial review of the acts of the either the
Executive or Legislative branches; putting the extractive industries (oil,
coal, etc.) at the center of the economy; and to the extent possible limiting
environmental regulation. Obviously, with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 the scenario has
been changed for the present. But
the danger of fascism for the American future has hardly disappeared. The forces behind it have hardly given
up. They will just be in
hibernation for awhile, waiting for their next opportunity to strike. President Obama can conduct his
Administration forcefully or weakly. If it is the latter, that opportunity could come as soon as 2012.
The book was reissued in 2004 through the print-on-demand
publisher Xlibris, with a New Introduction. It detailed certain major elements
of the original predicted scenario that indeed turned out to have occurred in
one form or another between January 21, 2001 and the spring of 2004. While the scenario in the book as
projected from 2004 onwards did not occur as written, given the “rightward
imperative” being followed by the Republican Party (as predicted in the book)
some form of it may yet well descend upon our beloved country. Like two of its major inspirations,
Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1906) and Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t
Happen Here (1936), it is intended first and foremost as a warning
book. Hopefully, enough of us,
both in positions of political and economic power and outside of them, will
take heed. Otherwise, we will
surely go on to experience some version of “The New American Republics” and a
Second Civil War. And what
tragedies they would be, for ourselves, and in the context of global warming,
for the whole world.