Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State - Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State - Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Tarcher/Penguin (2004) 264 pp. (S) ****

When a house is burning and a nation’s in crisis, most journalists will give you all kinds of descriptions of the smoke and an occasional glimpse of the blaze. But sadly, all too rare is it that you will find a courageous soul who will venture into the brush, or if you prefer, the bush, to look into actual causalities (i.e. how did the fire start, who might be the arsonist, and what might be his/her motives). In Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America into a One-Party State by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, we unfortunately find an example of the former breed. One possible definition of fascism might be: single party rule of the hard right, characterized by extreme nationalist and militarist manifestations, whereby state and corporate interests are merged to the point of near indistinctness. So it came as a surprise to this reader, bordering on shock, that when one finds the terms “Right Wing” and “One-Party State” in a single title, only to later discover the complete omission of the word “fascism” from its subsequent pages, well, speechless is about the best approximation of his state of mind that he might offer. While Rampton and Sheldon give us a brief history of the radical right in America and some of its more noted personages (i.e. the shameless direct mail shenanigans of Bruce Eberle, the transmogrification of Irving Kristol from Trotskyite to founding father of neo-conservatism, and the “great little racket” honed by his son at The Weekly Standard where they paint themselves as lone, noble defenders of the absurdist notion of “objectivity” in an otherwise biased field of the now infamous “liberal media”), they would have done far better to have widened the scope of their analysis, beyond the borders of the United States and into the fateful years that preceded World War II. That said, this is still a well documented and argued work, even when its approach is too mild and its analysis and conclusions fall far short. Early in the book, we read of a Republican election strategy pamphlet, endorsed on its cover by Bush campaign guru Karl Rove, and circulated in 2000, entitled: The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win. “Politics is war by other means. In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy’s fighting ability. . . . In political wars, the aggressor usually prevails,” the authors quote from its pages. Given this red flag, not only of an inappropriate analogy, but of the stated goal of not simply triumphing over one’s foe, but indeed, having the intent to “destroy” him, it is not enough to simply observe the inherent contradiction of conservatism between the “traditionalists” of cultural issues, and the libertarian proponents of least government. As we have seen with the Bush II administration, the brilliance, if you’ll indulge the suggestion for a moment, comes when the agenda of the former is veiled by the public language of the latter, thus averting a probable schism. Not even recognized by Sheldon and Rampton, is that increasingly rarer breed of conservative, the fiscal conservative – apparently nowhere to be found, other than the Clinton administration, since the dawning days of the Reagan administration. Part of the liability of living through such a tumultuous period marked by serious shifts in political tectonics, is the penchant to lose perspective by following the ever-steady flow of obfuscating smoke. A small illustration of this is the author’s cursory mention of the 2002 California recall election, an event they acknowledge more or less by stating it as historical fact, never bothering to ask why a governor who was re-elected only eight months prior was targeted for recall, what is the history of the state’s recall provision, where the money and men behind the initiative came from and why were petitioners paid for their services, what might be the abhorrent precedent for democracy, how an artificially truncated campaign season might have grossly advantaged a seriously inexperienced candidate, and the context into which the recall election fits, when one considers the Texas re-redistricting strategy, and the fact that the President’s brother is Governor of Florida (three electoral power block states that account for nearly a third of electoral votes). Neglected and omitted from mention altogether are the anthrax mailings to major media networks and the offices of two ranking Democratic senators, the leaking of ambassador Wilson’s wife’s identity, the break-in of the Democratic e-mail system by a staffer out of Orin Hatch’s office, the Pentagon’s mysterious Office of Special Plans and how it figured prominently in the cooking of pre-war intelligence, Tom Delay’s zealous fundraising activities, and the detrimental impact DRE (digitally recorded electronic) paperless voting machines and the 2002 HAVA (Help America Vote Act) will have on our electoral democracy. When confronted by the extraordinary string of highly anomalous events of the past four years (the 2000 presidential election, the 9/11 attacks, two wars of aggression), one is better inclined to seek historical perspective and precedents of the past – both domestic and foreign, but sadly for Sheldon and Rampton it still seems to be simply business as usual, that as cynical as politics my be and become, it will always return peaceably once again to the left and center. That the Bush II administration is neither traditionalist nor libertarian but a radicalized, powermad amalgam, may be a truth these writers find either too intellectually disturbing or journalistically and professionally rigorous to indulge. This denial will not deter the astute reader, who will continue his search and look elsewhere for his answers, but it is likely the authors themselves who have yet to fully realize and confront their disappointment. Yes, Mr. Sheldon and Mr. Rampton, there is indeed such a thing as a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and its model is not confined to our shores alone. Maybe your next work might call for a closer examination of the Spain and Italy of the 1930s.