Adia Sisson

Adia Sisson

Ms. G

Social Studies

April 28th, 2015

 

Could Fascism Happen in the U.S? A Persuasive Paper

Roughly eleven million people died at the will of a single man. Still the shocking part is not how this man ruled but rather how he was put into power. Germany was falling apart, and the German people democratically elected the chancellor that they thought would lead their country out of ruin. Strong out-of-the-box ideas attracted attention and got people thinking and hoping. Fascism has occurred in different countries during different conditions. Could fascism happen in the United States? History does have a tendency to repeat itself, and to the best of my knowledge, fascism has not been excluded from that.

Yet if eternity is fated to loop itself, why haven't we been affected? The answer is simple: the U.S. is not like other countries. This is made clear in three points. First, we don't "yield to trends and fads and popular opinion," as Charles Kuralt once said. We make our own path in the world. America lead a revolution against one of the most powerful countries of its time and won. It brought democracy back to a world ruled by ancient bloodlines and monarchs. Second, in order for fascism to rise into popularity and assume power, everything must go wrong, and the United States has got its act together. This leads to the third point. America has been through famine, inflation, natural disasters, depressions, even civil wars and has maintained its original plan of attack. The dust bowl wrecked the food supply and caused millions to go hungry. We survived it. The stock market crashed and pulled us into a ten-year depression. We survived it. Our country split in two and each side took turns massacring the other. We survived it. Our country was cured one man at a time. Our presidents helped us survive. The United States has seen it all, and not once has democracy failed us.

But has it actually helped us at all? Americans like to think of themselves as unique, when in reality they are just another group of confused, self-righteous animals. If Americans don't follow "trends and fads and popular opinion," why is the United States famous for being one of the biggest consumer countries in the world? In fact, the entire system would cease to function if people simply stopped buying things. Americans claim to make their own path in the the world, but even their identity was copied from the Ancient Greeks. We think we've got our act together, yet thirty-two million adult citizens can't read at all, and another 21% read at or below a fifth-grade level. Our founding values have survived a lot of hard times, such as the dust bowl, etc., in the few years that we have been independent, yet they were changed and even abandoned completely along the way. The Constitution has been amended 27 times, but in the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was ignored entirely. He served as president for twelve whole years—three times the allowed term. How is our country going to hold onto democracy if we can't even obey the rules we set for ourselves?

The direct answer is that it isn't. Disorganization lead to the rise of fascism in both Italy and Germany, and the U.S. is certainly not the most organized place in the world. Our government simply will not work if Congress is too polarized to make any decisions, and the President is vetoing anything he disagrees with. With only two parties battling for superiority, debates turn into a rally rather than an actual, scoring game. Fascism gained popularity in Germany after parties refused to collaborate for the good of the people. Their country lost its structure and soon fell apart. They only found refuge once a single person took control, restored order, and just fixed it. Though many Americans have a sense of individuality, peer pressure or a need to fit in can steer them to either mirror what others are doing or simply take no action at all. As proven by the Milgram experiments, Americans in particular are very susceptible to this pressure and blindly follow the orders or actions of authority figures and peers. A mere 35% of subjects refused to continue against their moral compass, and 65% obeyed even though they knew it was wrong. This disproves the theory that all fascists are either sadists or clueless idiots.

Fascism can happen anywhere, all it needs are a series of conditions and subjects to allow it. America has plenty of these and enough people to make it work. We elect presidents by voting every four years, but one man ruled us for twelve. Hitler rose to power using this same system and served as chancellor for the same amount of time, so what's to stop us from becoming mindless followers and our next president a dictator?