IN UNITED STATES

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 134, 8 June 1935, Page 15

IN UNITED STATES

CHURCHES AND FASCISM

THE DRIFT TO THE RIGHT

EEMARKABLE AETICLE

The "Christian Century" of America, one of the leading weeklies in the United States, publishes the following remarkable leading article:— "It is a sad commentary on the state of American politics that Huey Long and Father Coughlin would have only to combine their growing political influence to become a threat of serious proportions. Such a combination is not an immediate probability because a wide cultural gulf separates the poor whites of the South, who endowed Long with political power, and the followers of the radio priest. But it is certainly not an impossibility; and there are rumours that negotiations to this end are already taking place. "The threat of the Long Coughlin type of politics may be rougmy bui noi inaccurately descnoed as tne threat oi Fascism. The description is not accurate if we mean by it that American political developments are in danger of following the German-Italian pattern. There are resources in American life which make such a development unlikely. "The description is, nevertheless, roughly correct in the sense that Long and Coughlin represent a political movement of the more desperate lower middle classes—as Hitler and Mussolini did—and that its purpose is to express the political resentments of these classes against both the plutocracy and labour. APPEAL TO MIDDLE CLASSES. "The political programme designed to accomplish this purpose is as ambiguous as all middle-class programmes are. It proposes to establish social justice without making any basic changes in the present scheme of economic and industrial production. "It seeks to satisfy two equally prominent characteristics in the temper of the middle classes. The one is resentment against the injustices of present society. The disintegration and contraction of capitalistic economy impoverishes large sections of the middle class as well as labour. The other is fear of a thorough-going reorganisation of our economic life. "That fear is prompted by an aversion of the lower bourgeois to the equalitarian ideals of labour, their hope of being able to preserve the minimal advantages of social prestige and privilege which they still possess in an inequalitarian society, and their dread of revolution. ' • "The Fascist or semi-Fascist programmes, which seek to satisfy these two rather incompatible characteristics of the middle class mind and temper, reveal striking similarities, whether! they are fashioned in the swamps of | Louisiana, a beer hall of Munich, or a radio station dedicated to the little flower of Jesus. "First, they are. radical on financial policy, without being radical in regard to the property system. They advocate inflation, or some new credit scheme, or promise 'freedom from interest servitude.' In short,' they attack banks and banking without recognising that high finance is simply one aspect of i capitalism and the whole scheme of private manipulation of public and I social processes. They appeal for this | reason particularly to farmers who know that a mortgage rests heavily upon their farms but who hay little knowledge of the structure and the meaning of our total economy. APPEAL TO SIMPLE PEOPLE. "Second, they promise limitation on income through political action without touching the economic system which automatically makes for inequality and injustice: Huey Long's | programme of confiscating capital • and | income above a certain limit of millions states this idea in vivid caricature. It is simple enough to appeal to the imagination of simple people. "It does not destroy the middle-class individualistic illusion that we are liv ing in a land in which it is still possible to amass a fortune of millions. At the same time, it appeals to the sense of justice because it prohibits the kind of wealth which transcends the limits of the ' middle-class mind. Without denying that it is possible to use political society for the purpose of equalising some of the inequalities of economic society, through high taxation, for instance, it is obvious that such programmes are highly fantastic as serious proposals for the convalescence of. a . sick society. "Thirdly, all such programmes intend to reach their ends by maximising the power of a political State. Increase of State power is always a perilous proposition. It is particularly dangerous in a society in which the old concentrations of economic power remain, for j they always bend the political power j to their uses. The Hitlers of our era gain their political power by com-j pounding the political resentments of the lower middle classes and then use it inthe service of the Schachts andj Thyssens. They might be more honest than they are, and that would still be the result. THE PBESIDENTS DRIFT TO THE RIGHT. "Economic power, the power to control social progress, is the most significant power in a technical age. The oligarchs who possess it can always bring a political oligarch to heel, no matter how. loud his pretensions or how honest his sympathies for the poor who gave him political eminence. This is what gives such poignant pathos to middle-class politics in our era, whether in Germany or America. "Incidentally, we need not wait for Long to observe its logic arid its consequence. We can observe it quite well in President Roosevelt^ drift to the Right. Mr. Boosevelt merely represents the less desperate and the not-yet de-1 operate middle classes. But his liberal and radical pretensions evaporate when the commercial and industrial oligarchy threatens to retard his plans for recovery by non-co-operation. "What is of particular importance to religious leaders is the fateful charm which. Fascist programmes seem to exercise upon the people of the i churches. The German Church would I have accepted Fascism without quesition if the latter had not been so unwise as to use a new racial religion as i the cement of its social cohesion. ■ i: NOT FROM RELIGION. 1 "The susceptibility of Church people to Fascism derives more from the fact that they are middle-class people than that they are religious. Nevertheless, I Long, Coughlin, and Hitler all know I how to clothe their political ideas in Christian terms. They appeal to Christian Ideals of social justice, and they defend the Christian religion : against its radical detractors. "Their ideals of social justice appeal Ito religious people not only because ; they are clothed in religious terms, .but because they do not deal with the mechanical problems of the structure of a society but remain, ostensibly, ', within the field of pure morals. They , distinguish between good capitalists and bad capitalists, and that distinction;, is dear to. the heart of every pious moralist^ Jt'is a, necessary, distinction

from a moral point of view, but it is confusing in politics. "If fairly enlightened Church people become the victims ,of Fascist propaganda that will be partly due to the fact that Christian leadership, whether orthodox or liberal, has preached for decades on problems of social justice without understanding that justice in human society is only partly the consequence of moral intention and largely the product of adequate instruments and mechanisms of social life.

"A very good man can only slightly ameliorate—through philanthropy and kindness—the injustices which flow automatically from an unjust property system. Every moral problem is a religious problem in its highest reaches, but it becomes a problem in social mechanics when it comes to its application."