Right-wing Populists and Fascism

I heard a clip of Rush Limbaugh describing the health insurance reform being debated in Congress as Nazi-lite.  The argument: 1) it's a national plan, 2) it's socialistic; ergo: national socialism; ergo: Nazi.  But in reality, Rush and his cronies are the ones participating in a Goebbel's like propaganda attack that presents truth as lies and lies as truth.  It is most Orwellian.  I hate to draw the comparison to 1930s Germany, but the parallels are just glaringly obvious.  Right-wing ideologues using propaganda to appeal to emotions, to replace thoughtful debate with screaming rhetoric, to spread lies and rumors as if they were scientific truths, to spread hate, ultimately, to gain power.

Given the Right's supposed distaste for Big Government, I suppose we aren't in danger of a true Nationalist-Socialist (right wing) take over (although, I suppose I should be less sure of myself after the previous 8 years), but what I am more disturbed by are the possibilities of Russian-style pogroms led by right-wing, Christian fundamentalist terrorists.  Quite frankly, I don't think we are all that far from genocide, given the rhetoric.

The political climate now is a major crisis in the development of American democracy, though it is somewhat reassuring that we've seen similar crises over the course of our history and we tend to emerge okay, if not better than we were before.  The problem is that the Democratic Party, and more generally, the left, is not reacting more strongly to the hijacking of the national debate.  We need Obama to pull a Nixon, of sorts: give voice to the Silent Majority.  Why isn't there a major campaign to put a stop to the lies?  To organize the masses that were polling strongly for single-payer, but have now been drowned out?  Why isn't the left mobilizing?  Why have we become complacent?  

I heard Ralph Nader on Democracy Now! recently, and he was comparing today to the days of the Civil Rights Movement.  He was castigating the politicians for not providing the leadership, but in reality, the history of the CRM shows that politicians are reactionaries - it is a part of the representative system.  They have always responded to the political pressures that exist in the broader society.  Kennedy, Johnson, Congress didn't make the CRM successful; the CRM was successful because of the people on the ground, in the towns and cities of America, that created a social-political culture.  In the same way, we on the left cannot be complacent and expect that now that we've elected Obama our work is done.  As he himself pointed out, our work has just begun - we need to create the conditions that will allow him/force him to do what we want.  As I've made clear, my sense of how this is done is to be advocates for our causes against the proposals of the Right, rather than critics: to build, rather than to tear down.