Wrapping their platform in the flag

“If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” is the most famous thing the American Nobel Prize winning novelist and satirist Sinclair Lewis never said.

I thought of the quote — and discovered Lewis never said it — when the Texas Republican Party published a platform that came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. It wasn’t fascism, just nutty enough to warrant the attention such documents rarely receive in publications like The New Yorker and Esquire. 

This wasn’t the first attempt by the Texas GOP to produce a zany platform. In the 2012 election, its platform attracted some nationwide mirth by informing the electorate that “we oppose the teaching of critical thinking skills.” Stephen Colbert explained his conservative kinsmen in Texas didn’t want the schools to “fill our kids’ heads with dangerous concepts like evolution and physical education.”

The party’s spokesman explain it wasn’t really opposed to critical thinking, but didn’t want anything in schools that might “challenge students’ fixed beliefs and undermine parental authority,” which cleared that up.

Having dealt with education in 2012, the current platform concentrates more on other issues. I especially liked a plank that called for nullifying and also ignoring, opposing and refusing to enforce federal laws Texas doesn’t like, reviving the practice of nullification outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1809 and confirmed by the side that won the Civil War.

Getting down to specifics, the platform calls for the abolition of many kinds of taxes, including personal, property, estate, capital gains, franchise and business and gift taxes. 

Also facing abolition would be the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, all other agencies not based on power granted by the U.S. Constitution, the Federal Reserve, all foreign aid not related to national defense or “catastrophic disasters,” Obamacare and the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over cases involving abortion, religious freedom and the Bill of Rights.

I detect the Court’s surviving jurisdiction over cases involving the first 10 amendments is mostly aimed at the Second, but in case there are any doubts, the platform gets pretty specific about guns:

“All federal acts, laws, executive orders and court orders which infringe on the people’s rights to keep and bear arms shall be invalid in Texas, not to be recognized by Texas, shall be specifically rejected by Texas and shall be considered null and void by Texas. The repeated use of the word Texas is presumably to avoid confusion with the Massachusetts Republican Party.

And not wanting to offend its base, the party stressed that “minor mental health diagnoses” should not in any way bar those so burdened from their “God-given right” to own and bear arms. 

After guns, the Texas GOP is mostly preoccupied with sex of both the heterosexual and homosexual persuasion. 

The party is pro-woman, saying, “We strongly support a woman’s right to choose” but restricts the right somewhat, by adding the words, “to choose to devote her life to her family and children.” 

The platform on gay marriage is sadly halfhearted, as if the battle has been lost but it has to mention that marriage is “a God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman.”

The platform also sets out to right past wrongs, like giving blacks the vote, with “We urge that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 be repealed and not reauthorized.”

There’s much more, but the platform takes 16,000 thoughtful words or about 15,300 more than this column and I wanted to explain who did say what Sinclair Lewis didn’t say about how fascism would come to America. 

In 1938, not long after Lewis wrote “It Can’t Happen Here,” about a Huey Long type becoming dictator, Yale Divinity School professor Halford Luccock delivered a sermon at the Riverside Church in Manhattan that made an observation similar to what Lewis didn’t observe. It appeared on a Monday morning back when The New York Times routinely covered Sunday sermons in the major city churches:

“When and if fascism comes to America, it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany;’ it will not be marked with a swastika; it will be called, of course, Americanism.” 

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.