Erich Fromm wrote "Escape from Freedom" while he was still living in prewar Germany, watching the rise of the Third Reich and commenting on it and the reasons people allow and sometimes even welcome  that sort of thing. He was compelled, out of concern for his own safety and self-respect, to leave afterward, and landed in the USA where he became friends with another hero of mine, Paul Tillich, who also had booked a late flight out of Germany.

What we are watching happen here, thankfully, is not the rise of a Fourth Reich American-style, but the implosion of evil. The attempted escape from freedom launched here by the so-called Tea Party has turned into a maelstrom from which, daily, more and more followers are trying to extricate themselves as they realize, slowly and dimly, they have voted themselves into a potential hell. They are rethinking everything, many of them just thinking for the first time in their lives. For this we can thank the process that gave us this fiasco.

Why They Can't Win

After Fromm settled into his digs in the US he delivered the second half of his manifesto begun with "Escape From Freedom." It was titled "The Sane Society," and in it he described the conditions under which a people may be adjudged collectively insane as well as what might comprise a truly sane society.

First comes the breakdown. We are now in the process of going sane.

This may offend some, but there have been failures of the liberal school as well as utter folly on the part of the conservative one. It is together we have lost our national mind, so no one is entirely spared here. Liberals are seen as "weak" for a reason, and that reason is tolerance to the point of absurdity.

Our problem is neoconservatives are expert at concentrating their energies on destructiveness. They choose their targets carefully and are capable of prodigous feats of concentration on those targets. We, on the other hand, are constantly trying to create everything good all at once, with the result that nothing much ever gets accomplished. 

In his grand utopian novel "Lost Horizon," James Hilton allowed us the observation of Chang, an English-speaking representative of the High Lama of Shangri La, on moderation, a quality to which he attributed most of the success of the utterly sane society into which Hilton's hero, Conway, has almost literally fallen. Chang points out to the newcomer a village far down in a lush valley, where he says the residents of Shangri La go on the occasional weekend to raise hell, drink, party and generally carry on. Conway is perplexed by this seeming contradiction in Shangri La's maxim "moderation in all things." Chang merely smiles and says of course, all things "including moderation."

We have suffered from a failure to moderate our moderation. We have found it necessary and proper to respond to vicious attacks on fundamental American values by the far right with polite diplomacy. We have watched our President behave this way and have shaken our fists at him, while living our own lives the same way.

Well not all of us, but too damned many.

From Shangri La back to post-World War II United States and Erich Fromm: in "The Sane Society" Fromm points out something so elementary and obvious as to be stunning, something so sane and rational it defies ready perception: That there are two primary solutions to the problem of human existence: The destructive and the creative.

Fromm uses Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union as two grand examples of the destructive solution. He then goes on to describe one ideal form of the many possible versions of the constructive solution. I might add here, Fromm suggests a form of socialism as part of the answer. One must read the book to understand his take on socialism, however, before drawing any conclusions.

This dichotomy, in itself and by reason alone, explains why, though the timetable for failure may vary, the far right, the Tea Party, the misled and the knowingly misleading, the oligarchs and virtual facists, the Rick Scotts and Scott Walkers and Paul Ryans and the rest, can not ultimately succeed.

Those people have chosen a destructive solution to the problem of human existence. They have chosen intolerance, bigotry, thievery and inhumanity, collectively, as their wheelhorse. As Fromm so thoughtfully pointed out 56 years ago, any destructive solution is self-limiting, leaving the oppressor no one to oppress, as the serfs and vassals and the polite are either ground up in the machinery of destruction or head for the hills where they regroup as insurgents who eventually return to the streets to defy and if necessary attack those who by then have run out of corpuscles to suck, who have driven off the peasantry or killed them, and are slowly starving. When the virus has killed or crippled the host, the virus can no longer survive. It must move on or die.

There is a tipping point to tolerance, and it comes when tolerance for intolerance finally gives way to righteous rage.

We are rapidly approaching that point. We have a virus and it is eating away at our substance. It is a dangerous but potentially enormous creative opportunity, this sickness. Given the kindly nature of liberalism it is unlikely to result in any public spectacle of the sort resulting from the fall of Mussolini, but for educational purposes it will likely carry the same weight. Public humiliation of the Right at its own hands is preferable to it being literally strung up by the mobs.

Liberals just don't make good mobs, but we can learn to hit back, verbally and physically, rather than continue to roll over when the neighborhood bully continues to confront us.

Pat Buchannan was a neighborhood bully on the streets of upper Northwest DC before he became "The" Pat Buchannan. He was just a pain in the ass --until he got his ass kicked. Not unlike Jean Shepherd's Grover Dill (remembered better as Scut Farkas in the movie "A Christmas Story," which was a mashup of nearly all Shepherd's most popular childhood memoirs), Dill/Farkas finally got what he'd been begging for for years. He got his ass kicked. He had but to push a time too many and at the wrong moment -- or the right one.

But is that what liberals, progressives, sane, civilized people do?

Sometimes the answer must be yes. It may seem counterintuitive, but it is nonetheless true, and the only thing it takes is a moment of supreme arrogance and the happening by of someone like, say, Anthony Weiner or Bernie Sanders to set it off, to simply stand up and shout "Bullshit!" and the tired and confused and perplexed suddenly see what has been lying hidden in plain sight all at once and stand behind the instigator -- or better yet one of their own steps forward to relieve the Weiners and Sanderses and, to borrow the unfortunate slogan of Nancy Reagan, Just Say No. Only say it this way: NO!

A resounding, jaw-thrusting, steely-eyed, forceful and articulate NO!

We do not have to sit back and wait for the magical, messianic President to do it, and we owe it to him to quit laying that responsibility on him. Just because he has not yet (at least until his recent off-mic comments) got in their faces does by no means let any of us off the hook. We are all responsible, we are all Egyptians, Michiganites, Floridians; we are all Syria, we are all Tunisia, hell, we are all Americans, and that is a good enough starting place. Let's quit being them and just be us for a minute.

We need to let them know they have kicked the hornet's nest. We need to let them know we are not always a circular firing squad. We need to let ourselves feel the power that comes with the release of a hearty Fuck you! at evil, ignorance and rapaciousness.

We proved we can get orgnanized for a while. We did that when we put Barack Obama in the White House, but then we all went back to the bench expecting him to hold off the other team by himself while we all sat there and yelled at him what moves he should make next.

This is government of and by the people?

That's right. I'm suggesting the rest of us quit whining and complaining about the President (who admittedly has been a little less than confrontational) and do some of the heavy lifting ourselves. Governing ourselves is not just about complaining: it is about standing up, it is about confrontation when called for, and sometimes it is about getting a little ugly, facing down the fools, and if they don't buy the bravado, to back it up with a roundhouse to the side of their collective, if empty, head.

This isn't India, the Tea Party is not England, and we are not a legion of clones of Mohandas Ghandi. We are Americans and we are dealing with our own.

Some would call growing some cajones the same thing as stooping to conquer. No. I am saying stand to conquer.

Chang said it best: Moderation in all things -- including moderation.

Time to go into town and raise a little hell.