Dwayne Day is complaining today at The Space Review about my and others’ use of the word fascism to describe NASA’s human spaceflight program, though he doesn’t call me out by name (interestingly, when you do the Google search he suggests, this post doesn’t even come up in the top ten, though it’s only a link away from some of them).

I’ll make two points. First, if he actually read Jonah’s “screed” (his word), it isn’t obvious from this review. For example, he says that Jonah doesn’t criticize conservatives for their own fascist tendencies in the book, but that’s patently false. And he seems to fall back on the old leftist paradigm that the epitome, almost definition of fascism were the Nazis and Mussolini’s Black Shirts:

Fascist governments do not allow other competitors to exist. The first thing they do when they gain power is to eliminate their opposition at the point of a gun. Usually they started with the primary threat, the communists, then the fascists turned their weapons on less organized and non-political groups, like the Jews and the gypsies. Fascist groups have also reveled in their militaristic attributes such as discipline and uniforms and strength and weaponry. The groups most identified with fascism–the Nazis and the Italian fascists–were paramilitary organizations that sought to enact their goals through force. It is impossible to separate fascist ideology from the methods used to implement it.

Take out the words “communists,” “Jews,” and “gypsies,” and in what way does this not describe Stalin’s USSR? Did they not eliminate their opposition at the point of a gun? Did they not have “discipline and uniforms and strength and weaponry” (recall all those May Day parades with the missiles and tanks rolling down the streets, and goose-stepping Soviet troops)? Did they not “enact their goals through force”? Is not the same true of North Korea? Or Cuba?

What Dr. Day is talking about is what fascists do when they actually gain power, but fascism is not just the use of force. It is a set of ideas, to be implemented by whatever means necessary.

My second point, as I wrote in the previous post, is that those ideas are described in Jonah’s book, particularly in reference to Apollo.

From the first edition, pages 210-211 (my annotations are in square brackets, and red), “Even Kennedy’s nondefense policies were sold as the moral analogue of war…His intimidation of the steel industry was a rip-off of Truman’s similar effort during the Korean War, itself a maneuver from the playbooks of FDR and Wilson. Likewise, the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents were throwbacks to FDR’s martial CCC. Even Kennedy’s most ambitious idea, putting a man on the moon, was sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science…”

He went on. Again, the red text is my annotation of his words.

“What made [Kennedy’s administration] so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those elements that fit the fascist playbook: the creation of crises [We’re losing the race to the Soviets! We can’t go to sleep by a Russian moon!], national appeals to unity [They are our astronauts! Our nation shall beat the Soviets to the moon!], the celebration of martial values [The astronauts were all military, the best of the best], the blurring of lines between public and private sectors [SETA contracts, anyone? Cost plus? Our version of Soviet design bureaus?], the utilization of the mass media to glamorize the state and its programs [The Life Magazine deal for chronicling a bowdlerized version of the astronauts’ lives], invocation of a “post-partisan” spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader [von Braun…”Rocket scientists”…not just Kennedy Space Center, but (briefly) Cape Kennedy].”

Obviously, this can go overboard, and Dr. Day has some legitimate complaints. While certainly leftists use the term (as Dr. Day describes) to simply insult anyone who disagrees with them and shut down discussion, and have done so for years, that is not the way that it is being used here, at least not by me. I don’t think that it’s an insult to call something fascist (though I’ve certainly been called that enough times myself when that was the clear intent). I am not merely being Seinfeldian when I always append the phrase “not that there’s anything wrong with that” to my usage of the word. I really mean it. Hitler gave fascism a bad name. Not to imply, of course, that I think that these are good ideas. Just that they’re not intrinsically evil, and many millions of people in this country apparently buy into them, as demonstrated by Obama’s campaign success.

In any event, I do think that it is a useful prism through which to view the program for the purposes of analyzing it, and trying to develop a more useful space policy. If we can recognize it for what it is, we stand a much better chance of moving things in a more useful direction, and one more in keeping with traditional American values, and classical liberalism.