Photo courtesy of the Center for American Progress Action Fund

This moment will be looked back upon as giving a signal of encouragement to some of the most fascistic elements in the American political Right.

I signed the same statement on 9/11 that Van Jones signed, and there was nothing immoderate about it. It didn’t say what the Right claimed it said (and the mainstream media chimed in without investigation). I’ll explain below.

Jones’s resignation is bad for the country and for the Obama administration. It’s bad for America when progressive views are an excuse to purge someone from the administration while extremist right-wing views of past administrations were always given a “pass.”

Van Jones’s forced resignation is a huge defeat for the forces of sanity and humanity, and represents a deep failure of the Obama-ites to understand the nature of the challenge they face from an increasingly fascistic Right wing.

Jones was the first African American environmentalist to have become a national figure (his book became a national bestseller), and was brought into the administration to help enlist minority communities in the struggle to save the environment from decades of abuse.

Right-wingers pounced on him for a speech in which he allegedly called Right-wingers assholes, though he used the same word to describe himself and the Left. But what gave them a supposedly clinching argument was that he signed a statement calling for an objective investigation of 9/11. See my article in Tikkun’s online “Current Thinking” section to read the full text of what it really said — not what the media claimed.

The forced resignation of Van Jones demonstrates the lack of backbone of the Obama administration.

Jones was a rare progressive appointment among the wide array of Wall Street sycophants and inside-the-Beltway pragmatists who have misled Obama into a path that has caused him to lose his initial popularity and severely endanger his presidency.

The notion that Jones’s past could have a serious impact on the future of health care reform defies all plausibility — those who will oppose health care reform will do so just as strongly without Jones’s presence in the White House as they would have had he remained. The message being given by the Obama administration is clear: if you on the Right critique us, we will pander to you and abandon our friends.

In conditions of expanding prosperity, this would create the possibility of a resurgence of McCarthyism throughout the society. In conditions of growing economic pain, this kind of mimicking of the worst behavior of the German middle-of-the-roaders during the Weimar Republic sets the stage for the possibility of a genuine home grown fascism in the U.S.

If, God forbid, that should happen, people will look back to the capitulations on health care, human rights, and many other policy areas of the Obama administration, but will give equal importance to the abandonment of Van Jones and the signal it gives to the Right.

As to how Jones could have signed the 9/11 statement, let me make clear that neither he nor I, who also signed the statement, signed something accusing Bush of being directly involved in 9/11. I did authorize my name to be used to call for an investigation of the claims of those who deny the official story of 9/11. For my full discussion of this issue, read the expanded version of this post in Tikkun’s Current Thinking Section. Here’s a link directly to the expanded section on conspiracy theories and the 9/11 statement.

The conspiracy issue aside, the bigger issue remains: how Obama responds to the assaults from the Right. The pattern he sets by allowing his assistants to force Jones to resign (or set by Jones himself in the unlikely case that he made the decision without such outside pressure) is one of capitulation — and that will only guarantee yet more extreme assaults from the Right. Wilhelm Reich in the late 1920s analyzed the growth of fascism in Germany, and one of his important observations was that the fascists managed to intimidate people because the Left was not in the streets challenging them. Luckily, we are not yet at a point where the Right is scaring people in the streets of American cities, but they are doing so through the media. What is needed is a vigorous challenge in the media from liberals and progressives, and the obvious place from which that should be coming is the Obama administration. If, instead, they wimp out, as so many congressional Democrats have done for the past many years, the Right will be encouraged and tens of millions of decent Americans will become fearful and withdraw from public involvement, allowing a path to power for some of the most hate-oriented forces in American society. Historians may well look back at the Van Jones resignation as an important step in that process of shifting the society, so recently rejoicing at having gotten back on track toward progressive values, toward a renewed McCarthyism or worse.

Of course, I have lots of compassion for Obama and for Jones, because when they peer out into the society they don’t hear enough voices speaking out on their behalf. Please read the September/October editorial I wrote on that topic! And I have compassion for many Americans on the Right who have been deeply misled both about the facts and about how to understand them by rightwing media like FOX, and by spineless liberal politicians and media who rarely provide Americans with an alternative context through which they can analyze their experiences and the news. But that compassion should not lead us to inaction, but rather to vigorous advocacy of a spiritual progressive perspective, recognizing that many Americans would actually be quite moved were they to hear such a perspective and see how that could be tied to specific programs to heal and transform our world.

I have posted the full text of the original 9/11 statement that Van Jones and I signed in Tikkun‘s Current Thinking section. Please do check it out.