Huey Long [a populist Louisiana governor and senator in the early 1930s] once said that when fascism comes to this country, it's going to be wrapped in an American flag. You've commented on tendencies toward fascism in this country. You've even been quoting Hitler on the family and the role of women.

The Republican convention -- fortunately I saved myself the pain of watching television, but I read about it -- struck such chords that I began looking up some literature on fascism from the 1930s. I looked up Hitler's speeches to women's groups and big rallies. The rhetoric was very similar to that of the "God-and-country" rally the first night of the Republican convention.

But I don't really take that similarity too seriously, because the levers of power are firmly in the hands of the corporate sector. It'll permit rabid fundamentalists to scream about God and country and family, but they're very far from having any influence over major power decisions.

That was obvious in the way the campaign developed. They were given the first night to scream and yell. They were even given the party platform -- it was pre-Enlightenment. But then when the campaign started, we were back to business as usual.

But that can change. When people grow more alienated and isolated, they begin to develop highly irrational and very self-destructive attitudes. They want something in their lives. They want to identify themselves somehow. They don't want to be just glued to the television set. If most of the constructive ways are cut off, they turn to other ways.

You can see that in the polls too. I was just looking at a study by an American sociologist (published in England) of comparative religious attitudes in various countries. The figures are shocking. Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing.

These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.

Just a couple of years ago, there was a study of what people thought of evolution. The percentage of the population that believed in Darwinian evolution at that point was 9% -- not all that much above statistical error. About half the population believed in divinely-guided evolution, Catholic church doctrine. About 40% thought the world was created a few thousand years ago.

Again, you've got to go back to pre-technological societies, or devastated peasant societies, before you get numbers like that. Those are the kinds of belief systems that show up in things like the God-and-country rally.

Religious fundamentalism can be a very scary phenomenon. It could be the mass base for an extremely dangerous popular movement. These fundamentalist leaders aren't stupid. They have huge amounts of money, they're organizing, they're moving the way they should, beginning to take over local offices where nobody notices them.

There was a striking phenomenon in the last election -- it even made the front pages of the national newspapers. It turned out that in many parts of the country ultraright fundamentalist extremists had been running candidates without identifying them. It doesn't take a lot of work to get somebody elected to the school committee. Not too many people pay attention. You don't have to say who you are. You just appear with a friendly face and a smile and say "I'm going to help your kids" and people will vote for you.

A lot of people got elected because of these organized campaigns to take over local structures. If that ties in with some charismatic power figure who says, "I'm your leader, follow me," it could be very ugly. We could move back to real pre-Enlightenment times.

There's also a huge increase in fundamentalist media, particularly electronic media. You can't drive across the country without noticing it.

That was true years ago. I remember driving across the country, being bored out of my head and turning on the radio. Every station I found was some ranting minister. Now it's much worse, and of course now there's television.