But the point is, if things ever come to a crunch in the United States, this massive part of the population ( Fundamentalist Christians ) – I think it’s something like a third of the adult population by now – could be the basis for some kind of a fascist movement, readily. For example, if the country sinks deeply into a recession, a depoliticized population could very easily be mobilized into thinking that it’s somebody else’s fault: “Why are our lives collapsing? There have to bad guys out there doing something for things to be going so badly” – and the bad guys can be Jews, or homosexuals, or blacks, or Communists, whatever you pick. If you can whip people into irrational frenzies like that, they can be extremely dangerous: that’s what 1930’s fascism came from, and something like that could very easily happen here.
Understanding Power – Noam Chomsky