Fascism and Postmodern Progressive McCarthyism in Connecticut

Biden CNN

"What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism" -- Biden fishing for dollars and votes in Maryland.

At this point in our political process, no one need fear that former President Donald Trump will be running for President in 2024, because Trump has not announced unambiguously that he has tossed his hat into the presidential ring. Likewise, no one need fear that current President Joe Biden will be on the ticket in 2024 because, like Trump who favors ambiguity – not to mention excessive hyperbole – Biden has not yet formally thrown his hat into the presidential ring.

Fears of these kinds are premature. However, like good boy scouts, one must be prepared for all eventualities. A large portion of political reporting in the United States is devoted to raw speculation concering political races that have not occurred.

For Democrats, Trump has become an indispensible part of political campaigning, and in Trump’s view, Trump always has been an indispensible part of Republican politics.

The fear that Trump and his followers may succeed in overthrowing the American Democracy is overblown. Here in the United States, we suffer presidential fools, gladly or not, for two terms at the most, after which they are sent off to write presidential autobiographies or to devote themselves to charitable works.

When Democrat President Jimmy Carter retired from office, he built houses for the poor; Republican President Ronald Reagan, stricken with Alzheimer’s, quietly disappeared from the editorial pages of the New York Times; and Republican President George Bush the Younger took up painting. Unlike President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, Bush’s paintings did not fetch huge sums of money, but then Hunter Biden, like many greedy capitalists, has been hugely successful in teasing vast sums of money from nations such as President Xi Jinping’s China and President of all the Russias – not excluding Ukraine – Vladimir Putin.

Because the United States is a Constitutional Republic, and because presidential terms are limited by the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution to eight years, it seems likely the Republic will survive the administrations of both Trump and Biden.

Biden’s fear that Trump and his supporters, MAGA Republicans, are fascists is little more than campaign fodder. Americans have grown used to such wild exaggerations during election seasons.

“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election,” said Otto von Bismarck.” And also, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” And yet again, “A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.” On the question, have either Trump or Biden grasped the hem of democracy’s garment, the jury is still out.

Neither Trump, nor his followers, nor Republicans, are fascists – the club of fascism having come to rest in the post-Cold War era in China, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Russia Then too, Biden is not so far gone in mental deficiencies as some suppose. More likely, he has crossed over to postmodern progressivism at a time when everyone but extreme leftists have abandoned authoritarian creeds that still sustain socialists and their fellow travelers.

However, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, (Joe) McCarthyism is very much in the air. What is the real difference in unjustly calling someone in the 1950s a communist and, as unjustly, calling half the nation in Biden’s postmodern progressive era a fascist conventicle?

Most of us regard McCarthyism as the practice of making transparently false accusations of subversion and treason related to anarchism, communism and socialism.

Is Trump an anarchist and treasonous ex-president methodically engaged in subverting the democracy? And are all Republicans in Connecticut who dare rise to the defense of Trump’s rational and practical policy of border security – as contrasted with Biden’s subversive open-door policy – also fascist?

Is respected historian Victor Davis Hanson, who wrote a book titled The Case for Trump, copyright 2020, a fascist? Is anyone who presumes to defend Trump’s highly traditional and even commonplace foreign and domestic policies a “fascist” as defined by Benito Mussolini, the principal author of fascism – “Everything in the state; nothing outside the state; nothing above the state”?

Is historical fascism, enshrined in National SOCIALIST Parties, a doctrine likely to be promoted by Connecticut conservatives or libertarians who favor limited constitutional governance over and against a centralized administrative state in which the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government are blithely ignored or overridden by autocratic and unconstitutional executive orders?

To ask such questions – rarely entertained in the pages of Connecticut’s media – is to answer them. Whether they will be asked and answered honestly in the upcoming 2022 midyear elections is  very much an open question.