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| Duff -- Wilton Bulletin |
Said Duff: “The march to fascism in Florida continues with
this new “Don’t Say Gay” bill. For a bunch of people in Florida” – specifically
the nearly 60% percent of Floridians who voted for Governor Ron DeSantis during
his last campaign, the largest margin in 40 years, according to NPR -- “who claim to be
about family values, they are certainly showing the opposite… At this point in
Florida, they are practically burning books… The next step in the march to
fascism for Florida is to continue on this “Don’t say Gay” bill… What it does
is, it takes a small group of people and marginalizes them within the rest of
society. Florida puts them in the “other” category… LGBTQ+ kids shouldn’t be
used as fodder for the Republican campaign base… Hopefully, in Florida, they
get their act together; they start choosing family values over political
values, and start getting in step with the real America, who believe (sic) that
everybody has an equal right under the constitution.”
Most reasonable people, assuming any are left in a politics
in which opponents think it necessary to denounce their political opposites in such
lurid terms, may agree that Duff’s strained rhetoric is alarmingly severe.
Is it possible that 60% of Floridians are “fascists?”
Benito Mussolini, the father of Italian fascism, a
journalist and socialist, perfectly defined the fatal fascist itch for power
when he said that fascism means: “Everything in the state, nothing above the
state, nothing outside the state.” What is it, then, in the American political
experience that militates against the fascist credo, which places all power in
a central authority and is the true enemy of the doctrine of subsidiarity? The
United States is a federated, tripartite system of governance – federal, state
and municipal – in which there exists robust political organs outside a state
that prevents the centralization of power -- the hallmark of fascism.
DeSantis is not a friend of fascism, and even, should be
become President of the United States, he could not practice an attenuated
fascism longer than eight years. While in office – unless a President is able,
Cromwell-like, to dissolve Congress and the Judicial Department – he will not
likely rise to the eminence of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Putin, or a Xi
Jinping.
One of the blessings of the American system of government is
that it foreshortens the careers of excitable autocratic hyperbolists – except
in cases in which term-limits are not enforced. In 37 states, some kind of term
limit is enforced on governors, according to Ballotpedia. Connecticut imposes
no term limits on elected state office holders.
No one has yet asked Duff, who has spent 18 years in the
State Senate, whether he favors term limits for members of Connecticut’s
General Assembly as a surety against fascism.
The politics of hurdling spittle should be resisted by those
who fancy that issues should be decided through reasoned discussion. The idea
among incautious Democrats appears to be to get the word “fascism” to waltz
around with the words “Republican” or “the right” or Trumpisms such as “Make
America Great Again” (MAGA) or “conservative” in the hope that a fascist taint
will adhere to words sharing the same space in a defamer’s mouth. It was
Cardinal Newman who said in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, very
politely, that his critics could throw mud enough, “and some of it will stick –
stick, but not stain.” Mud throwing is a detour around an argument that cannot
stick or stain.
Parents of very young school children in Florida and
Connecticut, however impassioned and boisterous, should not be FBI bait. They
have been trying, with varying degrees of success, to send a clear message to
politicians and educators. And the message is one that even ponderous
pedagogical experts should be able to understand: We, the parents of young
school children, are the moral guides and the shapers of the character of our
children – not National Education pedagogues or politicians who for decades
have successfully averted their eyes from both failing and successful urban public schools.
Duff’s answer to parents concerned about runaway “education”
must be sounder than a rhetorical truncheon, and if he wants an A in political
science, he should educate himself on the origins of fascism.
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