Finally, the 'Socialists' are Calling Out the Fascists?

I have been a registered Democrat since 1976. Over the years, I have had many verbal—but respectable—battles with Republicans, Libertarians, and the Green Party. Throughout all those sometimes contentious disagreements, the only group that consistently and derisively refers to me as a socialist has been Republicans. I bring that point up because the average Republican is so unfamiliar with the nuances of our Constitutional Republic that the necessary elements of socialism running through it escape their thinking. Things like public hospitals and schools, the police and fire departments, Medicare, and Social Security are a few examples.

Republicans like to scare people

When Barack Obama announced for President in the fall of 2007 in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, it was the first hint of his politicking savvy. Republicans paid attention too and immediately looked for a counterattack to his symbolic invoking of a Republican icon. Eureka! Mr. Obama was a devotee of the symbol of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, and out came the socialism knives. No Democrats had been attacked so frequently and as virulently with the tag ‘socialist’ since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Alinsky was the perfect foil, the son of Russian Jews and a name that ended in S-K-Y. Obama is following a communist, socialist, it was said—all the same for their purposes, and who among their constituency will check or care. The attack became so common in Republican circles that it spread more quickly than ammunition at a Lauren Boebert Christmas Party.

I have to laugh…

When Republicans feign outrage about the so-called insult of MAGAs being labeled as “semi-fascists” by President Joe Biden, I want to vomit Crudités. I am confused about why the party that brought about life-saving social changes following the Great Depression is labeled socialist. I was equally baffled when President Biden ended a 20-year conflict in Afghanistan—that had no violent solution, opened the door to financial recovery for people mired in endless school loans, and achieved historical employment for the nation, is called a socialist. Conversely, the party led by a former President who called for a legal election to be tossed out in the last forty-eight hours because he lost and retweeted the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham intimating a Mafia-like call for violence if justice is pursued. “If they tried to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, there literally will be riots in the street,” said Graham. “I worry about the country.”

Democrats are repeatedly called baby killers, anti-Americans, snowflakes, and election cheats. Now that Biden has revealed the truth about people who attacked democracy with violence as fascists, the GOP cries foul.

Yale Professor Jason Stanley may have best explained the modern fascism of the Republican party when he wrote:

“[O]nce you have hierarchies set up, you can make people very nervous and frightened about losing their position on that hierarchy. Hierarchy goes right into victimhood because once you convince people that they’re justifiable higher on the hierarchy, then you can tell them that they’re victims of equality. German Christians are victims of Jews. White Americans are victims of Black American equality. Men are victims of feminism.

Stanley went on to say, The appeal to “law and order,” to police state levels of control, only applies to certain threatening classes who need to be put back in their place or eliminated. It does not apply to those at the top of the hierarchy, who recognize no constraints on their actions because they perceive themselves as threatened and in a state of emergency. It’s really the immigrants, leftists, and other minorities who have taken over, “and that’s why you need a really macho, powerful, violent response,” Prof. Stanley explained. Joe Biden was right; America will be better off when she admits it.