If You’re Going To Use The Word ‘Fascism,’ Learn What It Means
President Biden accuses MAGA movement of "semi-fascism" while delivering a speech while deploying his own "fascist-lite" symbolism. Screen grab from 6ABC News, via YouTube.
A couple of days ago, we posted a satirical piece, call it a sati-torial, with a list of headlines we’re never going to see. One of them said “Democrats Realize They’ve Been Using The Word ‘Fascist’ Wrong For Decades.” There’s a lot of truth in there. The way the political left tosses around that word shows that they have no idea what it means.
Or maybe they do. And they’re intentionally applying it wrongly because they’re driven by their depravity.
Either way, we’ve been hearing it for decades. And its use has accelerated in recent years along with the irresponsible usage of “white supremacy” and “white privilege.”
Exactly two months ago, Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Reich wrote a column for the loose-screw Guardian under the headline “The modern Republican party is hurtling towards fascism.”
The Independent, another British propaganda sheet, in 2021 ran the rantings of columnist Patrick Cockburn, who declared Republicans were replicating “the structure of fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.”
In a bizarre speech last summer heavy with Third Reich overtones, Joe Biden said “the entire philosophy that underpins” Trump-supporting Republicans is “like semi-fascism.” His press secretary the next day said “It is very clear” that “what MAGA Republicans have done” fits “the definition of fascism.”
Years earlier, George W. Bush had “come to embody the f-word” – fascist – “for a whole generation of activists.”
Our Power Line friend Steven Hayward was prescient in 2008 when he said “the left will go on deploying ‘fascism’ as a conversation-stopper against conservatives, even though the term ought to be associated overwhelmingly with” the political left.
Though they make their claims with a stomach-turning self-assuredness, never in their ravings do the accusers point out even approximately what fascism is, or what fascists do. But, for the record, here’s what fascists don’t do:
They don’t campaign on platforms that endorse tax cuts and deregulation – then once elected follow up tax-cut and deregulation agendas.
They don’t advocate for limited government.
They don’t support increasing individual liberty.
They don’t believe in free markets or property rights.
They don’t make law by fiat, using a “pen and phone” to bypass the constitutional process when it gets in their way.
Fascists don’t believe in giving parents and students choices in education, civil society nor open discussions.
It’s true that Republicans and conservatives often are unable to move their limited-government – and anti-fascist – agendas through Washington and state houses around the country. And part of that is their disinclination to fight hard enough. (They don’t want to be called fascists by the Democrats and the state media.) But they are also stymied by the left, which itself is fascist.
It should be obvious that all these charges of fascism are projection, an effort by the left to cover its true identity. In his tirade, Cockburn was correct when he said “fascist leaders may use democratic processes to obtain office, but once there, their instinct is to pull up the ladder and let nobody else climb up it.”
But he directed it at the wrong side. That is exactly what the Democrats have been working for over the long term. Their political goal is to establish unchallengeable power. We made this point before when we said:
“The left, which has marched through our institutions, won’t rest until the civil society we have flourished in has been replaced with a political society. It craves a societal breakdown, to bury the political and social norms that stand in its path to unchallengeable power.”
The truth that the left tries to hide is that fascism was a socialist creation. Italian politician Giovanni Gentile, known as the actual founding philosopher of fascism, was a socialist. So was Italy’s Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, who, inspired by Gentile, said “Everything within the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.” He also said “socialism is in my blood.”
So we ask, who is more socialist in this country? Democrats? Or Republicans? It’s not even close.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board