No. of Recommendations: 18
Pollyanna, there is so much wrong with this response. In your world fascism doesn’t exist until it does. It’s a light switch. In fact, your philosophy is so narrowly legalistic that if fascism were established through the democratic exercise of power it wouldn’t be fascism at all. It would be the will of the people. In fact. I’m pretty sure you can’t define fascism.
In the fall of 1922 Mussolini was constitutionally appointed Prime Minister. In the fall of 1923 the Italian parliament passed the Acerbo laws allowing a party that won a plurality of the vote to earn a supermajority of the seats. Perfectly legal. In 1924 elections, in which the fascists used the levers of power constitutionally available to them to influence the outcome, the fascists won the election and then proceeded to use the political power afforded them by their democratic victory to end democracy.
Based on your arguments, as long as the laws were followed, even if using those laws leads to the dismantling of democratic rules and norms, there is nothing fascist about this path to power and authoritarian rule. Or if you deny this, you would have a hard time pointing to the legal tipping point in which the exercise of legal power shifts from legitimate democratic governance to fascist rule. As long as there are laws behind the exercise of power, no matter how abusively that power is exercised, it must be respected as legitimate and abided by all who are subject to it.
You seem like an old guy. What advice would you have given Martin Luther King in 1959? Continue to sue for your rights young man?
The fascists are here. They have their hands on all three levers of federal power. I have to take them at their word when they tell me what is coming. What advice do you have? Wait until November? Trust that this is only bluster? I’m not sure those being kidnapped off the streets share your faith.
Those with wealth and power have tossed their lot in with American fascism because it is the only way to prevent the great economic reckoning that is coming in America. The people cannot be allowed to hold the levers of power at a moment in our history when the ruling class is realizing the consequences of the great concentration of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege." - Tommy Douglas
