Fascists Are on the Left, not the Right

Fascists Are on the Left, not the Right

– By Howard Sierer –

Pres. Biden’s September 11^th speech got it all wrong: this country’s fascists are on the left, not on the right.

So says Lance Morrow, a long-time, award-winning editorialist at Time magazine, professor at Boston University and more recently a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

In a recent article titled “Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward,” Morrow is worth quoting at length:

“If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy.

“The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists).

“The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of ‘gender.’

“Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.”

Personally, I’ve always found it useful to think of the political spectrum not as left and right spread out on line. Instead, I think of political beliefs as arrayed on a circle. At the top is democracy usually embodied in a republic such as ours.

Immediately to the left as one moves down around the circumference is the center left beginning to favor increased government action to address social and economic ills. Moving down on the right, the center right tends to see a strong economy and robust military as cornerstones of governance.

The farther one moves down around the circle on either the left or the right, democracy suffers as either the left or the right sees the need for more authoritarian measures to implement their preferred policies.

Nearing the circle’s bottom, whether approached from the circle’s left side or its right, is authoritarian government, dictatorships where free and independent thought and action are repressed by police or military force. Totalitarianism is at the very bottom: Orwell’s “1984.”

As Morrow points out, the 20^th century’s most notorious dictators, Hitler and Mussolini along with Lenin, Stalin, Mao and now Vladimir Putin, all started out on the left as avowed socialists and moved down the circle’s left side. Rightist fascists, often military officers, became equally-despicable dictators in many South American, African and Asian countries but with more localized impact. Idi Amin and Argentina’s military juntas come to mind.

Morrow contrasts today’s right with the fascist far left:

“Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work.

“Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think.”

I find little to praise in Trump as a person nor in many of his unthinking followers. But like Morrow, I hardly see them as threats to democracy.

I worry more about the far left’s fascist tendencies. This shrinking percentage of the electorate has captured much of the media and many of our educators. These elites claim to stand for freedom while silencing or shouting down those who disagree. They see racism at every turn and brand their political enemies as irredeemable racists.

They claim to embrace social justice while implementing policies that preserve their status but that have repeatedly failed the poor and disadvantaged, keeping them dependent on government handouts. When voters fail to give them Congressional majorities, they all-too-quickly propose presidential (authoritarian) executive orders to implement their policies.

Presidents Obama and Biden used the FBI to attack their political enemies. Disagree? No matter what you think of Donald Trump, explain why his Florida home was raided by a phalanx of FBI agents while Hillary Clinton received barely a slap on the wrist in 2016 for far more egregious storage of classified documents at her home and on a personal computer. Don’t bother to answer, “No one is above the law:” Hillary Clinton was.

As for Biden’s September 11^th speech, 57% of the public believes the speech “represents a dangerous escalation in rhetoric and is designed to incite conflict amongst Americans.” Only 36% agreed with the statement that “it is acceptable campaign messaging that is to be expected in an election year.”

I join Morrow in saying that leftist elites have embraced Mussolini’s “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Look left to see fascist enemies of freedom.