Lady Liberty’s torch is dimming. Republicans insist that she is fatigued and her fire has been quenched by the caravan of migrants exploiting her generosity. They may seek to close the United States to asylum seekers but conservative politicians are opening up our borders to a century-old European ideology ready to invade our democratic union: fascism.
Benito Mussolini was a dictator and founder of fascist political ideology, but the now-believed cancerous ideology has recently been associated with former president and now president-elect Donald Trump. It is often described by scholars as “a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.”
Conservative media outlets like Fox News often blast liberal ones, like MSNBC, for hammering the label of “fascist.” To them, fascism is a buzzword seeking to undermine an anti-establishment president. However, there is no denying that the Republican party has become fascistic, whether for better or worse.
Mussolini’s “everything in a State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,“ rings similar to Trump’s populist “America first” policy which has both domestic and global aspects. Trump’s plan to deport millions of migrants and claim that immigrants entering America are “poisoning the blood of our country” is famously a strategy of fascists. Trump’s hesitance toward NATO strongly signals his desire for the U.S. to abandon our allies, reiterating his hyper fixation on the American state in a vacuum. He seeks to coerce universities into “defending the American tradition and western civilization,“ another popular authoritarian fascist tool in propping up their regimes.
Despite being ostensibly for small government, Republicans fear higher education teaching citizens any information that is critical of the state such as our history of slave labor. We can love our country and criticize its shortcomings, too: former President Bill Clinton said, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Trump seems to not believe the people have the right to know about America’s shortcomings unless he can scapegoat the political left for those shortcomings.
For the first time that I can remember, politicians like speaker Mike Johnson are openly telling constituents that we “do not live in a democracy.” Fascists will tell you that democracy is beautiful in theory, but a fallacy in practice. To protect the state, they will suppress opposition.
Trump wants to do this by “ban[ning] federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information.” The bodies that typically label facts and misinformation are journalists and scholars, and their freedom will be ceased if Trump gets his way. The federal government will aim to control how Americans perceive reality by invading your classrooms, newspapers and television screens to shield the administration from criticism.
He has already signed executive orders to fight “indoctrination” in schools which simply means history he perceives as left-leaning.
To this end, Trump has belabored the terrors of left wing economics like Marxism. Authoritarian fascism lives in direct contrast to left-wing economics such as socialism. Many on the right may confuse socialism as direct government control of the economy and people. Socialism is simply a theory that calls for worker-owned means of production; Republicans hate that. Worker empowerment would overthrow their centralized autocracy.
The GOP projects their own authoritarian tendancies to avoid confronting how the party has evolved. They will convince workers that immigrants exploit them more than billionaires to grab their vote while voting to cut social programs and labor protections. Because of this propaganda, Trump has the power to tweet that “He who saves his country does not violate any law” while criticizing leftists as vermin. I mean not to glorify Marxism and socialism, as they, too, have been applied in genocidal ways, but rather I seek to raise concern about Republican attempts to scrub left-leaning ideas out of society to preserve oligarchy.
In a recent Gallup poll, 12% of Republicans said they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media. 53% of Republicans lack confidence in higher education. Despite the 17 Nobel prize winning economists that endorsed Kamala Harris’ economic plan, 52% of Americans trusted Donald Trump to lead the economy. 71% of those intending to vote for him feel like what Trump says is true (despite 3/4 of his statements being varying degrees of false), which is higher than the number reported for trust in those voters’ friends and families and religious leaders. A large percentage of Americans trust virtually no institutions, their peers, whether friends or family, but trust a single individual, Trump. That’s fascism. If you phrased the question without mentioning the word, you might find that roughly half of Americans believe in fascism. If that’s the case, then fascism is what we deserve.
“Fascism is a religious concept,“ according to Mussolini.
“Trumpism” has become its own religion, where no amount of scandal or immorality can shake the followers. No one is more to blame than the Left, who have spent so much effort demonizing the Right as a basket of deplorables. The Left’s moral superiority complex has alienated people who simply want a better standard of living and because of that, many Americans prefer fascism. I would resort to extremes if I received the same constant condescension from the opposing party.
Donald Trump won the election and it wasn’t close: either many Americans don’t know what the signs of fascism are and therefore couldn’t see how the former president is a fascist, or people know Trump is a fascist and still voted for him. The U.S. has given itself fascism. How will it unfold during the 21st century in a nation built on land of the free? More than anything, I sincerely hope fascism has some saving grace, because, it is clear that our 47th president will be a fascist.
