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This is a tough column to write, because I don’t want to demean or insult those who write me in good faith. I’ve started it a half dozen times since November but turned to other topics each time because this needle hard to thread. No matter how I present it, I’ll offend some thoughtful, decent people.
The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.
The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.
This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.
As for those who equate Trump and Joe Biden, that’s false equivalency. Biden has done nothing remotely close to the egregious, anti-American acts of Trump. We can debate the success and mindset of our current president, as we have about most presidents in our lifetimes, but Biden was never a threat to our democracy. Trump is. He is unique among all American presidents for his efforts to keep power at any cost.
Are you saying that Biden is fascist, or that he isn’t a right wing corporatist? If Biden is fascist, what is Trump? Neoliberalism is on the far left (or centrist) side of right wing corporatism, and fascism is the far right side.
Neoliberalism thinks power comes from meritocracy, and Fascism thinks it comes from moral superiority. The first is rooted in the merchant class, and the other with the divine right of kings. That’s why fascists turn on Jews so often, because they associate Jews with wealth and Christians with royalty or ecclesiastical power.
Mussolini made no such distinction. mechanized military states meet all the hallmarks of fascism: primacy of the state, and alignment of institutions with the interest of the state.
Neoliberalism is better described as alignment of the state with the interests of institutions. It’s almost worse, except that the interests of different institutions aren’t all aligned.
the state still has primacy, and the corporations are both chartered by the state and are subject to capricious prosecution for a myriad of laws if they threaten the power of the state.
US corporations don’t seem particularly threatened by the state. Look how much trouble the all powerful state has had prosecuting just one obviously guilty as hell oligarch with a tiny fraction of the wealth controlled by the big corporations.