OPINION:
There is something exquisitely ironic in President Joe Biden calling his political opponents “semi-fascists.”
Sounding like a cross between a cranky grandpa and a Victorian lady with the vapors, Mr. Biden laid into his opponents at a DNC rally last month. The ultra-MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy, he sputtered.
“It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy,” the leader of the Free World railed. “It’s like semi-fascism.”
When reporters asked what he meant, the foxy oldster laughingly replied, “You know what I mean.” I’m not sure even he does. The man who can’t quote the most famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence correctly is going to define fascism?
While it will come as a shock to some Democrats, fascism is not a small government/laissez-faire philosophy.
Which party seeks to constantly expand the size and scope of the state? Hint: In 2018, the federal government took 16.5% of GDP. This year – under the president who wants to hire 87,000 new IRS agents – it’s 20.1%.
Fascism has been around long enough to have recognizable elements. In October, it will be 100 years since Mussolini marched on Rome and established the first fascist state. There were elements of fascism in the Third Reich and in various totalitarian regimes that came to power since then.
There is nothing even remotely fascistic about the Party of Lincoln.
Fascists use violence to achieve their ends. Mr. Biden and his party refused to condemn the BLM/Antifa riots of 2020, when business districts across the country went up in flames and murders were committed in the name of racial justice. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy (now a candidate for governor) said the arson was a good thing. (“Yes, America is burning. But that’s how forests grow.”) Then-candidate Kamala Harris tweeted her support for a bail fund to get rioters back on the streets. Left-wing crazies, including Jane’s Revenge, are the Democrats’ storm troops.
Fascists trample the law underfoot. Before open borders, there were blue sanctuary cities. Now, the president has turned America into a sanctuary nation. There are still laws against illegal immigration; the administration just refuses to enforce them. There’s also a law against demonstrating at the homes of Supreme Court justices. The Department of Justice has decided to ignore that law too, even after the attempt on the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Regarding speech they don’t like, Democrats think the First Amendment is more of a suggestion than a restraint on government.
Fascists need scapegoats. For European fascists, it was Jews, the rich and the old conservative order. On this side of the Atlantic, the fascists have decided that all of the nation’s problems are the fault of white males, Christians who refuse to get on board with the new sexual ethics, the 1% who we’re told don’t pay their fair share of taxes, those who refuse to worship at the altar of green energy, and now the dreaded MAGA Republicans, who dare to question the integrity of stolen elections. In every election cycle, they create a new smear– deplorables, bitter-clingers and now, semi-fascists.
Once in power, fascists seek to radically transform government. Biden Democrats are pushing to pack the Supreme Court, repeal the legislative filibuster, abolish the Electoral College, make mail-in voting permanent and bestow statehood on D.C. and Puerto Rico, giving themselves four Senators and at least two more Representatives in perpetuity. Some would go even further, like the two Ivy League law professors who declared in a New York Times op-ed that we need to throw out the ”famously undemocratic” Constitution, that stands in the way of “real” freedom and democracy.
This is a totalitarian agenda that would wipe out the last vestiges of liberty and representative government in America.
Friedrich Hayek was an Austrian economist who left his homeland shortly before the Nazis came to power in Germany and spent the war years teaching at the London School of Economics.
In 1944, Mr. Hayek (who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics) wrote his classic “The Road to Serfdom,” in which he explained that fascism, socialism and Nazism all had common roots in the central planning of the economy. Under FDR and his successors, the Democratic Party increasingly embraced the collectivism we fought in World War II, which left so many nations in shambles in the post-War era.
If Mr. Biden can get more Americans to go beyond his empty rhetoric and learn about the real nature of fascism, he may finally serve a useful purpose.
• Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist.
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