President Joe Biden delivers remarks on ending the war in Afghanistan, Tuesday, August 31, 2021, in front of the Cross Hall of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats are mixed up. Trump and his followers are not, unlike the Left, seeking a one-party system. Rather, they are seeking freedom from Government control.
Like him or not, Donald Trump is not a fascist. He is an egomaniac, perhaps, and an opportunist. He is, according to Lance Morrow, an anarcho-narcissist.
(Trump) is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”
Trump’s followers belong to the “Church of Nostalgia,” seeking the next Norman Rockwell or General Eisenhower, continues Mr. Morrow in the WSJ.
They regard themselves, not without reason, as the last sane Americans. You might think of them as American masculinity in exile; like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, living in the forest has made their manners rough.
Nothing Outside the State
If there are fascists amongst us, as President Biden stridently accuses, Joe had better look at his own reflection and the mob behind him, who insist that anything not in line with their ideology is 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.
Freedom Isn’t Fascism
Essentially, Donald Trump and his followers are antifascists, argues Mr. Morrow.
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.
“The Enemy of Freedom”
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. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.
The WSJ reports that Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book ,“The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism,” is forthcoming in January.
What IS Joe Biden’s Position? Read more here.
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