Clarence Page: MAGA may not be fascist, but increasingly it rhymes
As much as I call myself a zealot for free speech, I also find it prudent sometimes to remember the value of not speaking.
Or, at least, in pursuit of reasoned discourse I will seek a substitute that sounds less inflammatory.
One of them is an F-word.
No, I know what you’re probably thinking, but I don’t mean that F-word.
I’m talking about “fascist.”
Do I hear gasps from the gallery? Yes, that’s why I usually avoid using the word. It sounds inflammatory, even when it sounds appropriate. That’s partly because so few people seem to know what it really means beyond, perhaps, allusions to Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator in the World War II era. He did the world the courtesy of telling us upfront what he and his National Fascist Party were all about.
In short, fascism is a dictatorial governing system characterized by ultranationalism — including racial and religious nationalism — autocracy and elitism, often at the expense of individual rights.
Or as I define it in terms Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously used to define obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”
I knew fascism when I saw it on Jan. 6, 2021, as deliriously angry Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed attempt to block the official electoral vote count, just because their guy didn’t win.
Those self-important “patriots” are better described as peeved-off MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) mobsters, unwilling to let democracy get in the way of their “freedom” to trash the nation’s seat of self-rule. Lock them up.
...continued
(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
