For months now, the
Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in
connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael
Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington Post:
Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.
Sadly, Kinsley reveals, as so many
before him have, that academic degrees are no substitute for intelligence,
knowledge, critical analysis, and basic logic. The term “fascist” is a very
distinct one and Kinsley can apply it to Trump only by redefining it entirely.
His is a deconstructionist effort that leeches all meaning from the word.
Because Kinsley’s essay is currently
behind a paywall, let me summarize briefly what his argument is before I
demonstrate what a shoddy piece of disinformation it is. Kinsley opens in a defensive
posture, absolving himself of proving Godwin’s Law, which holds that internet
discussions always end with Hitler analogies. Instead, Kinsley boasts, “I mean
‘fascist’ in the more clinical sense.”
What is this clinical sense? If you
plow through an endless cascade of words, Kinsley accuses Trump of being a
crony capitalist, not to enrich himself and his friends, but to claim boasting
rights about his skills conferring material benefits on the American people.
Kinsley calls this “corporate statism,” which he says is the same as “fascism,”
although he considers himself too classy to call Trump a fascist (except when
he calls Trump a fascist).
As is the case with so many Leftist
arguments grounded in history, Kinsley could not be more wrong. “Corporate
statism” is certainly a feature of Hitler’s fascism, but it’s also been a
feature of Obama’s administration. Standing alone, corporate statism, while
corrupt and unfair, is not
fascism.
It’s just garden-variety corruption.
Actual “fascism” is not just about the state’s relationship to corporations;
it’s also about the state’s relationship to the luckless individuals under its
control.
The reality is that, no matter the
myriad names given to the world’s political systems, there are only two types
of governments: Those that vest more power in the state (statist systems) and
those that vest less power in the state (individualist or liberty-oriented
systems). Every government in the world, no matter the name given, its place in
time, or its geographic location, falls along that continuum. Here’s a very
basic illustration of that unvarying fact:
Lots of world leaders and regimes
have occupied the continuum’s far left, statist side. Western Europe and
Obama’s America occupy the area left of center while the area just to the right
of center is America shortly before Obama dragged it over the red line.
Off to the far right is the
Founders’ vision of a constitutionally limited government, one
subordinated to individual citizens’ unalienable rights — that’s the one that
is every conservative’s dream. It’s a nation that stops short of anarchy
but that allows individuals maximum liberty.
Conservatives want a smaller
government that, by virtue of its limited size, has limited control over each
individual’s ability to make his own choices, to live his life as he sees fit,
and to see the government as his servant, rather than bowing to the government
as his master.
Given that conservatives
Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty
side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise
to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and
Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”? You can
blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American
communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political
“right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives,
being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.
The correct analysis properly begins
with jettisoning the terms “right wing” and “left wing.” Their antecedents are
irrelevant to American politics and, in any event, statists have polluted them
irreparably. The terms arose in France, in 1789, when Louis XVI’s supporters in
the National Assembly sat on the president’s right and the revolutionaries to
his left. We are not in France in 1789. Moreover, that archaic division ignores
the fact that the left and the right in France were totalitarian in nature.
Both wanted complete control; they just had different visions about the nature
of that control.
“Fascism,” another historic term, is
one that American statists embraced until Hitler tainted it. It first
gained political traction in Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini defined it to mean
“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
In other words, fascism is purely on the statist side of the continuum.
Savvy readers will have noticed that
fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all
power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state.
The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the
government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government
does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case,
for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for
the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.
What Kinsley missed entirely is that
the decision to nationalize private property or to control it while it’s in
private hands is not the most important issue when looking at the two systems.
The central point is that, under both systems, the government owns and controls the individual citizens.
For ordinary citizens, the
difference between communism and fascism can be seen as the difference between
wearing ugly stainless steel handcuffs and stainless steel handcuffs garnished
with pretty pink fur. Citizens are still wearing the state’s handcuffs, but in
the fascist state (at least before the state gets the bit in its teeth) things
look nicer.
Communists and fascists hated each
other in the 1920s through 1940s not because they were diametrically opposed
ideologies, but because they were similar ideologies fighting for the same
slice of totalitarian pie. When they weren’t fighting each other for power,
they supported each other, as was the case with Hitler and Stalin . .
. right until Hitler decided he wanted Stalin’s territory, too. In Spain,
there was a bloody civil war because communism and fascism were jealous rivals
seeking total control.
Without exception, two bad things
happen in totalitarian governments: (1) the government ceases to see it
citizens as individuals and views them only as widgets who exist to aggrandize
the state; and (2) the people who control statist governments fall prey to
grandiose delusions and paranoia. Hitler and Stalin went after their own
people. Hitler got the negative headlines only because he explosively sought
control over Europe, without anticipating Churchill’s refusal to surrender or
America’s ferocity when roused. Had Hitler been more discreet, as Stalin was in
the Ukraine or in the gulags (or as Mao was in China), Hitler’s fascist,
genocidal state could have lasted for decades more.
After the war, Hitler’s grandiosity
ensured that “fascism” was a dirty word. American communists needed to move
fast to erase Russia’s pact with Hitler and to disguise that “fascism” and
“communism” are variations on a theme. Using America’s media and higher
education systems, America’s communists associated the word “fascist” with
“right wing.” This allowed them to affix the “fascist” label to those who
cherish individual liberty, tying them to Hitler, the ultimate madman. It
didn’t matter that the new label was deconstructionist sleight of hand. The
only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly
associations surrounding it.
So, no, fascism is not limited to
state control over privately-held industry. In any event, Kinsey’s attempt to
shoehorn Trump’s Carrier deal under the corporate statism side of the “fascism”
label is also wrong. Outside of communism’s nationalizing industry, all
governments engage in some way with wealth owners and wealth producers.
In America, the government’s
engagement with businesses takes three primary forms: (1) it taxes corporate
profits; (2) it enriches corporations that engage in conduct the government
favors; and (3) it uses regulation to take over entirely an economic sector, as
was done with Obamacare (an action Mussolini would have recognized).
Cronyism or corporate statism, or whatever else you want to call it,
happens when a government, to benefit government insiders, favors certain
businesses over others and uses taxpayer monies as a sign of that favoritism.
Keep in mind that the government has
no money of its own because it generates no wealth. All of the money it
possesses it has taken from citizens via taxes and fees that are requested
politely, with the understanding that the polite request is enforced with
a gun. Any money that the government gives a corporation is taxpayer
money. When a government foregoes collecting taxes, it is simply leaving money
with its true owner — although this can be abused if the government foregoes
tax collection for the benefit of a select few.
Compare what Obama did in 2009 with
the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“the stimulus”) versus what Trump
is doing now: In 2009, the Democrats took taxpayer money, in the form of
guaranteed loans, and handed it out to favored corporate constituencies. These
corporations were usually staffed with Democratic Party insiders who promised
to provide magical green benefits that would eventually create jobs and improve
the climate. (Think: Solyndra.)
Although the administration touted
the stimulus’s success, claiming it “saved or created” over a million jobs (a
metric that is almost entirely imaginary), the cold-cash reality is that jobs
either weren’t created or did not last, green corporations went under,
America’s real infrastructure (e.g., roads and bridges) continues to decline,
and taxpayer money vanished into crony bank accounts.
The Carrier deal is different. Trump
got Indiana to allow Carrier to keep more of its own profits through a
series of tax
incentives playing out over the next few
years. The real incentive for Carrier and all American businesses is Trump’s
overarching promises to (a) lower dramatically the corporate tax rate, which at
35% is now the highest in the Western world; (b) lift burdensome regulations
that harm profits; and (c) increase available fossil fuel energy, bringing down
costs.
These benefits would not be
conferred solely on “friends of Donald,” but would extend to all American
businesses. This is the opposite of crony capitalism or “corporate statism” or
“fascism.”
I’ll start worrying if Trump, like
Obama, uses taxpayer money to give benefits to favored corporations that are,
in turn, expected to return some portion of that taxpayer money to Trump and
his buddies. And I’ll start worrying about a new dawn of fascism in America
when Trump, instead of shrinking the regulatory state to lessen government’s
hold on American purses and minds, starts to extend the regulatory state into
every area of American life, from education, to business, to bathrooms, to
forcing Americans to buy products they don’t want from an industry under
government control.
One more thing: Obama said that the
biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure
to grab more guns from American hands.
Statists always grab guns because their regimes are fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it
impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical
government.
Trump’s promise to protect the
Second Amendment is the antithesis of a statist, especially a “fascist,”
regime. So, Kinsley, if you want to go
around calling people “fascists,” start by looking in your own mirror and by
saluting the picture of Obama you have hanging over your bed.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/donald_trump_is_not_a_fascist.html
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