The Fascist Price Of A Dozen Eggs
They say that we should stop talking about fascism, because we tried that during the election, and it didn’t WORK.
The leadership of the Democratic Party wants us to accept that, somehow, the Americans who voted for Donald Trump simply held their noses and voted for a narcissistic aspiring dictator because the price of eggs is too high.
Are they right?
I’m hearing a lot of people in the media, in the podcasts, on the TV, on the pages of the few newspapers that our country has left, say that we must not use the label of “fascism” to describe what is happening, and must not call the people who are doing it fascists. They say that we should stop talking about democracy, and freedom, because these are abstractions that don’t really matter to people.
They say that we should stop talking about fascism, because we tried that during the election, and it didn’t WORK.
Robert Reich, for example, says that we shouldn’t get bogged down in paying attention to “culture war” issues like the right to marry the person you love, and the right to define your own identity, and the right to make your own choice about whether to teach your own children to follow a religion. He says that these issues are just a “distraction” from what this is all REALLY ABOUT, which is the economy, and the effort by financial elites like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg to use the power of Donald Trump’s government to grab even more money for themselves.
I like Robert Reich. Robert Reich is not wrong that Donald Trump’s Silicon Valley benefactors are using Trump as a means to consolidate wealth and power for themselves.
However, Robert Reich is dead wrong to characterize issues of freedom and democracy as nothing more than a distraction. He is wrong that economic inequality is the only real story, the only valid thing that’s going on.
The movement behind Donald Trump is complex and multidimensional, as fascist movements always have been. It includes economic opportunists, Christian Nationalists, and a huge number of gullible, ignorant suckers who are proud to have avoided an adequate education.
The leadership of the Democratic Party doesn’t want Americans talking about this, because as a political strategy, they think that it doesn’t WORK. They want to keep pretending that the Americans who voted for Donald Trump are good, intelligent people who just somehow mysteriously happened to vote for a politician who promised to terminate the Constitution, become a dictator, and exterminate tens of millions of Americans like vermin.
The truth is that good, intelligent people don’t support a candidate like that. The truth is that there are two reasons for an American to have voted for Donald Trump. If you voted for Donald Trump, you’re either a cruel person who doesn’t care about other people or you’re an idiot.
The Democratic Party leadership wants to convince us otherwise. They want us to accept that, somehow, the Americans who voted for Donald Trump simply held their noses and voted for a narcissistic aspiring dictator because the price of eggs is too high.
Sure, the price of eggs is too high. But is it really that high? Is it so high that you would choose to live under the dictatorship of a madman?
The price of eggs matters, but if we talk about the price of eggs INSTEAD of talking about the attacks against the essential liberties defined in the Bill of Rights, we will cheapen ourselves along with our eggs.
Are we willing to sell away our freedoms for the low low price of a dollar for a carton of a dozen eggs? Is that the price of our liberty?
If we stop talking about the values of democracy because it’s not popular to do so, because democracy does not feel like a winning strategy, that is not a way to win against the fascists. It is a way to help the fascists win.
The fascists want us to agree that the only thing that the government of the United States of America really stands for is the price of eggs. If we agree to those terms, the fascists will always win the argument, because the fascists will always find someone else to blame when the price of eggs is high. They will find someone else to blame, and they will send those people into the concentration camps.
The minute that we agree that the price of eggs is more important than freedom, we have lost.
Let’s get practical about this. Let’s talk about kitchen table politics.
When Donald Trump and his fascists are done, who will be left to sit at your kitchen table?
Democracy is not an abstraction. Freedom is not an abstraction. They are matters of life and death.
This is no longer about how to win an election. The election is over.
This is about whose family gets rounded up in the middle of the night and separated from each other.
This is about who gets sent to the concentration camps.
This is about who survives.
Don’t tell me that democracy doesn’t matter. Don’t tell me that the cost of eggs is more important.
When you’re in a prison camp, when you’re dead, it won’t matter what the price of eggs is.
For now, we still have the right to speak freely. While we have that freedom, we should use it to speak honestly.
I don’t oppose the fascism of Donald Trump because it’s a strategy that works.
I speak out against the fascists because it’s the right thing to do.
I call them fascists because that’s what they are.
Speak honestly, while you still have the freedom to speak.