Ben Carson’s pathetic attempt to equate Hitler and pro-gun control Democrats was short-lived, but the specter of fascism is still haunting the 2016 presidential race.
When news first broke that Marco Rubio had won the support of billionaire Peter Singer, the media jumped on it as a sign that Rubio, a junior senator from Florida, was now the top “establishment” Republican candidate for president.
And while that may or may not be true, the fact that a billionaire supporting a presidential candidate even counts as news is news in and of itself.
It’s also just the latest example of what former vice-president Henry Wallace was talking about when he warned us 71 years ago about the “American fascists” among us.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Wallace to, as he noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
His answer to those questions was published April 9, 1944 in The New York Times, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and it is both shocking and prescient.
“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information."
Here, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word “fascist” -- the definition Benito Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word.
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is, “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this.
In a 1923 pamphlet titled “The Doctrine of Fascism” he wrote, “If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.”
But not a government of, by, and for We The People; instead, Mussolini’s fascist state would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini made this vision of fascism a reality when he dissolved the Italian Parliament and replaced it with the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations.
Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Marco Rubio and covertly write legislation through groups like ALEC, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice-President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his fears about the same thing happening here in America:
“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.”
