I didn’t expect that Barrack Obama and Emanuel Macron would turn out to be fascists. But if we take the Left’s rhetoric to its logical conclusion, that is indeed what has happened.
When you
hear the name ‘Emmanuel Macron,’ you probably recall that he’s the President of
France. Perhaps you remember how he beat Marine LePen by a two-to-one margin in
the second round of the 2017 presidential election, or how he got hitched to
future First Lady Brigitte Macron – they met when he was 15 years old and she
was a 39-year-old teacher at his high school; his parents sent him to a
different school in an attempt to break off the relationship, but to no avail,
and after Macron turned 18, Brigitte divorced her husband to marry him.
Which
makes Barrack Obama and Emmanuel Macron fascists, too.

If you’re
a right-winger like myself, then Macron probably comes across as an effete socialist,
out of touch with the working class and woefully unfit to confront Europe’s existential
problems. What he definitely isn’t is a fascist.
Unless
you take the American left’s logic seriously.
You may
recall that President Trump’s Independence Day celebration, with tanks and fighter
jets, elicited howl of protest from the leftist media, who denounced the
spectacle as militaristic, authoritarian, and fascist. As some of us still
remember, planning for this show began after President Trump saw a military
parade in Macron’s France and decided he wanted to do something similar in his
own country.
Also, in
France, the tanks got to actually drive down the streets, while Trump settled
for static tanks due to fears that their treads would damage Washington’s weak,
swampy roadways. So if, as the media assert, this kind of spectacle means that a
nation’s leader is a fascist, then not only is Emmanual Macron a fascist, but
he is an even bigger fascist than the prototype fascist, Donald Trump.
As it
turns out, President Macron is not the only left-winger who has suddenly found
himself redefined as a fascist in this new sense of the word. As is known to everyone
who hasn’t spent the last two years hiding under a rock, Donald Trump’s desire
to enforce the border means that he is a fascist. Because enforcing the border
means locking people up when they cross it illegally. And some of those illegal
border crossers are children, and there is nothing more fascist than children
in cages.
Except
that none of these policies were started by President Trump. Illegal aliens are
being treated the same way today that they were under the Obama Administration.
Trump talks a lot more about on cracking down on illegal immigration, but
policy-wise, little has changed between the two. Obviously, during the Obama
years the detention camps were seldom reported on, and nobody called Obama a
fascist for his halfway efforts to enforce the border – halfway efforts upon which,
I must remark, Trump has scarcely improved.
But that
was before Donald Trump became president. Border enforcement is something that
Trump talks about a lot, therefore, it is a fascist thing to do. Which, if we’re
being honest, must retroactively make Barrack Obama a fascist.
George Orwell,
as you may recall, was fond of griping about the decrepit state of political
discourse in his time. In 1946, he lamented that “the word Fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
It seems
that now, some seventy-odd years later, the American Left has gotten around to
rectifying that situation. “Fascism” no longer has no meaning – rather, it refers
to whatever a particular ‘Someone Not Desirable’ is doing at the moment. Which,
depending on the phase of the current news cycle, may include half-assed border
enforcement, or giving a speech in front of a couple tanks.

The famous statement by Sir William Harcourt, a hundred and thirty years ago, "We are all socialists now," just needs one word changed.
ReplyDeleteAlthough some of the Marxist sects do serious analysis of political reality, from their own point of view, most Leftists are creatures of pure emotion. If it offends them, it's "fascist".
Ten years ago, Jonah Goldberg turned the tables on them with his book "Liberal Fascism". (Available here -- https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189/ -- for a buck, used, plus postage, and well worth reading.)
There are those on the Right who like to claim "Hitler was a socialist", and therefore fascism is a Left-wing movement. I think this creates mental confusion, although it does agitate the Left, who don't like to be reminded (if they ever knew) of the socialist elements of the NSDAP's program, and Hitler's successful bending of Germany's capitalist economy via Keynsians measures to bring economic prosperity to the Fatherland.