Tonight’s scheduled debate between President Biden and convicted felon Donald Trump is being touted as maybe one of the most important such events in history, possibly eclipsing the Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960 that likely changed the outcome of the presidential election that year.
While we wait to see if Trump actually shows up for this, millions of viewers will be looking to see whose policy priorities will be better represented and whose personal mental impediments and such will be more revealed.
The report that a gaggle of hard rightwingers have convened in Arizona to discuss abandoning support for Trump in favor of Gen. Michael Flynn needs to make it clear that those folks are far more concerned about Trump’s declining mental state, as exhibited to all to see at his recent rallies, than anything else.
The meeting of Trump with top corporate CEOs last week made his deteriorated mental condition evident, as many of those CEOs stated, if in muted tones, afterwards.
But the talk of rightwingers seeking an alternative to Trump underscores one big point, and that is this: It is not Trump, per se, but what Trumpers, so to speak, hope to do to America and democracy which should be the overriding concern for us all.
Their more comprehensive agenda is outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report that spells out a vision for a sweeping reorganization of government, removing all career government specialists across the entire federal government with far right ideologues. This report represents one of the most chilling publications of the modern era and there is no way to describe it except that it is anti-democratic to the highest degree, or, in other words, truly fascist.
Advancing the political career of Trump was a huge step forward for this effort, but it will not depend on him to achieve it going forward.
Therefore, it will take far more than just an electoral defeat for Trump to remedy this very dangerous situation. It is going to take a “Sputnik moment” revival of core American values at all levels in our culture to turn this around.
It was World War II itself that turned the nation around the last time it seriously flirted with fascism, when Hitler and Mussolini were running the show on the European continent and exterminating six million Jews, among other unthinkable things.
Before the U.S. got involved in the war, pro-Nazi rallies were being held all across the nation, including one that filled Madison Square Garden to the rafters. On the verge of winning the Republican nomination for president in 1940 was the popular head of that movement, the aviator Charles Limburgh. The outbreak of the war called forth the still stirring democratic sentiments of the population that had been cultivated by FDR’s New Deal and other policies that were defining our government as on the side of the common man.
Therefore, the American role in World War 11 was as a rallying for democracy and the values of justice and fair play, and they carried over for the first decades after the war. Even though pro-fascist elements still existed here, they were severely diminished despite the best efforts of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his “red scares.” The great heroes of the war were the ordinary GIs, who fought so valiantly and with such a positive attitude toward the nation’s democratic ideals.
Following the McCarthy years, the pro-fascist right took to a new approach as key figures among the financial and corporate elites here found in the retrenched dictatorships in the Soviet Union and elsewhere allies to thwart the growing movement for democracy and rights for the working classes.
In the early 1970s, anti-war and pro-equality counter cultural entities saw their ideals quashed beneath the demand for a hedonistic assault on civility and justice. In that era, the Soviets discovered Trump, and wrote favorably of him as their chosen future U.S. president of choice as long ago as 1987. It was NBC which then popularized and groomed him for the job with its long-running TV show, The Apprentice.
Today, Joe Biden stands for the values of the FDR era, and Trump is the agent of fascism once again.