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Michael, I said we had been warned about fascism every four years, and you responded only that you didn't warm us about fascism. I take you on your word and congratulate you for your relative level-headedness. But I still heard it. Still, in your relative level-headedness, three of the elections during which you acknowledge to have raised this cry ended in a triumph for what you called the fascists. Reagan won in 1984, Bush in 2004, and Trump in 2016. Right? All deplorable and to be fought as hard and effectively as we can. But not fascism. We saw more political repression at other points in our lives and the racial demagoguery is especially discouraging, but let's not delude ourselves about Trump's predecessors. Which gets us back to the question of our effectiveness. You assert that this requires supporting whoever the Democrats use to keep Sanders or Warren from the nomination, but you can't really seperate Reagan's successes from Democratic subservience to his nonsensical trickle down creed, or even as he utterly ignored the law in Iran -Contra. And Dubya's dangerous war-mongering was so dangerous first and foremost because he faced virtually no opposition from the other party. Democrats happily circulated through the news shows, pimping his WMD lies, spreading the paranoia about germ warfare, funding his invasions, and building whole new dimensions of the surveillance state in his service. And before he ran for president as a Republican, Trump spent more time as a Democrat than as a Republican. Yes, Trump is different and the most detestable president in our lifetime. But we got him, in large part, by not building a real opposition. Easier to pass the buck to the Democrats, even though we know what they have done ... and have no basis for thinking they will do otherwise. It is precisely because the stakes are so high that we have to start trying something different. Finding something that will work. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
