Unceasing resistance

One afternoon, a dozen years ago, as I was leaving the Hampden Park Co-op food store, I noticed a small photocopied poster stapled onto a telephone pole.

As a responsible middle-class citizen, I removed the defacement from its unauthorized and aesthetically unattractive location.

But I took the poster home with me, because it had a message. A hauntingly premonitory message, for here is the text of that small, smudged black-and-white bulletin:

“Fascism, n. 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.”

As we’ve witnessed the occupant of the White House relentlessly implementing a dictatorial regime of purges, plunder, and persecution over the past three months, let’s realize just exactly what we are confronted with. There is no institutional restraint, no check or balance, to restrain Predator Trump—the 21st-century counterpart of the depraved Roman emperor Caligula.

I don’t want to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution by passively surrendering to the bitterest irony imaginable—a fully-fledged fascist regime destroying the very institutions, political principles, cultural traditions, and moral ideals that constitute our treasured national heritage, as Abraham Lincoln expressed it: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The crisis that Lincoln faced in 1861 is the only comparable historical antecedent for what’s going on now; but today’s case is worse. When the rebellious Confederate states started the Civil War, the federal government remained under the control of a loyal President, Congress, courts, and sufficient military forces.

Today, the traitors are in charge. Donald Trump has used the Big Lie, reinforcing and being reinforced by the monopolistic, meretricious Murdochian Fawkes-flavored media and buttressed by a packed Supine Court and a truckload of Republican zombies in Congress and state governments, and further entrenched by the political prostitution of law enforcement agencies and military commands to substitute despotism for the rule of law in the United States.

We the people are the unwilling targets of this tyrant, and my question is, “What can we do about it?”

Remember the advice of Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present so we must think and act anew.”

Think what we know about fascism. It is the political creed of liars and bullies, who interpret every well-meant gesture of moderation or cooperation as a sign of weakness. The Musk-Trump axis of autocracy and their deluded supporters don’t share traditional values of “freedom, liberty and equality,” as the Braver Angels organization wishes they did.

We do know this: Appeasement won’t stop this gangster cult of bullies and political racketeers. Instead, it will only encourage and strengthen them. Our only hope is in unceasing resistance, which is why I’ve adopted a new motto: “Never shut up and never give up!”

It’s our patriotic duty to talk and to listen, and one-by-one try to induce some cognitive dissonance into the closed minds of the Russian Roulette-Republican rank-and-file. Don’t flinch from saying that in so many words.

Oliver Steinberg
St. Anthony Park