I don’t know about you but I’m pretty fucking sick of the F-Bomb, you know–Fascism–the ultimate liberal pejorative.

This warning only applies to Trump and his MAGA supporters, but Team Blue, led by Biden and Harris spent the last year aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, where the US provided unprecedented political, financial, legal, military and public relations support and cover to save Israel from losing its edge as a client state for the American empire. The Biden-Harris administration has provided billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, which has used them to turn Gaza into a wasteland of rubble, sewage and corpses with hardly any health care or aid. The State Department has yet to take action on almost 500 reports it’s received claiming Israel used American weapons to cause excessive civilian harm in Gaza, according to The Washington Post on Wednesday. Is that not fascism?

The Biden Administration has been arming, training and supporting actual fascists–The Azov Regiment–while stoking a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Is that not fascism?

There’s the Censorship/Industrial/Complex that’s arisen since Trump’s election in 2016 to halt the free exchange of controversial ideas. Is that not fascism?

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the Democratic Party’s embrace of the deep state nexus of alphabet intelligence agencies, where since the Russia-gate, what the spooks have long done abroad with Color Revolutions now returns to sender. Is that not fascism?

Since the 2016 election there has been a loud narrative that Donald Trump represents a unique and imminent threat to continued health and even existence of the Republic, and that removing Trump from power is the overwhelming priority of all good-faith political advocacy to the exclusion of everything else. The Democrats have never recovered from the disruption in 2016 of their dream that history was about to end and their idea of the liberal ethos would eternally prevail. What’s ironic is that liberals were so busy shrieking their rage and hatred at Trump that they failed to do anything about the issues that brought him to power.  

Hence the fascism label. Moreover, a great many of the liberals who spend their time denouncing Trump as a fascist most loudly, have started insisting that free speech and other constitutional guarantees of civil rights are bad things that should be gotten rid of. Is that not the stirrings of fascism?

I know this is controversial but hear me out. What if what liberals are describing as fascism isn’t? What exercises liberals and what propelled Trump to the White House was MAGA (Make America Great Again). Liberals are certain that this is straight up racism, sexism and ultimately fascism, but for many Americans it’s all about economics. For many, they’re losing and they don’t want to continue to lose.

Since Bill Clinton’s administration the US has hemorrhaged millions of good paying, unionized manufacturing jobs that provided Americans a middle-class lifestyle. Heterodox economist, Servaas Storm, explains the gritty details. “Labour markets were enthusiastically deregulated, with the explicit and generous approval of central banks and governments, to break the structural inflationary power of unions and to create a flexible reserve of surplus workers with no choice but to work in temporary low-wage jobs in what is now known as the ‘gig’ economy. Globalization and offshoring contributed to breaking the countervailing power of organized workers because they offered corporations (the threat of) an opt-out possibility that was not available to workers. Taken together, the change in macroeconomic policy regime produced a structurally low-inflation economy, based on ‘traumatized workers’ in precarious jobs, who could not plausibly fight for higher wages and more secure employment conditions, given their daily struggles and the systemic biases they are facing. The wellspring of cost-push inflation had been radically removed.

Stagnant wages and incomes for the 90% mean that income (and wealth) inequality rises and that aggregate household savings go up. Higher household savings reduce consumption demand, which holds up fixed business investment for the domestic market. In effect, aggregate demand growth stagnates, and pressures for demand-pull inflation evaporate. With inflation (and expected inflation) being low in structural terms, central banks lower the interest rate, in accordance with the recommendations based on the monetary policy rules proposed by establishment economics.

The low interest rates, in turn, fuel asset-price bubbles, creating wealth gains for the rich, and over-indebtedness for the bottom 90% of households, which use cheap credit to finance essential expenses on education, medical care and housing. This reinforces wealth and income inequalities, and pushes up asset prices even more, but this does not lead to higher economic growth and better jobs, because the richest 10% use their savings and wealth gains not for investments in the real economy, but to speculate in financial markets. The past two decades have made it abundantly clear that the gains made by the top 10% in financial markets do not trickle down to the real economy.”

It’s not like any of this was a mystery. Alan Greenspan gloated that American workers were too traumatized to ask for a raise. Greenspan called it the Traumatized Worker Syndrome, and said, the reason you’ve had this huge productivity gain without any wage increase is workers are afraid to go on strike, or even to complain about working conditions, because they’re just one paycheck away from homelessness. Since then, elite economists and their billionaire benefactors have celebrated the “new economy,” where there was “no alternative.”

Until Trump came along.

I know this remains controversial but what if MAGA is largely a yearning for economic security?

By the way, I’m not a Trump supporter. I find both parties to be odious, both flirting with fascism because of their billionaire backers attraction to fascism in order to protect their wealth. The case of Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, is illustrative. Anti-trust is one of the few bright spots of the Biden Administration and Khan has been relentless in opposing corporate concentration, earning her unending enmity from the billionaires who control the US economy. What’s particularly noteworthy is that billionaires from Team Blue, like Reid Hoffman, and billionaires from Team Red, like Elon Musk, together want her gone so they can continue pillaging. Talk about bi-partisanship.

Mussolini defined fascism as “the merger of state and corporate power.”

We are warned incessantly about the threat of Russia or China but the real danger comes from the oligarchs and corporations that have captured the US government. It matters not if a Republican or Democrat administration comes to power.

Anyway, don’t listen to me. Just vote harder.