As liberal pundits clutch their pearls over “fascism” it’s imperative to trace the lineage because it wasn’t just Trump who brought us here. Liberals bear much of the blame.

Liberals were all in on the national security state’s attack on the “left” during the Cold War and after it ended became the biggest cheerleaders for neoliberalism with it’s emphasis on markets and destruction of labor. The Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is a US empire party. The Democrat elite simply want a slightly more polite and humanitarian empire, but all of them support war and endless conflict. 

While liberals wail about fascism here in the homeland they are more than happy to utilize it as a proxy to attack Russia, as their fervent support for the Ukraine Nazis demonstrates. Likewise, liberals like Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, eagerly deployed Islamic fascists to affect regime change in Syria.

Then there’s the unwavering support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The live streamed slaughter is the defining moral issue of our time. More bombs have been dropped on Gaza than were dropped on Dresden and Hamburg, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli’s have transformed Gaza from a concentration camp into an extermination camp. If the threat of Trumpian fascism was so dire then why did Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris refuse to call for an end to the carnage?

On the economic front, liberals celebrated globalization and the offshoring of American industrial might, which resulted in the decimation of millions of blue-collar jobs leading to the decline of the middle-class and conditions ripe for a former reality TV host. Democrats embraced the professional/managerial/class, with identity politics as a replacement after they abandoned labor unions, the working class, and the poor.

And that brings up an uncomfortable question. Democrats must be a really shitty opposition party for Trump to win not once but twice. Or was it all an act by the Dems? I’ve screamed it to the clouds but there is a huge opportunity for a political party that makes Americans lives better instead of steadily worse. It’s not rocket science here. Yet somehow “Trumpian fascism” just magically appeared out of the blue.

Furthermore, a historical examination of German and Italian fascism from the 1920’s and 1930’s points to the reasons for it, as populations beat down by liberal subservience to capital turn to a populist strongman for relief.

Sound familiar?

Of course the Trump Administration is fascist, and appears headed in an even more dystopian direction with Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” that directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.” NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.”

One exception to this crackdown on alleged criminal conspiracies is the prosecution of corporate criminals, which fell to record lows under Biden and are set to fall farther under Trump. All of this is wholly unsurprising, as Trump’s national security memorandum simply accelerates the bipartisan consensus for a brave new world that is anti-worker, pro-Silicon Valley and Wall Street, Zionist and corrupt.

I’ve argued before that Trumpism’s father was Lewis Powell–he of the infamous Powell Memo–but certainly the Democrats, chiefly Bill Clinton, midwifed the baby. The mother was Ayn Rand–tutored by Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek and Margaret Thatcher.

It was a lot like Rosemary’s Baby.