Things change a person’s political perspective – age, experience, education – but something else that changes a political perspective is parenthood. Through most of my young adult life, I could be classified as a socially liberal and fiscally conservative person. I did listen to Limbaugh but spent late afternoon drivetime with NPR to get a different slant on the same topic on which Limbaugh had opined just a few hours previously. Now I no longer listen to either but choose to get the news from a wide variety of internet sources, including foreign newspapers. But fatherhood changed that political perspective and I’m now…well, I’m not entirely certain how to categorize it but it’s safe to say that I’m simply angry with what our political, corporate and financial sectors have become. But while I’m angry with them individually, their proto-fascist collusion in the past decade or more drives me to outrage for this legacy that’s being crafted for my – our – children.
What our nation is becoming is increasingly fascist. The exact definition of fascism is murky, dependent upon multiple factors. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt best described it thusly in his 1938 address to Congress on the curbing of monopolies:
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.