Fascists Hate When People Help The Vulnerable

The vision that our demagogue president, his corrupt government and business partners, and their ideologue defenders in the media represent is one where human value is wholly defined by wealth. With the rise of neoliberalism, the ideology that centers around glorifying the rich, a figure as brazenly arrogant and class-entitled as Trump was given an ideal political environment.

The nature of capitalism and class hierarchy enforces the attitudes that produced this crisis. Poor people are the ones who get bullied as kids. The homeless are regularly harassed or derided by passers-by. The quality of a person’s clothes, car, or house defines how they’re perceived by society. The pettiest class differences can tempt those higher up to taunt their supposed inferiors, making the highest classes most inclined toward this cruelty.

In right-wing politics and media outlets like Fox News, the adult equivalents of those bullies who beat up the poor kids are empowered to punch down on a mass scale. Joe Walsh, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’reilly, Jason Chaffetz, Rick Santelli, and these other wealthy privileged men have used their influence to mock, condescend to, and pour vitriol on the vulnerable. They make their bullying acceptable by saying they’re simply advocating for personal responsibility, defending “freedom,” and upholding tradition and order. Their attacks against the helpless and voiceless resemble the act of sneeringly curling up one’s hand to mock a man with palsy-something that their representative Donald Trump has done.

The billionaires that employ these fascist propagandists are tightening their hold. The intelligence agencies and the police, long under the control of corporations, surveil and harass those who voice dissent. In January of this year the state officially published the opinions it defines as treasonous, which include dissatisfaction with the American electoral process, belief in government corruption, and opposition to corporate power. The expansions of CIA and military authority, police militarization, persecution of whistleblowers, global war escalations, online censorship of dissidents, corporate takeovers, and attacks against religious and racial scapegoats that’s happened since then have been unprecedented in recent history. Their next plans are to make warrantless mass surveillance permanent by reauthorizing Title 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and to create a personal police agency for the president.

These fortifications of the power structure have enabled the Trump administration to pass almost openly kleptocratic laws this month. The corporate tax rate, already an almost meaningless technicality as corporations are allowed to evade paying most of their assigned taxes, is now 14 percent lower. Millionaires and billionaires will benefit from the new tax cuts more than everyone else combined. This will add onto how the top wealthiest 1 percent of the population now holds 40 percent of the wealth, and how corporations and the rich have hoarded between 20 and 31 trillion dollars in tax loophole accounts around the world.

Goldman Sachs executives now make up much of the White House leadership. Openly classist and corporatist groups like Turning Point USA pile praise on the Trump administration while joyously attacking the vulnerable. After signing the tax bill, the president happily said to his fellow plutocrats that “you just got a lot richer.” As the remaining social services are dismantled, our rights become less and less irrelevant, and corporate and military rule become more blunt, the reigning bullies are able to indulge their hatred and selfishness with abandon. “This coup gives the rich the license and the power to amass unimaginable wealth at our expense,” wrote Chris Hedges in his 2013 essay The Pathology Of The Rich White Family. “It permits the rich to inflict grinding poverty on growing circles of the population. Poverty is the worst of crimes — as George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘all the other crimes are virtues beside it.’”

This is why these fascists-and they’re specifically called fascists under the definitionof Mussolini’s corporate fascism-hate those who align themselves with the poor and vulnerable. There are no counterarguments to helping the needy besides ones based in sadism and greed. No amount of hoarding resources and power can surpass the spiritual and emotional fulfillment that it gives. It has an indestructible and eternal power that makes the oligarchs’ trillions of dollars, vast military resources, and propaganda apparatus tiny when put up against the smallest acts of compassion and integrity.

Those who’ve chosen to embrace it have always grown far more powerful than any dictator or demagogue. Teachers and thinkers like Mahatma Ghandi, Nikola Tesla, and countless others have often not held political office, actively rejected wealth, and refrained from putting their ideas into formal dogma, and still they’ve become the most influential figures in history. Martin Luther King Jr. was arguably the most powerful political leader in the country, and the movements he represented were far more powerful than the state at one point. You can see this kind of power now in the influence of Bernie Sanders, and in the strength of our social movements.

More and more of us are turning to this path as the bullies and tyrants expose themselves. We stand in opposition to everything the money changers represent, and that’s why they demonize and ridicule us. Our ideas have the power to destroy their ideology, disarm their military forces, and shut down their governmental and business centers. We are the antithesis to power as the elite define it.