The Steady Drip, Drip, Drip of American Fascism
How the ‘normalization’ of paranoia, rage, and social atrocities is turning us into heartless fascists
I remember the time, back in the 80s, when I first started hearing the conservative trope that Social Security is an (undeserved) ‘entitlement program.’ Even then, before the rise of right-wing ‘win at any cost’ politics, I knew there was something dangerously wrong with that idea.
After all, Americans pay into Social Security all their working lives — specifically so they’ll have post-retirement income to help them out during their later years. So why was it being denigrated as an ‘entitlement’ program?
Similarly, around that time Reagan and many Republicans began pushing the idea that the Federal government is ‘the enemy.’ Reagan famously half-joked that “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” By the mid-80s Grover Norquist and other anti-tax Republicans had started a movement with the ultimate goal, as he later described it, of reducing the Federal government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Not exactly a positive or peaceful message, is it?
