The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?

[marmar]

The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?
Welcome to upside-down America: David Brooks calls for revolution while Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom grovel

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published April 20, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) This is pretty much it, I would say: This is the moment we have long feared — or, from another point of view, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. If you think you know what I mean by “this” being “it,” you’re probably right. This is the moment to bust out clichés and make them sound authentic, the moment for “Which side are you on?” or “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” to stop sounding like antique rhetoric out of earnest postwar melodrama.

Of course the moment has been more of a long, drawn-out process, and the premise that “it” can’t happen here has been slowly and gradually degraded and negated, somewhat the way Hannibal Lecter (“the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” as President Trump likes to say) keeps you alive and doped up on happy pills while he eats your brain. Still, though: Wasn’t there something like a moment for you? There certainly was for me.

....(snip)....

Yeah, I’m talking, for instance, about New York Times columnist David Brooks calling for mass action against the Trump regime and quoting the “Communist Manifesto,” pretty much non-ironically. I don’t think anyone had that on their mainstream-media bingo card. I’m also talking about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer literally hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office, and about California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s dramatic heel turn, which this week included describing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, as the “distraction of the day” compared to truly important things like whether Trump’s tariff policy is “accountable to the markets.”

....(snip)....

When we see Democrats like Newsom and Whitmer — and Amy Klobuchar and John Fetterman and Chuck Schumer, the list goes on — triangulating themselves into oblivion and semi-genuflecting before the Trump throne at exactly the moment when the fascist regime has made its intentions clear and the American people and the world are beginning to push back, we see people who have sucked on the crack-pipe of realpolitik for so long that, like all addicts, they have lost touch with everyday morality. They believe in nothing except political survival, and that, they believe, depends on the discount-store, focus-group version of voter psychology sold to them by expensive consultants. Any principles beyond those have atrophied into invisibility. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/20/the-fascist-moment-is-here-have-mainstream-liberals-heard-the-alarm/

[Autumn]

1. I think some are more interested in protecting the status quo instead of our lives and

our Democracy.

[Blues Heron]

2. That Brooks thing was wild

[Kid Berwyn]

3. First grovel.

Then shovel.

[choie]

4. Most of us on DU hard the alarm a while ago

Democratic leaders have been lagging behind, big time.

[Skittles]

5. damn straight we did