THE “ROMNEY REVEAL” AND DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, AS “ENEMY OF THE STATE”

FEBRUARY 6, 2020 – If you haven’t listened to Senator Romney’s speech on the floor of the Senate yesterday, you should.  Yesterday evening in his normally comedic monologue, Stephen Colbert, host of the Late Show, gave an impassioned tribute to the lone Republican Senator to vote to convict President Trump.

In voting against the Lock-step Party, Romney revealed notable political courage.  Though he’s not standing for re-election until 2024, he’s already feeling the blowback from Lock-step leaders.  Mr. Trump, Jr. labeled Romney as “forever bitter” and called for his ouster from the party. Mr. Trump, Sr. calls Romney “a Democratic asset.” FoxGoebbels star, Laura Ingraham lashed out at the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee as “the ultimate selfish, preening, self-centered politician.”

And those are just the opening salvos from the “Lock-steppers”—the Neo-Fascists.

“Neo-Fascists.”  Let’s call them what they are—what Romney’s courage revealed about today’s Republican Party.  Motivated by political fear but also by a heavy dose of political greed, people under the Trumpian spell have taken leave of their principles.  They have accepted, then embraced, and ultimately, leveraged to their personal advantage, the crass fascism of Donald Trump.

We who have opposed Trump rigorously ever since the birth of the “birther movement” against Obama, saw immediately his demagoguery. That demagoguery, in turn, is fueled not by any kind of political or ideological agenda but simply by an obsession with commercial branding (as distinguished from broadly meaningful business acumen).   FoxNews quickly capitalized. Based on the business model of capturing hearts and minds of the gullible in order to win advertising revenue, FoxNews morphed into FoxGoebbels. Trump’s branding obsession metastasized into political fascism.

That fascism produced a feedback loop among its consumers and commercial and political beneficiaries.  The key ingredient was as old as fascism itself: The Label.  In the age of German Nazism, the label was “Jew” and “Communist.”  In the current environment, it’s “Left.”  Anyone who is a skeptic, a resister, an opponent, is labeled a “leftie,” or worse.  Just now I checked foxnews.com, and sure enough the “left” label is in plain sight.  Without even entering a discussion of what “left” actually means (e.g. on the traditional political spectrum in Scandinavia, for example, it means something quite different from what it means on the traditional scale in the U.S.), Trumpian-FoxGoebbels fascism has converted the term into something viscerally negative.  Moreover, anyone and any opinion that challenges the Trumpian brand is, by definition, now “left”—that is, intrinsically evil, corrupt, and un-American.

Accordingly, my wife’s cousin and brothers, ardent Trumpians all; my friends and acquaintances who have fallen under the fascist spell; and all other Trumpians who might stumble upon my views, would be all too quick to label this post—and me—a veritable “leftie,” when in fact, with various policy exceptions, I am pretty damned centrist (by traditional American standards).

But then came Romney’s revealing speech. Call him a “leftie,” a “the ultimate selfish, preening, self-centered politician,” and you’ve now joined the Nazis in calling Dietrich Bonhoeffer an “enemy of the state.”

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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson