THE GRAY LADY HAS A FEVAH AND SHE NEEDS MORE COWBELL! COMMUNISM!

THE GRAY LADY HAS A FEVAH AND SHE NEEDS MORE COWBELL! COMMUNISM!

 Last week, Jonah Goldberg explored “The Times’ Postcard for Communism,” noting, “The New York Times has a lengthy, melancholy essay celebrating the role of Communism in American life by Vivian Gornick. It’s getting all of the predictable — and mostly deserved — blowback from conservatives.”

Yesterday, the Times ran a piece by Henry Scott Wallace, the grandson of Henry A. Wallace, who was FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1940, then his vice president from ’41 through ’45, and succeeded by Harry Truman in the last year of FDR’s life, for fear that Wallace was too far to the left, even for the Roosevelt administration. To make a long story short, that fear proved rather spot-on. (Pro tip: when Oliver Stone is lionizing your career, you may have lost the thread somewhere.)

The essay by Wallace’s grandson is titled “American Fascism, in 1944 and Today,” in which he claims that ol’ granddad predicted the rise of Trump:

Seventy-three years ago, The New York Times asked the sitting vice president to write an article about whether there are fascists in America, and what they’re up to.

It was an alarming question. And the vice president took it quite seriously. His article, “The Danger of American Fascism,” described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears, but is really interested only in protecting his own wealth and privilege.

That vice president was my grandfather, Henry A. Wallace. And in my view, he predicted President Trump.

To be clear, I don’t think the precise term “fascism” — as in Mussolini and Hitler — is fairly applied to Mr. Trump. Mussolini was a proponent of “corporatism,” defined by some as “a merger of state and corporate power.” And through that lens, using that term, my grandfather’s warning looks prescient.

OK, now do Obama’s brand of corporatism, including how Obamacare transformed the insurance industry into public utilities, and Solyndra, Fisker Automotive, and other “green” sinkholes, financial beneficiaries of the previous administration’s disastrous brand of venture socialism.  Or heck, corporatism under FDR himself.

Speaking of which, since when does the New York Times run pieces condemning “a merger of state and corporate power”?? (Answer: when the wrong people are running the state. Just think of the Times as the house organ for the Democrat party, and it all makes sense.)

Also missing from Wallace’s piece, FDR’s 1944 State of the Union address, in which he slanderously dubbed Calvin Coolidge’s laissez-faire administration fascism, bellowing “If history were to repeat itself, and we were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”

As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Corporatism, an ideology essential to the functioning of the modern left, is running a close second.

84Posted at 12:59 pm by Ed Driscoll   

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