"He looks and acts like a vulgar Nazi."

"Morning in America" was the mood when Reagan was shot in January 1981. Free Trade, secret wars in Central America and a take-no-prisoners approach to the Soviet Union was the decade's zeitgeist.

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

The 1980s were gritty because it was when we were first taught that greed was good. The economy was being decoupled from building better societies and transformed into the hedge fund winner-take-all approach we now think of as the ever thus way of doing things.

It was a decade when the war against modern trade unionism began to get serious about taking back the wages and benefits workers won after their blood, sweat, and tears defeated Nazism. It was a decade of discord that most of us who lived through just rode its wave and tried to adjust to the unsteady currents because we believed time moving forward always meant progress. It was an era, when the television program Life Styles of the Rich and Famous introduced us to Donald Trump for the first time. I probably would have paid no heed to Trump’s arrival into popular culture in the 1980s were it not for my mother’s observations about him. They had weight because she had been reared in Hitler’s Germany.

He looks and acts like a vulgar Nazi.

When John Hinckley Junior professed his love for Jodie Foster by trying to assassinate the President of the United States, I was 17 and in my final year of high school.

The headmaster of my school was a faux socialist who drove a Lada but understood the value of downtown Toronto real estate and made a fortune buying low and selling high. When he heard the news about Reagan being shot, he did a jig in the foyer of my school. In fairness, he did the same dance in May of that year when Pope John Paul was shot by a would-be assassin.

If a headmaster did something like that today. They'd be terminated on the spot because social media is a cruel mistress.

The differences between 1981 and now are more than skin deep. It was the start of a triumphant decade for western capitalism because the American Empire was ascendant. It could do all the evil it wanted without pushback. Its enemies were in decline and governed by out-of-touch geriatrics.

Forty-three years later, the tables have turned. Morning in America elapsed into darkness at noon because fascism eclipsed their society as well as all of the empire's allies. Democracy is the Humpty Dumpty of our age and we just can’t seem to put it back together again.

We don't know the motivation of the young man who attempted, over the weekend, to assassinate Donald Trump. But this new variant of the "shot heard round the world" did much to help secure Donald Trump's victory in the November Presidential Elections. It defanged the Democrat's correct argument that Trump is the epitome of political violence and made him the victim of it.

Cheating an assassin's bullet gives Trump the gravitas that Reagan was given after his brush with death by a deranged gunman. For the god-fearing, and America has as many of those as Cromwell's 17th century England- it is a sign of divine intervention. Republican strategists, pundits and the right-wing news media are now positioning Trump following his bullet brush with death- as not so much as MAGA's martyr but its mahatma, who must be re-elected so that America can fulfil its manifest destiny and become an eternal empire.

Weimar Germany had better odds of defeating fascism at the ballot box than Biden's Democrats have now after Trump dodge a killer’s bullet with as much alacrity as he evaded the draft and death in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Democrats neither have the fire in the belly to defeat him nor the moral gravitas to deserve the Presidency after enabling a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and demonising millions of Americans for opposing Israeli war crimes. You can't even argue that Biden represents the status quo because since the genocide started, he has kept moving the goalpost closer towards authoritarianism through suppression of free speech and the right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate.

Democrats aren't favoured to win as long as Biden remains because he's a President not only out of touch with voters but also with reality. Biden isn't a captain going down with his ship. He is a captain who won't order the lifeboats to be lowered for crew and passengers to ensure there are no witnesses to his hubris.

Neoliberalism, from its inception by Reagan in the 1980s, has evolved towards its ultimate end; authoritarian capitalism or what my dad's generation liked to call fascism.

The US presidential Election is a two-headed nickel coin toss because whether it is Trump or Biden- the 1% and their corporations win, and democracy loses.

"The horror, the horror," uttered by the character Kurtz in the novel Heart of Darkness and the film "Apocalypse Now" sums up the 2024 Presidential Election.

It's not pessimism that makes me write Totalitarianism is on our doorstep but realism. Since the plague of COVID-19 four years ago, political events have unfurled like a red carpet being rolled out at the gates of hell. The only grounds for optimism we can cling to is that people are protesting in the streets. And they won't go gently into that good night. But what's ahead will be bloody for ordinary people like you and me.

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts The above essay was from Harry Leslie Smith written in 2016.Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed which is always a struggle during this cost of living crisis era. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John