Jonathan Rauch, in a piece posted this morning in The Atlantic, finally — finally! — has forced the mainstream media to say that, yes, Donald Trump is a fascist.
I regret that this piece is behind a paywall, because it’s something that everyone should read. And probably everyone in Washington will read it. If you have a subscription to Apple News, The Atlantic is included.
Here I must hasten to add that Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. We go back forty years and have always remained in touch. In fact he’ll be a visitor at the abbey in early March when he is in North Carolina for a speaking enagagement in Charlotte. My micro press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two older books by Jonathan that had gone out of print — Denial and The Outnation.
Jonathan is considerably more conservative than I am. We’ve had our tense moments in political discussions, but that has never impaired our friendship. I will admit that I recently said to Ken that Jonathan is always right — it’s just that he’s always ten to twenty years behind. Conservatism does that to people. (Jonathan has described himself as center right.) Jonathan and I have the same journalistic DNA. We worked for the same newspaper many years ago, the Winston-Salem Journal. Jonathan was one of the many ivy league graduates who flocked to the Journal for their first jobs after the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize. I was a whippersnapper copy editor and soon saw that Jonathan wrote perfect copy that needed no editing. He is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and is the author of ten books.
His piece should get a great deal of traction, partly because of The Atlantic‘s reputation, and partly because everyone in Washington knows who Jonathan is, and they know that he is no leftist.
I hope Americans are now ready to go into full resistance mode, horrified and energized by Trump’s recent outrages, from Greenland to Davos to Minneapolis. Jonathan’s piece, I hope, will increase the confidence of Democrats in Washington and shame those Republicans in Congress who are still capable of shame. In her Substack dispatch this morning, Heather Cox Richardson quotes G. Elliott Morris, who pointed out that it would take only 23 Republicans to get Trump out of the White House — three in the House and twenty in the Senate. It seems pretty obvious that anyone who has the power to actually stop a fascist president, but doesn’t, is also a fascist.