Local View: 'Deplorables' was used prematurely

From the column: "(It also) got lots of pushback, and no one then called candidate Trump and his supporters fascists. The latter denunciation turned out to be long overdue."

By John Freivalds

Published 10/06/2022

Duluth News Tribune

“Deplorables” was the term used in a speech delivered by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Sept. 9, 2016, at a campaign fundraising event. She used the word to describe half the supporters of her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump, saying, "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic." Clinton admitted in her 2017 book, “What Happened,” that using the term was one of the factors for her loss.

 

Yet, she turned out to be correct. Her denunciation was premature, got lots of pushback, and no one then called candidate Trump and his supporters fascists. The latter denunciation turned out to be long overdue.

Fast forward to the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. It was violent. Yet President Trump said the people who stormed the Capitol were patriots, a congressman from Mississippi suggested they were merely tourists, and an Alabama congressman said the incident was caused by Antifa supporters. But the January 6 Commission and the Department of Justice brought out that groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and QAnon led the storm on the Capitol. Now, many members of those groups have been convicted and are serving lengthy jail terms.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” President Joe Biden told Democratic donors in the Washington suburb of Rockville. Calling out those he labeled “extreme Republicans,” Biden said, “It’s not just Trump; it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Robert Paxton, professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University in New York, told Live Science that fascism is "a form of political practice distinctive to the 20th century that arouses popular enthusiasm by sophisticated propaganda techniques. … Fascism uses such propaganda to promote anti-liberalism, rejecting individual rights, civil liberties, free enterprise and democracy, anti-socialism, rejecting economic principles based on socialist frameworks (to the) exclusion of certain groups, often through violence that seeks to expand the nation's influence and power.”

Adolf Hitler disguised his fascism by calling it “national socialism” while Trump uses MAGA in basically the same way and calls it “neo populism.”

Filmmaker Ken Burns, in his documentary on Adolf Hitler said, ”Nazi analogues are dangerous, but they are increasingly relevant today.”

Americans, particularly MAGA supporters, are horrified that one of their own may be behaving like Hitler.

The all-American Minnesota hero Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927 and grew up in Little Falls, was truly admired by all and even had an airport terminal in Minneapolis named after him. But Lindbergh’s past caught up to him when advocates of changing the name of the terminal spoke out. It’s innocuously now called “Terminal One.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously wrote to his treasury secretary, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” Lindbergh’s opposition to the war against Nazi Germany was not an isolated event. It was part of an apparent white-supremacist and antisemitic whole. Lindbergh wrote in Reader’s Digest that Europe and America could “have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood.” And he supported taking to arms for the cause of “defending the white race against foreign invasion.” It is time to correct this oversight and honor someone who truly represents Minnesota’s diverse and inclusive values.

To his credit, Lindbergh sought to redeem himself later in life. But redemption seems not to be in Trump’s vocabulary — nor will any airport terminals be named after him.

John Freivalds of Wayzata, Minnesota, is the author of six books and is the honorary consul of Latvia in Minnesota. His website is jfapress.com. He wrote this for the News Tribune.