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An Educated Fascist Is Still a Fascist [1]

['Greg Dworkin', 'Belinda Ridgewood', 'Sabrina Haake', 'Dan K', 'Bill In Portland Maine']

Date: 2026-05-18  

Hurray!

Some sense in Washington, D.C.! The Senate’s parliamentarian said today that a billion dollars in funding for Trump’s Versailles can’t be accomplished under reconciliation, and so can’t win passage by a simple majority. Finally! Some common sense, backed by rules, tradition and well-established norms — what could be more straightforward? Hell, what could be more REPUBLICAN?

But what was the 21st century Republican’s reply..?

““Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process,” Ryan Wrasse, a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) posted on social media in response to the parliamentarian’s ruling.”

In other words, “Game the system.”

Republican strategy has become ruthlessly clinical, and it is all about maintaining and expanding privilege. The way you accomplish this is by taking every advantage that comes your way while looking for ways to create new advantage ([coff!] Gerrymander!). Since they pretty much emptied out the mine of purely emotional (White; Christian; racist) grievance in the 60s and 70s, they re-trenched, re-educated themselves, and then began to re-educate the American public.

The Federalist Society is all about this — “Originalism” and “Major Questions Doctrine” are not part of our foundational documents — they are the product of right wing think tanks, employing the tactics of that great political theorist and tactician, Rush Limbaugh, who regularly said something like, “One and one is two, right? And two and two is five, right? So therefore…” This is what happens when you teach rhetoric to hateful hairless apes. And this is also where they hoisted us on our own petard, and you know how much they love to own the Libs.

Once I went from “politically aware” to “politically active,” I nearly immediately recognized Liberals’ Achilles heel — they have a cult-like faith in education. “If only we could educate them about how they are voting against their own best interests…” was the regular refrain through the early part of this century. First of all, as a teacher and the son of a professor, I’m not entirely sure that you can “teach” anyone anything — they can learn, but teaching is a fraught and uncertain activity. Weak-minded Liberals never really ask themselves this question (many of them are very personally invested in education, either professionally or emotionally), and cold-blooded Fascists have always scorned education (and still do) as anything other than a means to an end. From trade school to a PhD at Oxford, all a Republican wants to know is if this is going to get you a job. They are Sophists, but it isn’t academic for them — they are playing for keeps, or in other words, education is now about life and death for Republicans.

Among other things, The Big Horrible Bill changed rules for student loans that make it much, MUCH more difficult for poor people to take out a big enough college loan to actually complete a four year program. Now, why would the people who represent the 1%, who are getting rid of all the immigrants in the nation, and whose entire political project is based on theft, lies and exploitation want to make it harder for poor people to become educated? You recognize that — that’s a rhetorical question — and I trust Daily Kos readers to understand and come to the correct conclusions. Right wing sophists, though, wouldn’t leave any opening for you to come to your own conclusion — they would box you in with rhetoric, leaving the only “reasonable” conclusion being their preferred conclusion.

This is an uncomfortable and unfortunate part of our current fix — Liberals are, indeed, employed throughout the Academy and education, and have a tendency to have very optimistic feelings about education. Before I go on, I’d like to point out the language of that sentence — I said “feelings about education,” not “thoughts about education.” That’s what I meant, too — educated people are every bit as able as uneducated people to run on emotion without realizing it — but very educated people are stiffly uncomfortable with this reality, and spend lots of energy denying this in themselves. They are mistaken, but their resistance reads as arrogance, which Sophists are only too happy to exploit. Because for the right wing, remember? They’re only interested in education as a means to an end — “rhetoric” for them is purely a tool for getting what you want. In politics and other power professions, including the law, the power lies in the definitions — once you define the issue in your preferred way, the rhetoric flows irresistibly. The legal profession at least has the grace to recognize this, and we have the competing ideas of “the word of the law” and “the spirit of the law,” but right wing politicians have no such compunction. The word of the law IS the law, and they defined it, so you must do as they say. Unless of course you’re on their side, and then they’ll create some loophole, or pardon you as necessary, because the word of the law places no restrictions on the President’s power to pardon. It is only the grace of previous presidents that kept us from the current pardonpalooza approach to building political influence.

I’m very sorry to say that a smart and principled Liberal hero, George Lakoff, inadvertently contributed to this reality with his modern political Bible, “Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate!” That works fine, if “values” is part of the package, but once you dispense with that small inconvenience you are left with an excellent tool for swaying opinion in whatever direction you choose. Reframing becomes redefining becomes a lie with an impressive pedigree. Look at our current corrupt mid-decade redistricting project. It is many things, but is especially shameless, whose definition is fuzzy, according to the Sophists. For the rest of us it’s like pornography — we know it when we feel it. However, you can’t count on sociopaths and narcissists to feel shame, but you can absolutely count on them to use every tool in their arsenal to continue their power-seeking delusions.

I agree with Martin Luther King that the arc of history bends toward justice, but it is not an even or unbroken curve. I also still believe very strongly in education, but as the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a bucket. I’m old and tired now, and am out of the political game except as an observer and commentator, but I would urge principled politicians to resume using terminology like, “the smell test,” as in, “That doesn’t pass the smell test.” In body/mind/spirit terms, the mind is counter balanced by the body and the spirit. In the current era, right wing politics is as entangled with spiritual fraud as with intellectual grift, but the body is the body — we all have one, and it has rules. So Trump can bleat all he wants about Iran’s nuclear capability, but when we see gas and grocery prices going up with no sign of coming down we have a visceral (that is, physical) response. When we think of our grandchildren paying the national debt, same deal — hits you in the gut. Same with the draft; women’s bodily autonomy; voting rights; even education (AI in the classroom makes me want to vomit and run naked and screaming through the pep rally).

At a minimum, recognize the tactic: a person in a position of influence changes a definition, or repeats the same cockeyed thing on enough platforms with enough other people saying the same thing to gradually change the understanding of the original meaning, and you’re well on your way to “Love is Hate,” and “War is Peace.” Not an original thought, perhaps, but one that is playing out in a more directed, vulgar and alarming way than many of us could have imagined.

Rhetoric is not the enemy, but neither is education the savior. If it walks like a Fascist and talks like a Fascist and stinks like a Fascist, guess what?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/18/800040723/community/an-educated-fascist-is-still-a-fascist/

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