Biden drops the (semi) F-bomb — fascism — as GOP scurries like scared ants

The words “Philadelphia” and “long-suffering sports fan” are pretty synonymous, so you can imagine my shock and joy on Saturday when three of my teams — the Union, the Phillies, and Liverpool across the pond — won by their games by a combined score of 21-0. I mention this personal trivia only to highlight someone who arguably had an even better week: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the 46th president of the United States.

Biden’s bolder-than-expected move on reducing student loans — wiping out the entire college debts of 20 million Americans, some of whom wept at the news — capped a summer of executive and legislative achievements that went a long way toward dispelling some initial disappointments among core Democrats like young voters and African Americans. Aided by unusually savvy maneuvering on Capitol Hill, especially from oft-maligned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ Summer of Love included the first gun safety legislation of the 21st century and the largest assault ever on climate change, as well as measures to lower prescription drug costs and boost high-tech chip manufacturing. It’s maybe not FDR, but it ain’t chicken feed, either.

Getting stuff done is one reason why Biden’s approval rating has spiked upward to 44% — which might not sound awe-inspiring but is better than the comparable numbers for predecessors like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who would be reelected in landslides. It’s also helped to watch gas prices decline pretty much every day for two months, as that and record-high employment alleviate fears about a still-precarious economy.

In recent days, the energy and excitement among Democratic voters — who’ve been out-registering the GOP from coast-to-coast since the start of this summer — has felt palpable, but arguably the stark reversal of fortune for a party looking to defy the brutal history of midterm elections and keep control of the Senate and maybe even the House isn’t so much rooted in those policy wins. Instead, the party’s base is seeing something rarely seen since the dark night of Nov. 4, 1980.

The Democrats are finally throwing a punch, and the crowd is going wild.

It was a remarkable moment Thursday night when Biden — looking ebullient despite the grueling toll the job has imposed on our oldest president at 78 — hopped onto a stage in Rockville, Md., for a fund-raiser that doubled as a kickoff for the fall congressional campaigns. Little more than 24 hours after his college debt announcement had rocked U.S. politics, POTUS 46 could have calmly recited the accomplishments of his summer-to-remember, and walked off to generous applause. Instead, he rose to the true import of our fraught national moment, with a frankness and pugnaciousness that many Democrats have not seen in their lifetimes.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden told the party faithful, focusing on this summer’s flip side of Republicans embracing the paranoid style of anti-democracy, led by an ex-president under a growing cloud of criminality. “It’s not just [Donald] Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Biden’s (semi) F-bomb — taking the rhetoric against the GOP’s turn toward book banning, blatant homophobia, election denial, and straight-up authoritarianism to new but totally justifiable heights — was stunning, but it did not happen in isolation. Literally, as Biden was speaking, the official White House Twitter feed unleashed an unprecedented tweet storm, calling out for hypocrisy a slew of Republican lawmakers who’d criticized Biden’s college debt cancellation — yet had themselves benefited from the cancellation of COVID-era payroll loans.

Biden’s half-century of political survival and his long-game triumph has been built on his ability to change — the devout middle-class Catholic coming to champion gay marriage and abortion rights, for example — but his abandonment of kumbaya blather around bipartisanship for a blunt assessment of rising fascism in America might become his defining moment.

It’s easy to imagine an alternative universe — the one that existed just a few months ago, frankly — where a defensive Democratic establishment would have ignored the Republican attacks on college debt relief rather than responding, and when Biden would have played up his wins in getting some GOP support for his infrastructure and gun safety bills while ignoring the very real threats to the American Experiment.

Indeed, the Twitterati produced a few of the usual naysayers to tweet that, wasn’t it kind of unfair to equate the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans of the COVID-19 crisis — which were always intended to be forgiven under certain circumstances — with the more complex issues around student debt? And, some asked, isn’t fascism — with its echoes of many of the horrific abuses of Adolf Hitler and Nazis — over the top to describe what’s happening in America in 2022?

» READ MORE: It’s your rights, stupid. How Kansas showed Dems a roadmap to ‘22 victory.

To me — and more importantly, the many U.S. scholars who are experts on autocracy — the only potential quibble with Biden’s remarks is whether he needed to include the word “semi.” The hallmarks of the dominant, extremist strain of the Republican Party — a war on the free press, abusing state power to punish enemies, demonizing “out” groups like the transgender community, a fetish for the paramilitary — are textbook examples of fascism.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the New York University professor who’s an authority on Benito Mussolini and other strongmen, told CNN this weekend: “The semi part is interesting because today you don’t shut down elections, you hold elections and then you fix them, right? So that you — you know, you have the appearance of democracy like [Viktor] Orbán and Hungary calls it illiberal democracy. That’s the semi-fascist. The tactics they’re using are straight out of the playbook that started with Mussolini.”

Activists and a few lonely pundits have been urging Democrats to make the 2022 midterms a referendum on antidemocratic GOP positions — like library book bans or the muzzling of teachers — for months, but only now is that taking root. In addition to the more pointed messaging from Biden and other top Democrats, the shock of a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees overturning Roe v. Wade and a surprisingly effective House Jan. 6 investigation have woken up a once-sleepy electorate to the true political crisis.

An NBC News poll last week showed that, for the first time, a plurality of voters (21%) is ranking threats to democracy as the number-one issue, ahead of the economy. That goes hand in hand with data showing that voter registration has surged since the Supreme Court’s June 24 abortion ruling, especially among young people and women, and that Democrats are reaping the windfall.

And the bold new attitude is spreading to the states where semi-fascism has been flourishing. In Ron DeSantis’ Florida, newly minted Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist launched his uphill campaign with a dramatic vow to “defeat fascism,” and by picking a combative teachers’ union leader as his running mate, putting the war for free speech in the classroom front and center. In Greg Abbott’s Texas, hundreds rallied at the state capitol in Austin on Saturday with parents from the Uvalde massacre to demand gun control action.

Republicans, like most bullies who are finally confronted, are scurrying like ants from the new feistiness. In Arizona, the once-brash Senate nominee Blake Masters, who cradles a gun in his stark TV ads, panicked and dropped any mention of his once extreme antiabortion position from his website, joining other GOPers in abruptly backing away from the issue.

Meanwhile, conservatives who thought they were dealt a winning hand to attack overeducated Democratic elites over student debt relief instead looked out of touch on an issue that affects millions in the middle class. This was highlighted when Princeton and Harvard-educated Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said the move might help Democrats win over “that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, [who] now has loans, and can’t get a job.” Republicans can’t grasp that millions of those harmed by the college loan racket are the everyday voters they purport to be fighting for. They have been exposed.

That’s what was happening Thursday night when Biden stood in the ring and delivered a punishing left hook. The boldness to call out rising fascism may well be remembered as a knockout blow on behalf of a Democratic Party that is suddenly, unexpectedly, living a semi-charmed kind of life.

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