Don't Stop Believin'

Steve Perry writing in the City Pages in 2004 on the perils of electing Bush-Cheney:

On November 2 we won't be voting for anything like the measure of change we deserve the chance to vote for. We will be casting our ballots in a referendum on whether we wish to pause and reconsider our march toward a homegrown American fascism.

Steve Perry writing for the so-called Minnesota Independent in 2008 on the perils of electing McCain-Palin:

Sarah Palin emerges from the most militaristic strand of contemporary evangelicalism; her brand of incipient theocracy excites the Christian base like nothing in living memory.

As I wrote back in September, if Steve Perry keeps making these wild predictions long enough (decades, centuries, millennia), one of these times he's bound to be right!

Breaking news, fans of a Republican dystopian future. Steve Perry has been monitoring the recent Tea Party protests by citizens concerned about government spending, control, and taxation and you'll never guess what he finds. From MinnPost:

Fear of falling on the scale that Americans are now experiencing inevitably spawns a widespread wish for order and security that has always raised the stock of fascism. Is there a Mussolini in the house?

That hip hop style name checking of the Italian fascist leader is a nice touch. If Steve Perry's assessment of the Tea Party movement is correct, I see it catching on at future rallies. Maybe some call and response between the emcee and the audience:

Where's Mussolini? Mussolini over here!
Where's Luigi Freddi? Luigi Freddi over here!
Where's Giuseppe Ungaretti? Giuseppe Ungaretti over here!

Or, just maybe, Steve Perry is wrong again about the fascism of American conservatives. Noted expert in the study of fascism, Jonah Goldberg, had this to say about the F word being applied to the current protests about Obama led government over reach:

How do I say this so people will understand? Fascism isn't a libertarian doctrine! It just isn't, never will be and it can't be cast as one. Anarchism, secessionism, extreme localism or rampant individualism may be bad, evil, wrong, stupid, selfish and all sorts of other things (though not by my lights). But they have nothing to do with a totalitarian vision of the state where individuals and institutions alike must march in step and take orders from the government.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

That last part sounds about right: a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty. That could be the motto of most of the Twin Cities' lefty media.