Trump Just Won Tom Friedman’s Vote
“What if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment.” – New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on “Meet the Press,” May 2010
“I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.’” – Donald Trump on Fox News, December 2023.
Leftists in the press have been falling over themselves lately to warn Americans that a second Trump term in the White House would usher in an era of dictatorship.
The Hill reports that “The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times each published stories referencing a ‘Trump dictatorship’ in recent days, arguing a new Trump presidency posed a threat to democracy.”
Alleged Republican Liz Cheney warned that the U.S. is “sleep-walking into dictatorship.”
Robert Kagan wrote “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
It’s almost as if the left has a central clearinghouse where they get their daily talking points.
Whatever the reason, the left must be genuinely worried about the polls showing Donald Trump beating Joe Biden to start resorting to hysterical rhetoric like this. And since his opponents have already accused him of being a Russian stooge, a liar, a racist, a tax cheat, a traitor, an authoritarian, and an insurrectionist, they need something stronger to capture the public’s attention.
But our question is this: Since when did the left start hating dictatorships?
It’s the left, after all, that has had a long and storied string of romances with actual dictators.
“Josef Stalin. Mao Zedong. Fidel Castro. Ruhollah Khomeini. What do many of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century have in common? Adoration and obfuscation by the top journalists of their time,” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin.
W.E.B. DuBois, who has been described as “the father of Pan-African Socialism,” was “so taken with the Nazi movement that he put swastikas on the cover of a magazine he edited, despite complaints from Jewish readers. Even after Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany in 1933, DuBois declared that the Nazi dictatorship was ‘absolutely necessary in order to get the state in order’,” wrote Thomas Sowell.
Jonah Goldberg in his book “Liberal Fascism” points out how “a host of liberal intellectuals and journalists were quite impressed with Mussolini’s ‘experiment’” and that “FDR’s defenders openly admitted their admiration of fascism.”
Leftists love Nicaragua when it’s a communist dictatorship, which it now is. Far-left former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio honeymooned in Cuba. Socialist Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
More recently, leftists rushed to Venezuela to pay homage to brutal dictator Huge Chavez.
Just last year, Robert Kaplan – author of “Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos” – wrote a column titled To Save Democracy, We Need a Few Good Dictators.
Sure, there’ve been right-wing dictators. But as we’ve written in this space many, many times, it’s the Democrats who are uniquely drawn to dictatorships because they, far more than conservatives, yearn to control everyone’s behavior. They, not conservatives, want a bigger, more powerful, more centralized government. They are the ones who eagerly used COVID as an excuse to strip Americans of their right to free speech, free assembly, and due process. Those are all the hallmarks of dictatorships.
It’s the Tom Friedmans of the world, not the Thomas Sowells, who yearn for America to be more like the communist dictatorship in China.
So, when the left tries to sow fear and anguish about a potential Trump “dictatorship,” what it is really saying is that it fears Trump, or any conservative president for that matter, will kill its dreams of imposing a left-wing dictatorship.
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