Biden is right about dangers MAGA Republicans pose

President Joe Biden last week offered some harsh words about those of the “extreme MAGA philosophy” currently hacking away at our democracy. He referred to it as semi-fascism and called it a threat to our democracy due to adherents’ refusal to accept the will of the people and embrace of political violence.

Good for him. Those who cherish democracy need to call out the proto-fascist tendencies now seizing the Trump-occupied GOP. Many Republican candidates reject the legitimate outcome of the last election and are making it easier to reject the will of the voters in the next. Violent rhetoric from party leaders targets the FBI, the Justice Department and the IRS. A systemic campaign of disinformation makes their supporters feel victimized by shadowy “elites.” These are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

The Republican response to Biden’s warning? “Despicable,” Republican National Committee spokesman Nathan Brand said. “Biden forced Americans out of their jobs …” (the economy has added nearly 10 million jobs during Biden’s presidency, after losing 2.9 million during Trump’s.) That’s emblematic of the GOP response generally when called out: victimhood and fabrication.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., offered a classic of the genre this week. Historian Sean Wilentz had condemned Rubio’s contributions to “a culture of fakery,” saying the senator’s “fake populism and anti-intellectualism … are necessary ingredients of an authoritarian takeover.” Rubio, writing in the Federalist, responded with more fakery and by portraying himself as the victim. Rubio said those warning about authoritarianism are peddling imaginary threats, adding, “If you’re looking for authoritarianism, look no further than what happened under the watch of Anthony Fauci and his allies in the elite establishment.”

The day after Rubio alleged that the true authoritarian threat is the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (a job Fauci has held since the Reagan administration), the senator joined Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a campaign event. There, DeSantis said this about Fauci: “I’m just sick of seeing him. … Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”

Dehumanizing a foe’s appearance and fantasizing about violence against him: Where have we seen this before?

A man recently was sentenced to prison for threats against Fauci It was one of countless violent threats against the scientist for, among other things, the “sweeping shutdown” during the pandemic, as Fox News’s Neil Cavuto put it to Fauci this week.

“I didn’t shut down anything,” Fauci replied. All he could do was give advice. Some governors followed it. DeSantis didn’t. Instead, he fueled conspiracy theories, dubious treatments, and hostility to masks and vaccines.

Since then, DeSantis has devoted himself to book banning, voter intimidation and restrictions on what schools can teach about race, history and sexuality — all while DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, bashes “elites.”

Such relentless attacks on facts, expertise, learning and voting, like fantasies of violence against a nefarious elite, are tools of the authoritarian.

At DeSantis’s alma mater this week, Yale President Peter Salovey opened the academic year with a speech on the current “assault on truth,” in which he quoted Hannah Arendt, revered philosopher of the pre-Trump right: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

This is where the MAGA Republicans are taking us. It’s past time to call it what it is.