Are we all afraid of something these days?

How’s that Washington totalitarianism working for you?

Is it putting a little squeeze on your lifestyle? Are you becoming less tolerant of people who appear different from you? Are you feeling threatened? Do you dream of orange hair and raincoats that say: “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”

Have you circulated that promised $4,000 federal-tax windfall back into the economy? Has any of it even materialized in your paycheck? Fear not, because the congressional Republican majority is now openly admitting that they’ll attempt to reduce Medicare and Social Security to pay for it, because — shock of shocks — the national deficit is rising in proportion to Washington’s richfolks’ giveaway.

Have you inserted the term “fake news” into your daily language? Where do you draw that line? When you read a local newspaper story about a drunken driver in a fatal crash? When the president says it’s nothing unusual to separate foreign-born children from their parents?

I mean, it’s not kids who are being put into those concentration camps, in shuttered Walmarts, right? It’s not pension that Republican candidates for governor want to downsize in the name of “fiscal responsibility,” right? So what do you care?

And those unionized state employees: What selfish people to hang tight to their high pay and platinum-plated benefits while dragging down the rest of us with an unfunded pension liability pushing $60 billion.

Okay, sarcasm becomes me.

Generations of Republican and Democratic governors and legislatures, prior to Dan Malloy’s 2011 election, failed to invest enough in the pension plans. Virtually every one of the five Republican hopefuls for governor supports blowing up the current contracts for the 43,000 unionized state employees. If they win the Senate and House, look for legislation, via ALEC the conservative political action committee, to make Connecticut a right-towork state.

I mean, who cares about the state employees? Well, historically, it’s the fights of organized labor that made for better pay and benefits for the rest of us; everything from the minimum wage, to the now-distant memory of private-sector pensions.

About 250 people gathered Friday in a unionized Hartford hotel for the 12th biennial political convention of the 220,000-member Connecticut AFLCIO. There was some organized-labor planning for the fall elections, with grassroots, door-knocking encouragement. There was some screening of potential candidates for statewide office and the General Assembly, followed by a few endorsements.

It was a home game for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, who took a 20-minute star turn in the morning following a generous introduction from Lori Pelletier, the current president of the AFL-CIO. “This was a fraud from the minute they introduced it,” Murphy said of the Trumpian tax changes. “They are intending to blow up the deficit, so in a year or two from now they can say we have these giant deficits. We can’t stop reminding people about these deficits.”

Well, that’s bound to become a mantra of the Democratic campaigns, if the party decides to stop sliding into the abyss of self-destruction, as Democrats tend to do.

Are you feeling threatened? Do you dream of orange hair and raincoats that say: ‘I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?’

When I cover these events, I tend to gravitate to John Olsen, the former fire-breathing president of the state AFL-CIO who is a member of the Democratic National Committee and the former Democratic state chairman. I basically asked him why Connecticut Democrats are so moribund at a time when Republicans around the country are surging, with shades of totalitarianism and the cult of Trump.

“If you’re not supporting a union, you’re really not supporting a standard,” he said, launching into a history of organizing back more than 100 years ago. “What happened was they brought the standard of living up. You look at the rise of union membership, right up until the ’60s we were at about 35 percent, which was just private sector. There really wasn’t a public-sector union at that point. As the unions declined, so did the wages for Americans. Nobody would have had health care if it wasn’t for the unions negotiating it. Pensions. Who’s got a pension?”

Olsen’s worried about Trump and his enablers in Congress eliminating the federal Department of Labor, and driving other wedges.

“Democrats have to really be concerned,” he said. “This is about jobs and wages and conditions and benefits. Because if you go talk to everybody when they get up in the morning that’s what they care about. By the time they go home, they’re afraid of who’s going to attack them, who’s going to shoot them, who’s going to take their gun away. The American people are, like... they’re afraid. I’m afraid of fascism. I’ll fight against fascism.”