When it comes to fascism, I'm strongly in the Buellerist camp. That's Ferris Bueller, from the 1986 John Hughes teen comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," which I saw on the big screen the night before returning to Missouri Military Academy for senior year.
If you're thinking that Bueller inspired me to new levels of How Not to Get Caught Doing Exactly What I Want in a strict military-style environment, you're right. But Ferris also played a small part in informing my political thinking.
"-Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself," the high-school delinquent/philosopher once said.
"What about capitalism," you might ask, "don't you believe in that?"
Yes, but not as an ism.
"Capitalism" was coined by Karl Marx, one of history's most effective enemies of liberty and human decency, as a disparagement against human nature. Marx didn't like human beings much and meant to reshape us into what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would eventually call "the New Soviet Man."
What Marx called capitalism is really the absence of all the other isms. Working and trading and engaging in all those activities that Adam Smith described as "the invisible hand" that drives human progress — those are the things people naturally just do when they aren't constrained by somebody else's ism.
It doesn't matter much which label somebody's state-based ism goes by. Fascism, communism, socialism — they're barely differentiated flavors of statism, all of which leave a bad taste in the mouth and bruises on the body.
So let me show you a home video taken in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis on May 30, 2020. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had imposed one of the most authoritarian lockdowns in the nation — up to and including siccing National Guard soldiers on peaceful citizens.
Share widely: National guard and MPD sweeping our residential street. Shooting paint canisters at us on our own front porch. Yelling “light em up” #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #JusticeForGeorge #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/bW48imyt55
— Tanya Kerssen 🍉 (@tkerssen) May 31, 2020
The woman who shot, posted, and requested wide publicity for this video is hardly a conservative or MAGA type. Tanya Kerssen is a lefty with the inevitable pronouns in her bio and all the BLM/St. George Floyd-friendly hashtags attached to her video.
But she knew at least one dangerous ism when she saw it, in no small part because it came for her in the form of armed men in an armored vehicle as she was trying to enjoy a pleasant evening on her patio. Kerssen had the misfortune — almost certainly self-inflicted by her own vote — of living in Tim Walz's Minnesota.
Another lefty replied to Kersson on Twitter that night, "Them hollering to people to "GET INSIDE! NOW!" and shooting at them on their own property is something I've never seen. It's chilling as hell."
So what does Walz believe in? Fascism? Communism? Socialism?
Does it matter what ism we label it with? Walz believes in state power and in his ability to impose it.
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