Take a gander at the newest symbol of the Bernie Sanders movement.
Does it remind you anything, perhaps?
This monstrosity has been designed by Shepherd Fairey, the man behind the iconic Obama HOPE poster from 2008 that looked similarly dictatorial:
That poster was reminiscent of this one:
Meanwhile, in the Hillary campaign, they’ve been trotting out similarly historically evocative imagery of the Great Woman gazing into the future:
Which looks a lot like this image:
On the other side of the aisle, there are no such images. Donald Trump, for all his totalitarian musings, trots out hats that look like they sprang directly from a family reunion barbecue in 1987:
Fans of Ted Cruz are more into the self-deprecating, street art feel:
Meanwhile, Jeb!’s campaign is just a big dropping exclamation point.
All of which is to say that the left’s comfort level with fascistic imagery is certainly high. FDR trotted out similar imagery during the Hitler era in the United States, marking companies that complied with federal mandates with the blue eagle:
Leftists in the United States have always been comfortable with such imagery. That’s because they’ve never been uncomfortable with the idea of a Great Man dictating policy. Woodrow Wilson said in 1906, “The president is at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit….no single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him.” In 1933, Anne O’Hare McCormick of The New York Times wrote of FDR’s Washington D.C. that it was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan…America today literally asks for orders.” Even the architecture of the period, reflected in today’s Washington, D.C., looks a lot like the architecture that Mussolini installed in Italy.
Nothing has changed in the Democratic Party. The only question is whether Trotsky or Lenin takes over.
On the right, the imagery of Trump adorning worship walls hasn’t yet been popularized. But it’s certainly easier to imagine such imagery than that of Cruz or Rubio.
America was invented in opposition to worship of political figures. But the human desire for a Big Man to fix everything seems to be overwhelming us at long last. Its imagery is everywhere. All you have to do is open your eyes.