Guess Who Was Called a 'Fascist,' Back in the Day
- Bigotry. Fascism. A threat to women’s rights. Alliances with foreign dictators. A president as entertainer, trampling labor and the environment.
"It sounds like the contemporary complaints against President Trump.
Actually, it’s a 1984 newspaper advertisement from “Scholars Against the Escalating Danger of the Far Right.”
“With
Ronald Reagan as its performing star in the White House, the Far Right is attempting to take over the Republican Party,” says the ad, published in the November 2, 1984, New York Times and signed by, among others, Carl Sagan, Linus Pauling, Corliss Lamont, Stephen Jay Gould, John Hope Franklin, Gloria Steinem, and Frances Fox Piven.
“Four more years of Reaganism...would see a
sweeping attack on civil liberties.
Four more years of Reaganism would also bring us
closer to a nuclear Holocaust.
Unlawful intervention in Central America threatens us with a
new Vietnam,” the ad claims.
It says Reagan sought “
to stifle women’s rights, including the right to legal abortion.”
The ad says that under Reagan, “The Civil Rights Commission is anti-civil rights, the NLRB is anti-labor, the EPA is anti-environment.
The Administration champions special privileges for the elite while
life for the working people, the poor and minorities deteriorates.”
“There is a scent of fascism in the air,” the ad pronounces, warning that a second Reagan term would unleash “more bigots and chauvinists.”...
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