This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

No, not that word.

“Fascism.”

President Joe Biden made a good point a few days ago when he said this, as reported by The Atlantic and other newspapers:

“We cannot, however, let our understandable fear of words such as fascism scare us out of talking about the reality staring us in the face.

“The GOP itself might not meet the full definition of a ‘fascist’ party—not yet, anyway — but it’s not a normal party, and its base is not an ordinary political movement.

“It is, instead, a melding of the remnants of a once-great party with an authoritarian, violent, seditionist personality cult bent on capturing and exercising power solely to benefit its own members and punish its imagined enemies among other Americans.

“Is that fascism?  For most people, it’s close enough.  A would-be strongman and a party of followers enveloped in racism, seized with nostalgia for an imagined glorious past, and drunk on mindless blood-and-soil nationalism all stinks of fascism.”

So, beyond reading the last paragraph, I decided to check the dictionary for an explicit definition of the term “fascism.”  Here is what I found:

“A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”

Sounds like Trump and his cronies.

At various times in the past, I have agreed that much of the Republican party has gone off the rails, especially in relation to its mostly conservative roots.

But I also have opined that Democrats often were not much better.  They always supported new and more aggressive government that peaked into every corner of everyday life and spent government money as if there was no tomorrow.  Socialism?  Perhaps, or at least the way there.

Wall Street Journal commentator Daniel Henninger put the two-party tension this way:

“But an unexpected opportunity has emerged.  Biden, by blurting out unscripted what he and many progressive Democrats believe — that much of the country is now semi-fascist — has opened a door to debating whether his presidency is semi-socialist.  And whether that’s where America wants to go.”

In view of this tension – autocracy vs. socialism — what I wish for is:

• Either a two-party system that functions effectively in this country for the good of the country from different, but not violent, perspectives.
• Or, a third party that arises to represent those, like me, who believe the best solutions to pressing public policy problems lie somewhere in the middle, not either the right or left extremes.

The very future of our country is at stake.