The problem is that until you said :
Then your sentences were making sense.
There's nothing to suggest either of them wanted to be authoritarian and nothing to suggest Obama is a communist, nor Bush a fascist.
So who cares if you have a BA in Politics at Yale, a Masters in PS at Harvard and doing your phd at Princeton. What you're saying doesn't make sense.
Perhaps you just don't understand. Just to claim that what I said doesn't make sense does not mean it isn't true.
I am confident in my understanding of these terms because I studied and wrote many papers about them. Some person making a baseless ad hominem attack on me is not going to make me either understand their perspective nor make me doubt my own. A baseless attack is met with an equally useless response. I'm plenty willing to discuss these subjects, but a flippant response with no backing is neither constructive nor worthwhile to the conversation. It is only slightly irritating to me. And I would hope that we can be pleasant and respectful enough to each other that your goal would not be simply to get under my skin.
Allow me to strengthen my claim. Obama is seeking to create social justice through welfare programs. While campaigning ("change") he said he would seek a "redistribution of wealth" and said that the free market had proven to be a failure. He has sought for the expansion of the credit system. He encouraged and authorized over $700 billion in bailout programs for "too big to fail" businesses (an unholy union between the private sector and government), increasing the federal budget by over $1 trillion. He sought the establishment of universal healthcare. He wants to raise taxes, with the burden falling primarily on the wealthy. By 2016, Obama will have increased government debt by a record $4.9 trillion. From Wikipedia, "communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, stateless and revolutionary socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production." Do his goals not indicate that many of this is among his aim?
George Bush also authorized over $700 billion in bailouts before leaving office. Bush also created a Medicare entitlement that cost over $800 billion. Education spending was increased by nearly 60% and he helped pass the No Child Left Behind act. He sought to expand the role of the United States in foreign affairs. He provided large tax cuts for corporate interest. He presided over an increased public debt of what was a record $2.5 trillion. He increased the role of government in U.S. citizens' daily routines by advocating for the Patriot Act, allowing government to spy on its own citizens without a warrant - in the name of increased security, at the cost of privacy (TWA at the airport does this on a more localized level as well). From Wikipedia, "Fascism supports a socially united, collective national society…Fascists advocate: a state-directed, regulated economy that is dedicated to the nation; the use and primacy of regulated private property and private enterprise contingent upon service to the nation or state; the use of state enterprise where private enterprise is failing or is inefficient". Wiki even talks about fascists advocating war to help create national identity (not quoted because this is not a focus of my comparison). Does this not sound consistent?
Both of these ideologies share one thing in common: authoritarianism. Again, from Wikipedia (the day Wiki was blacked out was a scary day for me), "Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy. In politics, an authoritarian government is one in which political authority is concentrated in a small group of politicians…Authoritarianism and democracy are not fundamentally opposed to one another, it is thus perfectly possible for democracies to possess strong authoritarian elements, for both feature a form of submission to authority." Is not facilitating a stronger central government also creating a more authoritarian state?
Just to have a communist in office does not make the U.S. a communist country. Just to have a fascist as president does not make the U.S. a fascist country. We have checks and balances to prevent that from happening (and an incrementalism policy-making process, as I mentioned in an early post). But you cannot deny that the last two president's have spent more, by a considerable margin, than any other president before them. That is a fact. They share in common a desire to consolidate central powers. We have not seen the feds exercise as much power in at least three decades, and there certainly hasn't been as rapid change in the role of government in the day to day lives of Americans since the Great Depression.
This is why I went on my political rant about the left-right spectrum. People are hesitant to even consider looking at other ideologies and seeing how they resemble things that are happening in the world. I would say Obama and Bush's history and beliefs make a stronger case to what political affiliation they have than their party tickets. There can be moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, right? Well who's to say there can be such a thing as a moderate fascist, communist, libertarian, socialist? Does fascism even fit on the right-left spectrum? Wiki again, "there is a running dispute among scholars about where along the left/right spectrum that fascism resides." We aren't even allowed to think about it, because we all know Bush was far right, right? Well, there is a reason he was referred to as a "neo-con", and it's not because he had more extreme economic views. In fact, he was far more "moderate" than the last couple Republicans that preceded him. It had to do with his spending habits and belief in a strong central government. That's how I see it at least.