I’ve had a Hayek quote on my FR profile page for more than a decade that shows this has been a known thing for quite a long time:
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944
Our modern Left stopped being liberal in the classical sense a long time ago. It is the conservative who really believes in individual freedom, in current/modern terminology.
Dinesh D'Souza's latest book,
The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, traces the common roots of nazism, fascism, socialism, and communism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytu5Kz6Y0CQ
Nazism is fascism plus racism and eugenics. When drafting their racial legislation, the Nazis actually studied American Jim Crow laws on segregation and miscegenation. And on eugenics, they drew inspiration from Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
Fascism and communism are close cousins. But the two brands of socialism had a falling out over Hitler's drang nach Osten in search of Lebensraum. The Nazis' plan was to enslave the inferior Slavic peoples and colonize the East with the German master race. Hitler lost. The Soviet version of fascism survived amidst the Allied victory. Naturally, the surviving fascist wing needed to disassociate itself from the thoroughly discredited Nazi wing. So, they put out the Big Lie of D'Souza's book.
The big lie is that fascism is right-wing, that the GOP is the party of racism. The reality is, the Right wants to preserve the values of the Founders, whereas the Left wants to destroy America as founded and replace it with a fascist dictatorship. Historically, the Democrat Party was the party of slavery, racism, and the KKK.
Naturally today's Left needs to cover up its vile history. But the truth is, both sides in the Charlottesville riot are fascist.
The book is easy reading. D'Souza writes like he talks, only with footnotes. Devastating footnotes!