[optimistically_conservative]

It seems that the op/ed left often writes on similar themes at the same time. Not that might be a VLWC out there, but I thought I would post this in response to a few that have been posted here recently:

GOP ignites liberal flame

Anger Management Liberal anger is justified, but it won't win the election.

Temperament Wars (Dems are nice, GOP is mean)

[jimkress]

Great article! Thanks for posting.

[rdb3]

Not bad. Archived.

[gcruse]

If an opponent is inherently evil ideologically imbedded, then one has no reason
to expect that rational discussion and debate would produce any useful result.

Disagreeing with someone doesn't necessarily make either one of us evil.
And many things besides evil are inherent and incapable of change.

[Gabz]

PING

It may be a bit long - but it is DEFINITELY a MUST read!!!!!!

Many things we have been saying and doing for years.

[RichardMoore]

National Socialism is control of business by government. What we have today is big government and big big business working hand in hand. They conspire to move jobs to cheap labor markets. This is a new form of Fascism.

[The Electrician]

Wow... Well said... I've bookmarked it for future reference.

[Eva]

One statement that the author made that was misleading is that Mussolini offered the Italians the same promises that Roosevelt was making here, in the US. Roosevelt studied Musolini's reforms, not the other way around.

Ann Coulter discusses in her new book that the way Reagan beat communism was to reignite the fire of religious morality and God given freedom in the United States. This is what the left fear most of all because you cannot subjugate a people who answer to a higher power than the state.

[Great Dane]

For later reading.......... thanks.

[LiteKeeper]

INTSUM

[StriperSniper]

Much of modern American liberalism is fascism and always has been. We ought to start calling it that.

Be it dim's fascism or pubbie fascism, it is just a matter of degree.

[Carry_Okie]

Here is a little quote written in 1933 from Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell:

In reality, it was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain. Later, when the Right Wing forces were in full control, the Communists showed themselves willing to go a great deal further than the Liberals in hunting down revolutionary leaders.

[Snip]

Between the Communists and those who claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this maneuver simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery.

[tet68]

a strong central government permits, but regulates and taxes, private wealth and property in order to achieve the utopian socialist ideal.

This DOES sound familiar.

[thoughtomator]

I find it odd that 'republic' is left out of the forms of government.

[sweetliberty]

"Liberal statists don't want the public to know that when they point the finger of fascism at someone else, they are pointing four fingers at themselves."

That says it all right there.

"Much of modern American liberalism is fascism and always has been.:

Which brings us back to the first point. They are experts at projection. Calling us fascists is one of their favorite things, but their feigned outrage always did ring hollow. Wonder if even they realize how much more it is THEY who fit the description and not us at all. The fact that the word is used as an attack reveals that even they know that it is a bad thing.

Ping!

[Katya]

Excellent article...similar to what we're seeing today.
How two popular movmeents equate the same group.
Hitlers National Socialists: Jews = capitalists.
Progressive left in America: Neo-cons = Jews

[thucydidesofsummit]

I agree with Tanner's observations regarding the power of the word fascist. Living in Italy in the 70's and experiencing the bantering about of the word by political party supporters (i.e. the PCI) during campaigns and students (again, mostly PCI ideologues) in philosophy classes at the university of Genoa, I observed first hand how its use could get things hopping; I use it myself on occasion to get peoples attention.

Nevertheless, I get the sense from Tanner’s discourse on what he described the “political evolution that produced fascism” that he hasn’t followed research, study, and commentary on this subject that have taken place during the decades since the end of World War II. Some books worth reading on the political ideology are "The Faces of Janus" by A. James Gregor, "The Birth of Fascist Ideology" by Zeev Sternhell, and "Fascism" by Mark Neocleous. Rather than try to reproduce my own interpretation of these three works, I will cite two points from Neocleous’ book which I believe are in fairly close agreement to the other historians and which are an accurate distillation of the current state of fascism. The New Right that Neocleous refers to regards a contemporary political movement in Europe, and even more specifically in Great Brittan.

First, on the kind of ideology fascism presents, extracted from the Preface, page xi of “Fascism”:

“[Fascism] is a form of reactionary modernism: responding to the alienation and exploitation of modern society but unwilling to lay down any serious challenge to the structure of private property central to modern capitalism, fascism can only set its compass by the light of reaction, a mystic past to be recaptured within the radically altered conditions of modernity. This politics of reaction constitutes the ideological basis of a revolution from the right in which war, nature and the nation become the central terms.”

And in the final chapter, on page 91 Neocleous writes:

“Many have noted the radicalism of the New Right, and have assumed that this radicalism stems from the attempt at modernizing Western liberal democracies. But in fact the New Right has been radical not because it sought the ‘modernization’ of liberal democratic states and societies, but because its project has been essentially reactionary: it pitted itself against the existing social order – the post-war ‘consensus’ regarding welfarism and the quasi-corporate management of capitalism – in the light of an image of past national glory (a mythical and contradictory image, but no less powerful for that). The central element of the New Right politics – an aggressive leadership, uncompromising stance on law and order, illiberal attitude on moral questions generally and certain political questions such as race and immigration, an attack on the labor movement and a defense of private property, and a forthright nationalism all contribute in a politics of reaction: a reassertion of the principal of private prosperity and capital accumulation as the raison d’etre of modern society, alongside an authoritarian moralism requiring excessive state power as a means of policing civil society. If there is such a thing as New Right distinct from ‘traditional’ conservatism, then it lies in being a reactionary modernism of our times.”

All three writers mentioned above, and many more historians and political scientists that have written on the subject, have characterized fascism as anti-materialist, anti-liberal, and anti-communist. This was certainly true of Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, and Franco’s fascist agendas. These are the principal points that Tanner misses. Gregor also stresses the additional irony that there is a convergence of Marxism and fascism. I would assert that I have long found the convergence even more pronounced in those variants Bolshevism and Nazism, even though Stalin purported that his Bolshevism was materialist, and he certainly assumed it to be communist.

[E Rocc]

"I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don't let it bother me. I don't let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal."

- P.J. O'Rourke