These lines from Steyn are extremely important:
“No one -Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Franco -had devised a form of totalitarianism appealing enough to seduce (Anglo-nations). Now they have. As the Bundy example illustrates, a free people will cheerfully abandon bedrock principles like equality before the law if state power is being used to torment a racist or a homophobe or someone whose very presence offends against the citizenry’s sense of its own virtue.”
Agree, Steyn can analyze a concept and summarize it with words in a way which is beyond brilliant.
[Quote:] I’m not sure terms like “left” or “right” are very useful here: Communism is assumed to be “left-wing” and Nazism “right-wing”, and my former colleague Jonah Goldberg has written an entire book on that, named for a coinage of H G Wells’: “liberal fascism”. But on the matter of “tolerant” “centrist” fascism: In the Twentieth Century, a nation of great beauty and culture embraced Fascism, and a backward peasant society embraced Communism, and the most evolved civilization in Europe embraced Nazism. And observers still wonder why the great anglophone democracies were almost alone in not going down this path. I think the reason’s simpler than it seems: No one - Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Franco - had devised a form of totalitarianism appealing enough to seduce them. Now they have. As the Bundy example illustrates, a free people will cheerfully abandon bedrock principles like equality before the law if state power is being used to torment a racist or a homophobe or someone whose very presence offends against the citizenry’s sense of its own virtue. Whether or not this is a middle-of-the-road fascism, it’s certainly a very flattering strain: what, after all, is wrong with benign despotism in the cause of preventing “climate change” or transphobia - or ensuring that Nevada’s desert tortoise has an area the size of the United Kingdom to gambol and frolic in? [End quote]