You have, however, misphrased the key element of fascism; that is, the elevation of the state above the individual. The “liberal society” being destroyed are those elements who would support documents such as the Bill of Rights.
That’s not “the key element of fascism”; that’s something any tyranny, including any fascist tyranny, does. No one disputes that fascism is a tyranny. Saying what you did there is no different than saying fascists drink water; it’s true but it’s undiagnostic. I’ve just recently written a piece here that goes through much of this.
The first thing Hitler did when he took power was to collect the guns.
And there, we run into one of the big problems in discussing the subject; people have no real knowledge of it. Hitler didn’t “collect the guns.” Not as a first act upon taking power. Not as a 4,000th act. While the Nazi regime eventually barred Jews from having any weapons (including guns), it actually loosened Weimar-era restrictions on guns.
The current crop of “leftists” in the US would not have bothered the German fascists in the least. All they would have to do is channel their energies.
Leftists are repressed by fascists, period. Like a lot of your comments, this one is born of puerile political fantasy that is entirely uninformed. If Bernie Sanders was serving in the Reischtag when Hitler became Chancellor, he would have gotten a one-way ticket to Dachau.
It seems necessary here to remind everyone that the name of Hitler’s party was the “National Socialists”.
And there speaks the ignorance of American fringe-right indoctrination. To cover the usual bases for the cheap seats, Hitler, who was violently anti-socialist, coopted socialist slogans and imagery and even the word “socialism” as part of an effort to draw votes (at which it failed) and to draw attention (at which it succeeded beyond what even he could have imagined). He was never a socialist. The anti-capitalists who attached themselves to the movement were successively purged. The fascism-is-leftism garbage is the equivalent of Holocaust denial, and Jonah Goldberg isn’t an historian.
Well, indeed. But as you infer above, you must excise the economic component when you measure it.
Because economics play no real part in fascism. “Economic policy” under fascism has always amounted to whatever one needs to do to achieve the goal (or perceived goal) of the day, which may be different than what one did yesterday and from what one will do tomorrow. Even attempting to define fascism from an economic standpoint is a confession of complete ignorance of the subject.
