I disagree that there is any "redefinition" of fascism in my comments. Jonah used the term carefully in the sense of taking it from its political roots in Mussolini-style statist collectivism, and that's what I'm doing here.
It's wrong and always has been to equate "fascism" with "Nazism." Nazism is Nazism -- Hitler-style national socialism, a hybrid concept encompassing a variety of principles from the left side of the political spectrum. Its development actually had surprisingly little philosophical reference to Mussolini's fascism. Its name -- national socialism -- was oriented on distinguishing it from the international socialism being pushed by Soviet Russia and the internationalist socialists in Germany's political mix. (Indeed, the Nazis went out of their way to equate international socialism with bomb-tossing "Reds" and "Jewish conspiracies." It wasn't the socialism they objected to, it was the internationalism.)
(Stalin, of note, ended up proclaiming his own version of national socialism in the '30s with his pronouncements on "socialism in one country" as a waypoint on the path toward universal socialism. It was a pragmatic act on his part, but was considered gravely disappointing, to the point of unforgivable betrayal, by many of the most internationalist of Marxist-socialist believers.)
It is, nevertheless, simply not true that either fascism, national socialism, international socialism, or communism had "very different" visions of desired outcomes. Their visions were much more alike than different in the economic, social, and political realms. All of them riffed on the same themes of state-directed collective action, collective political control of economic resources and decisions, and the transformation of man and society into conditions of utopian equality and reordered priorities and motivation.
The fascists and German national socialists had visions characterized by a unique nationalism, in that they prized and proposed to use to the hilt the European-style vehicle of the nation-state. They built political mythologies around ethnic and racial histories and destinies in a way that the international socialists, international communists, and Soviet socialists never embraced. (Nor, later, did the Maoists.)
But in terms of seeking to impose centralized state control and collectivization of all aspects of life, as a means of transforming humans and society, they were very much like the international and Soviet socialists and communists. Every one of fascism, international or national socialism, and communism sees it as appropriate for the central government to control the use of economic resources, dictate how capital is used, and dictate the conditions and pay of labor.
All of them deal with labor unions the same way: coopting them and relieving them of all their freedom of action. All of them rewrite history and teach lies and propaganda in the schools. All of them go quite nakedly into the business of state-business cronyism; they merely justify it with slightly different arguments, and put different titles on the doors of those who organize commerce on behalf of the state.
Of the -isms in question here, the one that emphasized "equality" the least in its utopian vision was not fascism, it was Hitlerian national socialism. Musso's fascism actually invoked equality quite a bit, but it was along the lines of the original revolutionary-leftist view of equality as a very muscular, aspirational, empowering thing. When the Italian fascists and the Soviet socialists spoke of "equality," they weren't speaking of the more passive, litigious, watered-down idea that has become pervasive in the soft-socialist West. They had in mind an aggressive, transformative manifestation -- something more like a tidal wave breaking over mankind than like the endless series of pedestrian prohibitions and lawsuits we are accustomed to in the US (equality as administered by the DMV, if you will).
In the Italian fascist version of this vision, leadership and greatness inhered in the nation of Italy because of its grand patrimony. That sense is one of the strongest in which Hitler's national socialism resembled Italian fascism. But Hitlerian national socialism was as distinct from Italian fascism as it was from Soviet socialism. On the other hand, the common threads in all of them, and in elements of European and American progressivism, were equally strong.
Obviously, CKM, you aren't familiar with the photo archive maintained by the Illuminati (and funded by the Trilateral Commission, with some Bilderbergers in there somewhere), in which Wilson is seen on a number of occasions with sinister-looking Roman fasces hoisted behind him.
It's important to recognize that the emotional freight of the word "fascism" is something we lay on ourselves. Technically, the fascism developed by Mussolini had key elements in common with Wilson's penchant for favoring interventionist, regulatory government. Both operated from the basic idea that the state needed to order much of business and daily life in order to secure desirable outcomes. Wilson's focus did NOT have the militarism and quasi-eschatological nationalism of Musso's fascism; it was much more "American" in that regard, which I would say was due partly to Wilson's own background and temperament, and partly to the historical/geographical accident of America's situation.
Of course it's extreme and intemperate for people (including Beck) to proclaim that they hate Wilson, despise Wilson, Wilson was the devil incarnate, yada yada yada. That doesn't invalidate comparisons of Wilson's policy tendencies and policy record with the principles of fascism. Nor is it a more correct perspective to equate "fascism" with "Hitlerian Nazism," as people sloppily do today, and argue that because Wilson was nothing like Adolf Hitler, that means he had nothing in common with the element of fascism that emphasized transformation of society and the future through bigger, "improved" government.
Distinguishing fascism from statism requires care, because fascism largely overlaps with statism. Statism is the more basic form, and is common to all of fascism, communism, socialism, national socialism, and American Progressivism. In that sense it's much like "collectivism," which is also a more basic, common element.
Anyone who wants to coerce the people, with a view to transforming their estate, and producing specific outcomes, is a statist. Thinking of the state in that light, as an agent of transformation rather than a utility of human life, is statism. Most people, in most times and places, have been afflicted with it; it just wasn't always called that.
Probably the major objection I've had to Jonah Goldberg's thesis in Liberal Fascism is the choice of the term "fascism." This is not because it's too tendentious a term to use, or because American leftists have had nothing in common with the fascists -- literal fascists; Mussolini and his disciples -- but because fascism proper carries the strong element of militaristic, transformative nationalism I referred to earlier. That element is not characteristic at all, really, of Goldberg's "liberal fascists": the statist leftists of the European and American West.
But Goldberg still does a service in identifying the common threads in all the movements of the left over the last century-plus. There is a cadre of legacy conservatives that has been familiar with that commonality for decades, from long before Goldberg's book made the best-seller list. It's neither new nor out in left field to identify the significant overlaps. (It is dismissible to imagine, as some do, that all these leftist movements must be in cahoots in a gigantic conspiracy. Humans just aren't that good -- that clever or monolithically effective.)
How one feels about it all boils down, I think, to one's basic view of law and government. Those who favor the "negative" interpretation of law -- as something that can punish and deter, but cannot transform the human condition for the better -- prefer limited government. Those who believe in "positive" law -- law that can transform and make human society "better" (however that's defined) -- are prepared to accept more government.
To the former people, Wilson looks like he places too much faith in the morally transformative agency of government, which puts him in the same category as anyone else who does, from fascist to Maoist commnunist. To the latter people, Wilson occupies the territory of peaceful incrementalism in terms of what government should/could be doing anyway. The quarrel here, in my view, is really about this central point: the nature of law and regulation, and the proper relation between man and the state.
I disagree that there is any "redefinition" of fascism in my comments. Jonah used the term carefully in the sense of taking it from its political roots in Mussolini-style statist collectivism, and that's what I'm doing here.
It's wrong and always has been to equate "fascism" with "Nazism." Nazism is Nazism -- Hitler-style national socialism, a hybrid concept encompassing a variety of principles from the left side of the political spectrum. Its development actually had surprisingly little philosophical reference to Mussolini's fascism. Its name -- national socialism -- was oriented on distinguishing it from the international socialism being pushed by Soviet Russia and the internationalist socialists in Germany's political mix. (Indeed, the Nazis went out of their way to equate international socialism with bomb-tossing "Reds" and "Jewish conspiracies." It wasn't the socialism they objected to, it was the internationalism.)
(Stalin, of note, ended up proclaiming his own version of national socialism in the '30s with his pronouncements on "socialism in one country" as a waypoint on the path toward universal socialism. It was a pragmatic act on his part, but was considered gravely disappointing, to the point of unforgivable betrayal, by many of the most internationalist of Marxist-socialist believers.)
It is, nevertheless, simply not true that either fascism, national socialism, international socialism, or communism had "very different" visions of desired outcomes. Their visions were much more alike than different in the economic, social, and political realms. All of them riffed on the same themes of state-directed collective action, collective political control of economic resources and decisions, and the transformation of man and society into conditions of utopian equality and reordered priorities and motivation.
The fascists and German national socialists had visions characterized by a unique nationalism, in that they prized and proposed to use to the hilt the European-style vehicle of the nation-state. They built political mythologies around ethnic and racial histories and destinies in a way that the international socialists, international communists, and Soviet socialists never embraced. (Nor, later, did the Maoists.)
But in terms of seeking to impose centralized state control and collectivization of all aspects of life, as a means of transforming humans and society, they were very much like the international and Soviet socialists and communists. Every one of fascism, international or national socialism, and communism sees it as appropriate for the central government to control the use of economic resources, dictate how capital is used, and dictate the conditions and pay of labor.
All of them deal with labor unions the same way: coopting them and relieving them of all their freedom of action. All of them rewrite history and teach lies and propaganda in the schools. All of them go quite nakedly into the business of state-business cronyism; they merely justify it with slightly different arguments, and put different titles on the doors of those who organize commerce on behalf of the state.
Of the -isms in question here, the one that emphasized "equality" the least in its utopian vision was not fascism, it was Hitlerian national socialism. Musso's fascism actually invoked equality quite a bit, but it was along the lines of the original revolutionary-leftist view of equality as a very muscular, aspirational, empowering thing. When the Italian fascists and the Soviet socialists spoke of "equality," they weren't speaking of the more passive, litigious, watered-down idea that has become pervasive in the soft-socialist West. They had in mind an aggressive, transformative manifestation -- something more like a tidal wave breaking over mankind than like the endless series of pedestrian prohibitions and lawsuits we are accustomed to in the US (equality as administered by the DMV, if you will).
In the Italian fascist version of this vision, leadership and greatness inhered in the nation of Italy because of its grand patrimony. That sense is one of the strongest in which Hitler's national socialism resembled Italian fascism. But Hitlerian national socialism was as distinct from Italian fascism as it was from Soviet socialism. On the other hand, the common threads in all of them, and in elements of European and American progressivism, were equally strong.
Obviously, CKM, you aren't familiar with the photo archive maintained by the Illuminati (and funded by the Trilateral Commission, with some Bilderbergers in there somewhere), in which Wilson is seen on a number of occasions with sinister-looking Roman fasces hoisted behind him.
It's important to recognize that the emotional freight of the word "fascism" is something we lay on ourselves. Technically, the fascism developed by Mussolini had key elements in common with Wilson's penchant for favoring interventionist, regulatory government. Both operated from the basic idea that the state needed to order much of business and daily life in order to secure desirable outcomes. Wilson's focus did NOT have the militarism and quasi-eschatological nationalism of Musso's fascism; it was much more "American" in that regard, which I would say was due partly to Wilson's own background and temperament, and partly to the historical/geographical accident of America's situation.
Of course it's extreme and intemperate for people (including Beck) to proclaim that they hate Wilson, despise Wilson, Wilson was the devil incarnate, yada yada yada. That doesn't invalidate comparisons of Wilson's policy tendencies and policy record with the principles of fascism. Nor is it a more correct perspective to equate "fascism" with "Hitlerian Nazism," as people sloppily do today, and argue that because Wilson was nothing like Adolf Hitler, that means he had nothing in common with the element of fascism that emphasized transformation of society and the future through bigger, "improved" government.
Distinguishing fascism from statism requires care, because fascism largely overlaps with statism. Statism is the more basic form, and is common to all of fascism, communism, socialism, national socialism, and American Progressivism. In that sense it's much like "collectivism," which is also a more basic, common element.
Anyone who wants to coerce the people, with a view to transforming their estate, and producing specific outcomes, is a statist. Thinking of the state in that light, as an agent of transformation rather than a utility of human life, is statism. Most people, in most times and places, have been afflicted with it; it just wasn't always called that.
Probably the major objection I've had to Jonah Goldberg's thesis in Liberal Fascism is the choice of the term "fascism." This is not because it's too tendentious a term to use, or because American leftists have had nothing in common with the fascists -- literal fascists; Mussolini and his disciples -- but because fascism proper carries the strong element of militaristic, transformative nationalism I referred to earlier. That element is not characteristic at all, really, of Goldberg's "liberal fascists": the statist leftists of the European and American West.
But Goldberg still does a service in identifying the common threads in all the movements of the left over the last century-plus. There is a cadre of legacy conservatives that has been familiar with that commonality for decades, from long before Goldberg's book made the best-seller list. It's neither new nor out in left field to identify the significant overlaps. (It is dismissible to imagine, as some do, that all these leftist movements must be in cahoots in a gigantic conspiracy. Humans just aren't that good -- that clever or monolithically effective.)
How one feels about it all boils down, I think, to one's basic view of law and government. Those who favor the "negative" interpretation of law -- as something that can punish and deter, but cannot transform the human condition for the better -- prefer limited government. Those who believe in "positive" law -- law that can transform and make human society "better" (however that's defined) -- are prepared to accept more government.
To the former people, Wilson looks like he places too much faith in the morally transformative agency of government, which puts him in the same category as anyone else who does, from fascist to Maoist commnunist. To the latter people, Wilson occupies the territory of peaceful incrementalism in terms of what government should/could be doing anyway. The quarrel here, in my view, is really about this central point: the nature of law and regulation, and the proper relation between man and the state.