It’s Fascism

Congress has passed the bailout/rescue bill, and the current President scurried right over and signed it into law.

Pundits speaking for the huge popular majority opposed to the plan seem to have decided to call it socialism, or a nationalization of banking and real estate. There is a political philosophy which combines those terms. National Socialism. Or, in a word, fascism.

Fascist governments nationalized key industries and made massive state investments. They thought private property was to be regulated to ensure that “benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual.” They also introduced price controls and other types of economic planning measures. Fascists promoted their ideology as a “third way” between capitalism and Marxian socialism.

I think the facts fit the description. So far, though, we are lacking the totalitarian dictatorship political control structure. But, the lefties have been harping on the current President’s “unitary executive” expansion of power. And the righties have had difficulties countering a charismatic orator preaching to mass rallies through the campaign season.

Put Barry O. in charge of the embiggened Executive branch, add a sympathetic majority in both houses of Congress, and one more condition is met.

Fascism sees the struggle of nation and race as fundamental in society, in opposition to communism's perception of class struggle and in opposition to capitalism's focus on the value of capital. The nation is seen in fascism as a single organic entity which bounds people together by their ancestry and is seen as a natural unifying force of people. Fascists promote the unification and expansion of influence, power, and/or territory of and for their nation.

In today’s terms, a post-racial, post-partisan President with the stated aim of restoring America’s standing and influence in the world. The populace is persuaded that they are again united and America will return to glory.

Although militarism is downplayed in this 21st-century fascism, the Leader has no hesitation in committing US forces to foreign interventions. More troops, just in different places.

Fascists promote corporatism, an economic system than is in between laissez-faire capitalist and statist economic systems of traditional communist and socialist governments. Corporatism is highly similar to Keynesianism which typically allows a significant degree of freedom from state intervention for private interests that are operating well independently or are outside of national interests, but if areas of the economy vital to national interests are operating poorly, or require direction to operate in accordance to national interest, state intervention is utilized.

Have you been reading the news lately?

…fascist economics “foreshadowed most of the fundamental features of the economic system of Western European countries today: the radical extension of government control over the economy without a wholesale expropriation of the capitalists but with a good dose of nationalisation, price control, incomes policy, managed currency, massive state investment, attempts at overall planning…

Exhibit A. This 21st-century fascism is innovated and improved over the last century’s version. Rather than fight the trade unions, subsume them into the power structure.

It is hard to raise this idea with invoking some form of Godwin’s Law. I am not attempting a reductio ad Hitlerum. I propose this comparison—which I am not asserting as logically perfect—is something more akin to a real-life Keyser Soze:

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist.

Barry O. almost certainly does not think of himself as the devil. Nor do I. But if one acts as a devil does, the name he uses matters little. Good intentions may matter to personal morality, but the devil’s work still gets done.

Let us call things by the most accurate and descriptive names. Our attachments to the terms tend to cloud reasoned judgment. Do not fear language. The United States is not sliding toward socialism. The risk, the spectre on our horizon, is not carrying a hammer and sickle. He is carrying a bundle of sticks.