Dennis Prager, here:
[I]f there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left, whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited. But because the left has so long dominated American intellectual, academic, artistic, and media life, it has succeeded in implanting fear of the right. ... First, it does not mean, or have anything in common with, Nazism. Nazism may have been a form of fascism. But Nazism was a unique form of fascism and a unique evil. It was race-based and it was genocidal. No other expression of fascism was race-based. And not all fascism is genocidal. So my fear that the American left is moving America toward an expression of fascism in no way implies anything Nazi-like or genocidal. ... Second, it is not liberals or liberalism that presents a threat of fascism. It is the left. Liberals of the 1940s to 1970s such as John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so many others were not leftists. They were liberals.
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I beg to differ in most of the particulars while seconding the main point.
The advent of fascist elements in American life specifically as a phenomenon of the left has gone hand in glove with the advance of liberalism under Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, in addition to the fact that the left won World War II, not the "right", whatever that is. One can hardly explain the growth of the state to its current proportions nor its growing oppressive reach without that liberalism and its spokesmen's early admiration for people like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Nor can one explain our alliance with left socialism in joining the war on the side of Stalin apart from a natural affinity for that form of it as opposed to the other. "Fear of the right" is an artifact of the victory of Stalin and FDR over Hitler and Mussolini, but should more correctly be styled "fear of right socialism".
Nor is it conceivable to imagine the rise of liberalism in America without the revolution in theology which immanentized the eschaton in the social gospel movement. For Marx religion may have been the opiate of the people, but to Spengler it was the very grandmother of Bolshevism. Russia and Germany went to war as developed rival socialisms while the majority of Americans resisted becoming involved in a fight where they had not yet a dog. They were still children in the classroom of The State. But now that we have grown up we routinely invade in the name of "freedom" because we have come to believe it is our destiny to impose it everywhere we can while ensuring cradle to grave security for one and all at home.
That's not to say America hasn't been fertile ground for fascism from the beginning, quite apart from the dominating influence of a psychology derived from Christianity and its tendency toward totalitarian-like moral conformity. But that involves the economic history, which Prager doesn't address. The contemporary corporatist model lauded by Wall Street has its roots planted comfortably deep in our origins in English colonialism, going all the way back to the crown's banking operations on behalf of the sea-trading companies. Many of the original American colonial charters were patterned on this model of state sponsorship and were first and foremost state-capitalist business ventures. So it should come as no surprise that American capitalism after independence has become more crony than capitalist as it has gotten so very long in the tooth. You can take the Tory out of England, but you can't take the England out of the Tory. Jeffrey Immelt of GE in his admiration for the Chicoms is no different than Henry Ford in his for Hitler.
Lastly, it is troubling to me that a person such as Dennis Prager, who is a student of communism, doesn't mention the fundamental bloodthirstiness inherent in all socialisms, whether communist or fascist. The "unique" evil of Nazism shouldn't blind us to Stalin's anti-German crimes anymore than it should blind us to Stalin's crimes against Ukraine and the millions "disappeared" during his purges. And where is the serious reflection on left socialism's responsibility for the many millions of Chinese who perished at the hands of Mao, who specifically imitated Stalin? And perhaps more to the point for us, the fact that as fascist socialism advances in America millions of unborn children have paid and continue to pay everyday the price for it, all in the name of "freedom"?
