Thomas Sowell writes a review of the book Liberal Facism that has piqued my interest. He explains:
"Because the word "fascist" is often thrown around loosely these days, as a general term of abuse, it is good that "Liberal Fascism" begins by discussing the real Fascism, introduced into Italy after the First World War by Benito Mussolini. The Fascists were completely against individualism in general and especially against individualism in a free market economy. Their agenda included minimum wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital, and "rigidly secular" schools. Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run. They were for "industrial policy," long before liberals coined that phrase in the United States. Indeed, the whole Fascist economic agenda bears a remarkable resemblance to what liberals would later advocate."
It really does sound like the Liberal (or Progressive) agenda today. Who would have thought the US could be susceptible to this, considering we fought a war to demolish the fruit of this worldview? It reminds me of a poem from the epilogue of the German Bertold Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui , which I came across while writing my Master's thesis (language warning):
If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.