Explaining what I mean

Another reader wrote me, unhappy about my argument about “fascism,” though more polite in his criticisms than the previous correspondent. He said in part:

So let us try change the political system in the Mid East. I can see where a lot of people including you and I would disagree with all this but it doesn’t make these believers fascists, does it? Bush is not trying to enslave these people, he is in fact attempting quite the opposite.

My answer:

I didn’t say that Bush’s democratism policy is fascist, I said the politics around it, the whole tone of the pro-Bush Republicans, has a fascist quality. Furthermore, I said this new emerging politics is fascist in style, and liberal in content. I said this fascism was a fascism for open borders and national suicide instead of, like the historical fascism, for dominance. Obviously I didn’t say that Bush is trying to enslave people. You weren’t reading carefully what I was saying.

What I mean by fascism is this thing I’ve noticed more and more—this hysterical banding together against the leftist enemy, the rejection of any thought, the triumphalism, the excessive emotional identification with the leader. I have run into it over and over on the right the last couple of years and it intensified in recent days with the Iraqi election and Bush’s upping his globalist rhetoric in the inaugural address. I’ve never seen anything like that before in this country, though I think that America in 1917 and 1918 had some fascist-type policies in place, in which, for example, people could go to jail for speaking against the war.

As I said before, this fascist-like quality on the right arose as an understandable reaction against the evil of the left, but that doesn’t make it good.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 04, 2005 07:42 PM | Send