The Left eructate their favorite, default libel, and call all and sundry Fascist, including Rockefeller Republicans, Romney-style Uniparty-folk, Law-biding Libertarians, and mainstream Democrats.
By Left logic, all patriots are racist, and all racists are White Supremacist, even Larry Elder, and no black is racist, including Joy Reid. All White Supremacists are Fascist, therefore all patriots, regardless of party, regardless of race, are Fascist.
(Whether Leftists apply this notion to patriots of nonwhite nations, China or Congo, I leave to others to investigate. Self-inconsistency is a core leftwing value).
This is nonsense on stilts. Let us introduce a modicum of reason.
Let us define our terms.
What is Fascism?
As described by Mussolini, who coined the term, fascism is the combination of corporate power and political power into socialist totalitarianism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Confusion arises because Mussolini was decidedly mystical and unclear in his description.
Mussolini seems to use a political form of Apophatic theology to describe fascism, much as St John of Damascus used when describing the indescribable and infinite Supreme Being. He says what it is not, and never clearly says what it is.
Mussolini says fascism is a spiritual and heroic vision of man. This is vague enough to mean anything, but he means it to denounce the materialism of Marxism and the individualism of democracy. He says the state must shape and train man to contribute to progress, not merely act as a nightwatchman protecting his goods and seeing to his physical wellbeing.
Mussolini is as decidedly vague about the progressive goal of the state as Nietzsche is about the Superman. Progress is given as a good, without any mention of aim or direction.
Mussolini says man has no meaning outside his place in history, for he is formed by the state, and not, as Marx would have it, formed by the means of production, or material factors of history.
The unclarity of Mussolini grows like a rolling snowball as one reads on. He rejects socialism as materialistic, liberalism as non-spiritual, democracy as mere aggregations of numbers.
He is against trade unionism as a communist enemy of state unity, but a champion of any workingman or trade union who takes up a proper place and role within the state.
Mussolini condemns both republics and monarchies with a sneer, saying either can be more reactionary or more progressive than the other.
“The State, as conceived and realized by Fascism, is a spiritual and ethical entity for securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation, an organization which in its origin and growth is a manifestation of the spirit. The State guarantees the internal and external safety of the country, but it also safeguards and transmits the spirit of the people, elaborated down the ages in its language, its customs, its faith. The State is not only the present; it is also the past and above all the future. ”
Thus Mussolini waxes poetic.
He goes on in like vein:
“The State educates the citizens to civism, makes them aware of their mission, urges them to unity; its justice harmonizes their divergent interests; it transmits to future generations the conquests of the mind in the fields of science, art, law, human solidarity; it leads men up from primitive tribal life to that highest manifestation of human power, imperial rule. ”
In other words, Fascism is idolatry of the State, assigning to it the role of father and king and priest and prophet. Caesar is Christ.
Mussolini seems to be a student of Hobbes, regarding the Leviathan of the state as a manmade god, but where Hobbes was cynical and materialist, Mussolini is romantic, drunk on dreams and blood and conquest, heroism and self-sacrifice, yearning for the lost glories of Imperium.
Unfortunately, Mussolini is so poetical and vague, that nothing much can be said about fascism aside from a craving for nationalistic totalitarianism: and Communists, who are gnostic totalitarians, despise nationalism in all its forms, and so calls any patriot, even a republican who insists on limited government, or a libertarian who insists on unhindered free markets, or anyone else not a communist a ‘fascist.’
The word is useful for describing Italian and German socialist nationalist totalitarians in the Godless Century (1912-2012).
Otherwise the word ‘fascist’ is merely a noise-word, indicating an emotion of hatred and fear, having no relation to external reality. When applied to non-threats, it is a sign of neurosis, or paranoia.
The neurosis may be called Dextrophobia, the hysterical hallucination that anyone to the political right forms a fascist menace when there is no fascism and no menace.
