Explaining the Reaction to Liberal Fascism
Leftists are treating Liberal Fascism as though it were making an intrinsically-ridiculous claim … such as a claim that the United States killed 600,000 Iraqi civilians or something equally absurd.
And furthermore …
Much of the reaction is an example of a common phenomenon: ignore a commonplace right-wing idea for decades and then, when forced to acknowledge it, treat it as though it were the product of an isolated nut. This not only applies to the claim that liberals could be fascists (as described by Nobel prize winner Friedrich von Hayek) but also the evidence showing that “primitive peoples” did not preserve their environment intact, the fact that Hannukah is a celebration of armed resistance, and even the fact that the roundness of the Earth was well known in the Middle Ages.
3 Comments:
Dang. I bought about twelve books over the holidays. Now I'm going to have to buy Liberal Fascism, based on the reviews so far.
Including the favorable ones.
Liberal Fascism is indeed making a ridiculous claim, because historians of fascism have a common agreement about the main features of "fascism", and virtually none of them are shared with liberalism. See this review:
http://tinyurl.com/2lk5jw
Let's see... That review came from a fellow hoshq user so I must take it seriously.
Apparently, it's not fascism if it's intellectual and it must be populist to be fascist. I suppose that means the eugenics movement was largely progressive. OTOH, the noted right-wing mole Steven J. Gould covered examples of that in his Natural History column.
Come to think of it, I covered an example of liberal fascism just a few weeks ago.
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