People who are truly concerned about fascism - or totalitarianism and authoritarianism, which are separate horrors that can flourish with or without fascism - should adamantly demand smaller government and greater protection for individual liberties. There is no other antidote.
This is how you know so much of the bleating about "fascism" or addle-pated mush about "semi-fascism" is utterly insincere: the people hurling the loudest allegations are also in favor of unlimited centralized power. They support all the things fascism cannot survive without.
A review of the past century suggests that Big Government inevitably trends toward fascism over time. Not only is centralized power an absolute pre-requisite for fascism to exist, but it's increasingly clear that centralized power inevitably metastasizes into fascism.
The very notion of fascism or authoritarianism becoming a serious threat in a land of Constitutional rights, individual liberty, small government, and true private ownership of capital is absurd. Fascists under such a system would be blowhards and thugs, not a powerful Party.
You can't have authoritarianism without authority, after all. You might have people attempting to use force to impose their ideology, but they would be treated as criminals. They might attract followers to voluntarily embrace their ideology, but they're little threat to others.
You don't have a fascism problem until you have real POWER for them to grab. They're a nuisance until they can actually impose their ideology on the unwilling - and EVERY big government eventually begins imposing ideology on the unwilling, to increase its power and wealth.
Totalitarians likewise need vast power and money to politicize everything. The key ingredient that makes every "ism" into a virulent plague, instead of a political sniffle, is POWER. Don't create huge, fetid pools of centralized power if you don't want them to show up. /end
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Republicans need to do more than remind voters how awful Dem governance has been. They also need to do more than provide alternative polices. If they want that midterm tidal wave to happen, they must offer a comprehensive vision of returning to normalcy and prosperity.
The Dem summer strategy has been shrewdly focused on making the Return to Normal seem impossible. Repubs stumbled into that trap more than a few times, with candidates who look like a different kind of weird instead of firm hands on the wheel that can set course back to Normal.
The net effect has been demoralizing to Republican voters and independents who hate what the Dems have done to their cities, states, and the country. They were made to feel that getting worked up for the midterms is pointless, while Dems are whipping their voters into a frenzy.
There is nothing surprising about the increasingly elitist and out-of-touch Democrat Party turning against working Americans with a vengeance. The Left is NEVER the ally of working people, no matter how much hot air it belches about being a "workers' party."
The Left develops lucrative financial and political relationships with union bosses, which is not AT ALL the same as being a "party of workers," despite pretenses to the contrary. Labor is merely a useful tool for leftists who cynically exploit class warfare and resentments.
After all, the bottom line is that left-wingers dream of a world in which private capital is obliterated - which means people will be FORCED TO WORK. There are only three ways to get people to work: hire them, let them hire others, or force them. The first two are capitalism.
Fascism - the system in which capital is privately owned, but controlled by the State and ruling Party - is so dangerous because it removes all restraints on power. The Party's private-sector loyalists can do whatever the State is legally barred from doing.
Of course, the first thing rapacious politicians always do with money and power is grab more money and power for themselves. Fascist systems never rest long with the fiction of a government nominally committed to individual rights while Party-controlled capital violates them.
It's baffling that so many people fail to understand this, or pretend not to, even after centuries of experience. Let a politician take a dollar, and no matter what reason he gave for seizing it, his first instinct is to use it to grab another dollar.
It's so weird that when you flood a system with billions of dollars in government money, the people running that system just keep raising their prices to gobble up all that taxpayer loot and then demand even more. Gosh, it's almost like it happens every single time.
This is one of the fatal flaws in socialism: it assumes honest and frugal brokers between the government that "socializes" costs (by forcing everyone to pay them) and the consumers of those socialized goods and services. It absurdly pretends government is the antithesis of greed.
In reality, socialist systems are fabulously corrupt, as greedy opportunists flock to the system at every level, fattening themselves on the loot extracted from citizens. It's WORSE, far worse, than the greed supposedly inherent in capitalism, because there are no checks on it.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. The greatest trick the Left ever pulled was convincing us "normal" doesn't exist. Obliterating the concept of healthy, normal life was a step toward creating obedient, programmable New Soviet Man.
There is nothing particularly difficult about perceiving "normality," and it's not an inherently oppressive concept. At the end of the 20th Century, advanced societies had a pretty good idea of "normal life," which brings health and success to the greatest number of people.
We had mountains of sociological data to back up our ideas of normality, which tracked fairly well with many long-standing traditions. This is no surprise, because long before scientific studies, countless generations learned through experience what works, and what doesn't.
The constant refrain in "Five Days at Memorial," a book and TV series about a hospital grappling with the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is "no one is in charge." As many crises have proved since then, from the pandemic to Afghanistan, that's still true.
Our multi-trillion-dollar mega-government has no idea how to respond to a crisis or fulfill its duties to the American people, even though thousands of officials are paid handsome salaries for years on end to devise plans and protocols.
Government agencies think of little beyond expanding their missions, demanding more funds, and above all HIRING PEOPLE. Expanding their staff is how they capture more bureaucratic turf and resist calls to trim the fat. The fat of the Leviathan State is people who can't be fired.