In times of sweeping political correctness, bullies attacking those who question the holy liberal trinity of diversity, inclusivity and equality, and a media which toes the party line while defaming dissenters, it's easy to see why more and more people are calling the current progressive groupthink "fascist". But if you look at history, as Jonah Goldberg did in his book, Liberal Fascism, you realize that this is kind of missing the point: today's left isn't merely using fascist tactics. No, fascism is, and always has been, a progressive, leftist project. What we today call conservatism has little to do with it - in fact, it's almost its exact opposite.

To understand this, we first need to realize that fascism is a revolutionary movement, in the tradition of the French Revolution. As Goldberg puts it,

...the French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and Russian Communist revolutions. A nationalist-populist uprising, it was led and manipulated by an intellectual vanguard determined to replace Christianity with a political religion that glorified "the people," anointed the revolutionary vanguard as their priests, and abridged the rights of individuals.

Revolution isn't exactly a conservative talking point, now is it? Or consider an early program of Mussolini, "the father of fascism": some of the things these early fascists wanted included a lowering of the minimum voting age, the end of the draft, the repeal of titles of nobility, a minimum wage, building "rigidly secular" schools for the proletariat, a large progressive tax system... in other words, a classically leftist platform. Fascism was, in a sense, a Bolshevik revolution minus internationalism. Consequently, many American progressives at the time were full of praise for Mussolini. Hitler was similarly anti-capitalist and anti-conservative. Writes Goldberg:

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic- including environmentalism, health food, and exercise- and, most of all, the need to "transcend" notions of class.

Goldberg leaves no doubt that fascism - both Mussolini's classical fascism and Hitler's Nazism - but also communism as fascism's equally-evil-twin - is in essence collectivist, anti-capitalist, anti-religion (except that it can use religion sometimes to further its aims), wants to control everything in the name of welfare, progress and for the "good of the people", uses science as a sort of priestly class to provide justification for the leaders of "the movement", hates the individual and always seeks to advance the collective... yep, exactly the Orwellian nightmare we see today, mostly on the left.

NRW New Deal Fascism

Roosevelt's New Deal and its NRA: progressive fascism at its finest
It's really fascinating and chilling how Goldberg (re)tells modern American history through this lens, like the story of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, who embraced exactly this kind of thinking - these were people who saw the constitution as a mere obstacle in the way of the great leaders and wanted absolute power in the name of "progress". It's astonishing to read the history of America around WWI and what Wilson and the whole progressive gang, including later FDR, had on their minds - people that have tremendous influence on progressive thinking to this day. And to say that the widely glorified 1960s revolution contained fascist elements would be an understatement - in fact, the violent, power-hungry mobs that shut down anyone even remotely opposing their radical ideas were eerily reminiscent of what happened at German universities in the 1930s.
more here

A good reason to love history.

real history is great, but not the changed history the liberals want

"National Socialism" without the National is right!

they're still trying here...good thing there's still some smart non liberals around

Liberalism destroys a country from within.

Politics as well, more or less. Sometimes I wonder, when was everything better in this area. With all the history lessons/we have known in the present life.. past as well. It is a long talk.

If you dig a bit harder, you'll find out that Hitler was studying the democratic south, in order to better deal with the jews. Some of their Nazi doctrine was simple copied from the dems. They just swapped the word Negro with jew.

I've also noticed that some of the moderate Dems are starting to distance themselves from the the hard left. They want no part of it, and I don't blame them.

Winston Churchill;
"The fascists of the future,
will call themselves anti-fascists".

Exactly.

Be alarmed when a leader tries to make you think of humans as vermin

The other day, our President expressed a remarkable opinion. Democrats "want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13," he tweeted, referring to the international gang.

"Infest." Now that's an interesting word, and there are at least two groups of people who are particularly well positioned to appreciate its choice.

The first group is neuroscientists who study a part of the brain called the insula. In most mammals, the insula does something mundane but important: If an animal bites into or smells a piece of food that is spoiled, the insula rapidly activates, triggering reflexes such as spitting the food out, curling the upper lip against the nose, maybe even vomiting.

This is mighty useful in terms of preventing ingesting toxins. Things work the same way in humans; stick a doughty volunteer in a brain imager, give them something fetid to bite into or smell, and the insula immediately activates. And as a measure of our cognitive sophistication, we humans can even activate the insula when thinking about eating something repulsive.
But now, study something more interesting than rancid food. Show someone a picture of a lynching, of bodies piled high in a concentration camp, of Klansmen marching; make someone reflect on something awful they once did; stab them in the back with a betrayal. There's a good chance that the insula will activate as well.
At some time, tens of thousands of years ago, humans evolved the notion that norms of right and wrong behaviors could be systematized into moral systems. And in the process, evolution tinkered and improvised, expanding the portfolio of the ancient insula such that in humans, it not only mediates gustatory and olfactory disgust, but moral disgust as well.
It's why something sufficiently morally disturbing can make us feel sick to our stomach, want to throw up, or be left with a bad taste in our mouths.
This can be great, in that the insula's involvement helps build up the visceral head of steam that can be needed to right a deep moral wrong. But this versatility of the insula carries a danger: The temptation to use moral disgust as a litmus test.

How do you decide if the way someone eats, prays or loves is wrong? Just ask whether it makes you feel disgusted. If it makes you puke, then you must rebuke. The problem, of course, is that moral disgust is a moving target, and one person's moral disgust is another's normal, loving lifestyle. Moreover, visceral disgust is a great stepping stone for more abstract disgust; once you decide that someone eats disgusting things, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to deciding they think and feel disgusting things as well.

We all differ as to the workings of the insula, and this helps explain more than just why only some people would think the milk tastes a little bit off. As a fascinating finding, social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.

They're more likely to be unsettled by wearing someone else's (clean) clothes, sitting on a chair still warm from a previous occupant, or thinking of someone spitting into a glass of water and then drinking it; show them a disgusting picture (e.g., a wound teeming with maggots) and their autonomic nervous systems tend to lurch more than a liberal's would (and as an important control, this lower threshold is not found among economic or geopolitical conservatives).

Perhaps, most importantly, you can manipulate people's moral judgments by exploiting the insula. Prime subjects to think of the United States as a living entity (discuss, for instance, how the United States underwent a "growth spurt" after the Civil War), and then have them read about scary new infectious diseases, and they express more negative views about immigrants.

Stick heterosexual subjects in a room with some smelly garbage, and they express more negative views about gay men. Upon smelling something subliminally vile, the insula confuses tasks and searches for something in your social world to stick with a "that's disgusting" label. It's not so much that old canard that a conservative "is a liberal who has been mugged." A temporary conservative can be a liberal who has been smelling rotting fish.

Scholars of insula neurobiology would likely give special attention to the President's imagery of immigrants "infesting" our land. But more importantly, another group would have a special appreciation of this as well.

When the Nazis urged on their populace toward the final solution, their propaganda was of Jews as rats, the Holocaust as extermination of the disgusting vermin in Germany's basement. For contemporary European white supremacists, it's the image of Islam as a malignancy. For Southern slavers, it was Africans as subhumans. And when the Hutus of Rwanda triggered the 1994 genocide that killed 75% of the Tutsi tribe in under 100 days, their propaganda endlessly shrieked about the Tutsis as cockroaches.

Every effective genocidal propagandist intuitively knows about the insula -- get things to the point where invoking "Them" activates the insula in your followers and you'll have people goose-stepping in no time.

Thus, Trump's tweet prompts not just neurobiological musings, but a historical one as well. He may not intend to create an association between immigrants and disgust but, psychologically, his rhetoric does not inspire compassion or unity -- American values.
So, constituents, be very alarmed when a leader tries to make you think of other humans as vermin. It's enough to make you sick to your stomach.

Yes, wise words. There’s a fine line between wanting good and thinking those who disagree with your beliefs are nothing but Untermensch.

Immigrants aren't coming here to make America great anymore. They are coming here to leech off what has already been created. It's time we start protecting our country before the things that made it great are gone.

"immigrants" have never been the problem..."illegal immigrants" are the problem now...a lot of Democrats can't see the difference,and use the hardcore left as a tool to undermine laws and deunife the country...same way other civil problems have started

Illegal aliens (undocumented and unlawful) who come here in that manner need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

A lot of them bring over more then just themselves.
Scabies, lice, ect...
Also a lot of criminals and gang bangers are getting through.

Every American should support border control which also includes the wall which will obviously be a great deterrent.

This should not even remotely be a debate whatsoever.
Not one scintilla of a debate.

We are waaaaaaaay past "discussing " this.
A lot of other issues need to be focused upon.
Our veterans, our roads and bridges, infrastructure as a whole, our military, drug epidemic ect...

I have nothing against socialist entities within an individualist, capitalist government, as long as they do not oppress others on the outside. The groupthink enables a sense of purpose more than the pursuit of self determined values enabled by capitalism, and a sense of belonging. Also, such entities are have much more meaningful common vision if they are limited in size to the extent that everyone knows more that 50% of the people there. During college I lived in a tiny city with an essentially communist local government, within a republican county consisting of farmland and forested mountains, with scattered businesses and farm owners. There was something remarkable about the community there. The relationships become high quality in understanding, which lead to developing better communication skills, and "character" as a member of the group. People looked for a release from the unity in different ways, to balance out life, by imagination and pondering new ideas somewhat anonymously at meetings and in the newspaper (student operated), as well as following self-sufficient endeavors. People learn to appreciate each other, as the serious work is done on the same team. For those who acquired more technical capacity to effectively achieve the end goals, their opinions typically had more weight; however, whoever cared the most also played in to how values were prioritized. Groupthink is only one side of life, though. It is important to be secure independently and be able to think for your self, and that is where the overarching capitalist government enables the country to thrive with more diversified businesses than anarchy with just self-sufficient farms who don't care about cash anyway, and prevents National communist oppression of dreams of the people. Thriving comes from the freelancing entity or individual freelancer.

Right, because the one in Berlin worked SO well..

This isn't Berlin, and the situation isn't the same.
Very bad comparison on your part.

Why? Because Trump wall is supposed to bigger? More "beyyyuuutifull"?

It will just give people something to laugh at as they fly over it.

Ever heard of hang gliders or <gasp> shovels?

As long as people can dig tunnels, all your magical wall will do, is waste money.

Wrong.
It will definitely be a deterrent, that is flat out common sense.

Your examples are unrealistic on any realistic scale of being a problem.