Reply #15: Fascism

[rogerashton]

was a movement of small businessmen and small proprietors, squeezed from above by corporations and from below by workers, to use bully-tactics in politics to restore a predominance free-market ideologies had promised them but not delivered. Let's see, who does that fit? The rank and file of Italian fascism were the "squadristi," bully-boys in pickup trucks who terrorized anyone they disagreed with. Hm, pickup trucks.

Of course, the rank and file lost out -- when Mussolini and Hitler got into power the big corporate capitalists bought them up like distressed merchandise, and the squadristi and "fierce German grocers" got to do the dying in Ethiopia and the Ukraine.

But I don't buy that extreme ideas have to be beyond reason. Indeed moderation often rests firmly on making logical compromises, i.e. affirming contradictory beliefs -- that cannot be stable or practical, and I think many of the real failures of "liberalism" reflect this kind of fallacy.