Replies

I posted this yesterday on another thread but it bears repeating.

Fabian Facism
As Ludwig von Mises observed, Fascism, Nazism, and Socialism are varying versions of the same old conviction, summed up in the slogan of the Nazis: "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"; (the public good ranks above private profit.) All three assert that "profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immerse majority, and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution."
What distinguishes Fascism and Nazism form Socialism in economic theory is how they translate "public control" into reality.
For the socialist, it means outright nationalization -- government ownership -- of private business. In a socialist state, the government own and operates the airlines, railroads, banks, phone companies, and any other business you can think of. Everyone is an employee of the State. Until recently in Fidel Castro's Cuba, even shoeshine boys worked for a government cooperative.
For the fascist, public or government control is just that -- control, not nationalized ownership, via complete bureaucratic regulation of ostensibly private business. As an ardent admirer of Marx, Mussolini created the term, Fascism, for his brand of authoritarian, patriotic Marxism.
As a social theory, fascism operates under the principle of "Might Makes Right," the exercise of raw, naked governmental police power. In America today, the increasingly rough shed violation of constitutional rights by government agents in the name of "Protecting the environment" or the "war on drugs" (just two of many current rationales) is an indication of how we are proceeding in this direction.
But fascism is also an economic theory, intellectually; fascism is far more dishonest than socialism, which at least has the courage to assert legal ownership of the economy and thus assume legal responsibility for it’s functioning. Fascism places responsibility for the economy on business, which is rendered Potemkinly private, a Hollywood set facade of private ownership.
The result of both socialism and fascism is the same: the destruction of economic freedom, replace the individual's choice of how to make a peaceful, honest living with State edicts. Fascism accomplishes this, however, more insidiously. Instead of being a straightforward employee of the government, you and I are told our lives and businesses are still private, while any attempt to act as such is proscribed by some regulation -- until we are trapped and immobilized in Washington's web.
We have become enmeshed in this web because it was spun around us so slowly. If the welter of government controls that Washington has enacted over the past sixty-six years (i.e., since the New Deal) had been attempted in one fell swoop -- say, in one Congressional term of two years instead of thirty- three terms -- the effort would, of course, have failed.
Instead, it has been spun right before our eyes - yet so slowly, strand by strand over many years, that we have barely noticed. We could call this slow spinning of the fascist web "Fabian Fascism."
Advocacy of what became know as Fabian Socialism was in vogue in the early part of the 20th Century, particularly among British socialists, such as Sydney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw. They argued that socialism could best be achieved by not frightening the horses, that is, not through immediate revolutionary action, but in small, incremental steps.
The gargantuan growth of governmental power in the United States over the last sixty years has not been in a socialist direction, towards nationalization and governmental ownership of industry. Clearly, it has been in the direction of ever more bureaucratic, regulatory control - that is, in a fascist direction. Since this growth has not been sudden, but slowly accumulative, we can accurately and aptly call the process Fabian Fascism.
Manufactured Crises
How did this happen? How did Americans relinquish so much independence and allow the federal government to gain so much control over their lives? Can we identify a mechanism or method by which Fabian Fascism succeeds?
We should first observe that this process - the progressive loss of personal freedom and growth of government - has not moved steadily in a continuum, but in burst and jumps. Now observe that many people are willing to trade freedom for security. When they feel threatened, they will grant government or police emergency powers to remove the threat. Then all the government has to do is somehow make the temporary or emergency powers permanent.
Thus, it is in times of social crisis that governments can most easily seize more power. The method of Fabian Fascism is the utilization or creation of a crisis as a rationale to progressively expand power.
The explosion of governmental growth in America and the development of Fabian Fascism began with the crisis of the Great Depression and the resultant passage of FDR's New Deal. Right on its heels came the crisis of World War II and then the on-going and just-ended crisis of the Cold war, allowing for fantastic increases in defense spending.
There crises were real, not imaginary. Advocates of bigger government utilized them, but did not make them up. One of the fundamental purposes of government, after all, is to protect its citizens from such clear and present dangers as Nazi and Soviet imperial aggression.
But the preservation of freedom requires that the expansion of governmental authority and financing necessary to deal with a crisis be granted only on an emergency basis and must be dissolved when the crisis is over. This is what the Washington Oligarchy always struggles to avoid.
Nonetheless, after the initial advance of Fabian Fascism made possible by the Depression and the New Deal, government growth was held in check fairly well through the 1950s and early 60s. But after defeating Barry Goldwater in 1964, Lyndon Johnson began an orgy of eleuthericide that continues to this day.
LBJ is the progenitor of Fabian Fascism, not FDR - for he realized that crises were the path to power and if one was not at hand, you had to create one. FDR did not create the Depression, he just took advantage of it. LBJ had no real crisis at hand so he made one up: Poverty.
Not the poverty didn't exist in America back then - in what society in history hasn't it? But it wasn't by any stretch of a bleeding heart's imagination some kind of societal crisis. Yet Johnson masterfully whipped up a media frenzy over his manufactured crisis, which he used to gain passage of his proposed "solution" - the most massive expansion of government power since the New Deal, a collection of government social programs called "The Great Society."
Notice that thirty years and hundreds of billions of taxpayer's dollars later, we don't have any less poverty, but we have a lot less freedom, because Johnson's programs have never gone away. This is because the purpose of the Great Society had nothing to do with poverty. There is a big difference between an excuse and a purpose. "Curing poverty" was only the excuse for Great Society welfare schemes; the purpose was to trick the American people into letting the Washington Oligarchy expand its power.
This formula for the advance of Fabian Fascism has worked ever since. After Johnson's Poverty Crisis and the War on Poverty came Nixon's Drug Crisis and the War on Drugs; then Carter's Energy Crisis; then the premier liberal crisis of modern times, the Environmental Crisis. It was only thanks to Hillary Clinton's hubris that the latest fashion in crisis mongering failed, the Clinton Health Care Crisis.
All of these manufactured crises offered one and only one type of solution to the alleged crisis: vast government programs at taxpayer's expense. None ever offered free market solutions, or were used to expand individual freedom, rather than restrict it. All of them either took a problem or set of problems, and hyperbolized it to the moon until it became a self-made "crisis" - or created problems out of thing air as an outright hoax, like "Global Warning." (like "Global Freezing" scare of 15 years ago claiming man's pollutants were participating the next Ice Age)
The media merrily plays an enthusiastic accomplice in the scheme not just because its members are mostly liberal, but because more importantly, crises generate more readers, viewers and listeners. This is why the principal product American media sells to its customers is crises, not information.
Certainly there are problems in our society, often severe, regarding poverty, drugs, the environment, et al. But the last thing these situations need is massive government intervention, which just makes them worse. They are not crises requiring emergency powers. They require people freely motivated to solve them without government coercion.
And that's the catch. If these problems were actually solved, all these government programs and bureaucrats wouldn't be needed. Thus the crises must be perpetual, never solved, always requiring another program, another intervention and more taxpayers' money. For the game is not to solve the problems but to use them to control people more through regulations or subsidies (or both), making them dependent on those writing and enforcing the regs and providing the handouts. People who are dependent on you are people who vote for you. The result is a form of fascist rule imposed upon a citizenry not by a dictator who seized power by force, but by freely elected leaders.
Democratic Fascism
We could call it Democratic Fascism whereby a people's freedom is not taken away from them by dictatorial force, but is voluntarily surrendered.
Just as a socialist government can be unelected dictatorship (like Cuba) or a freely elected democracy (like Sweden), so can a fascist government. Democratic fascism, or a fascist democracy is not more of an oxymoron than democratic socialism or a socialist democracy Instead, it is the most accurate description of what America's political system has become. A patient Fabian strategy taking many years has persuaded the American people persuaded, unwittingly and almost unconsciously, to voluntarily chain themselves to their colonial masters in Washington.
Americans have imposed the tyranny of Washington upon ourselves. No longer innocently oppressed, America has become of nation of belligerent beggars, demanding with insufferable arrogance an endless cornucopia of government handouts, subsidies, and "entitlements." Refusing to pay for them themselves, they demand that others pick up the multi-trillion dollar tab - most especially and contemptibly, their children and grandchildren.
This is, indeed, America's real drug crisis. Forget smack and crack. By orders of magnitude, the most addictive and destructive drug in America is welfare, government subsidies. Once people are shooting up the dole into their veins, be they farmers on farm price supports, artists on NEA grants, businessmen on protective tariffs and quotas, fourth generation welfare moms, or well-to-do greedy geezers on Medicare and Social Security, they're hooked far more than any heroin addict. And any threat to cut off or even diminish their drug supply makes them go berserk. So any attempt to really cut the federal budget deficit, much less balance the budget, is completely hopeless because so many millions of Americans want government goodies and don't want to pay for them.
None Dare Call It Fascism
So - how do we, you and I, help America restore its freedom by helping it to kick the fascist drug of the dole?
We must begin by breaking the great taboo, by using the forbidden word - fascism - in every public forum at our disposal. The left has always know that control of language was the key to political success - just look at the "political correctness" movement as a clear example. We must get the term of democratic fascism out into public discourse, widely debate, and ultimate accepted as an apt description of our current political system. That is requirement Number Uno.
Second, we must challenge the Brezhnev Doctrine of the Democratic Part: that once any area of people's lives or businesses becomes subject to bureaucratic control, it must stay that way; that any elimination or reduction of government intrusion and control is "turning back the clock" and is thus a return to immoral primitivism.
We must therefore abandon any strategy of containment, as we did in the pre-Reagan Cold War. With Reagan, we changed the goal of containment of the Soviets to rollback, and that's what we must do now. But rollback to what? Rollback to constitutional government, that's what. That's what our mantra should be, that's our goal, that's what we say when asked what we want, what we demand from America's constitutional government - literally acting outside the law - and all we are asking is for a government that isn't an outlaw, that obeys the founding laws of our country.

This is just an excerpt of an awesome essay by Dr. Jack Wheeler. Much more here.