Fascism. Favors an authoritarian government. Totalitarian in scope. The government controls and owns the means of production and the supply of money. A usual example of fascism is Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Italy. Fascism favors charismatic leaders like Hitler and Franco. Fascism is a populist movement; that is fascist organizers don’t come to power through armed insurrection but by appealing to the common people’s distrust of privileged elites. Hitler was effective at building a strong industrial base in post WWI Germany - he used the industrial magnates to end capitalism and free markets in favor of state controlled industries. Franco also poured a lot of the national wealth into manufacturing.
Classical Liberalism. The definition of liberalism has changed over the years. A good example of American liberalism before 1960 is Adam Smith, the father of capitalist economics. He advanced the idea of the “unseen hand” of progress in the free markets. Smith advocated against a form of statism that was prevalent in the 18’th century – the domination of the economy by kings and nobility. He was considered liberal because his teachings about free markets were leading away from statism. We still use the classic definitions of liberalism in words like “liberal arts”, where liberal simply means open minded.
Post-Modern Liberalism. Even before conservatives abandoned free markets, liberals discarded personal freedom in favor of egalitarianism. Liberalism seems to believe that the unseen hand of free markets oppresses the less powerful. Where Smith noted that self-interest can benefit everybody, post-modern liberalism uses the pejorative term greed. Proponents of post-modern liberalism favor governmental control over the economy as a way to bring fairness to all people. Liberalism supports populist, charismatic leaders. We have recently found that the acknowledged liberals in the current federal administration want the government to control the means of production – by purchasing controlling shares in companies, by denying companies the right to reward their employees, and even by refusing to allow some banks to pay back loans advanced by the federal government.
Defining recent political movements is risky. One can only look at the policies of the people who call themselves liberal or conservative, and think that they are speaking for the majority of like-minded people. Many observers may base their definitions not on economic programs but on the stated intentions of the self-defined conservatives and liberals. Liberalism has been successful in portraying itself as favoring fairness. Liberalism (classical and post-modern) is a strong proponent of all people being equal. Hitler spoke of fairness. We are loathe to believe that he was honest - from our perspective he seems to have favored enslavement of the people to the government and industries. We want to view the intentions of liberalism and fascism as opposite. But if we have no evidence but the stated intentions of the two groups, they are indeed very similar.
When one looks through the lens of economics, he may see that fascism and liberalism both favor big government at the expense of personal liberties. Both strive to control the means of production through the government and both think that government is better than free markets at creating a strong economy.
Conservatism can be just as fascist as liberalism. Conservatism is a political philosophy that means to conserve something. For most of the twentieth century, that something was classical liberalism. Now it increasingly becomes big goverment.
Just about everybody claims to favor fairness. It used to be that conservatives believed that fairness comes when people take control of their own destiny, and that government will usually make things worse. They still pay lip-service to that tenet, even while looking for creative ways to control the private lives of the citizens. Liberals unashamedly think that fairness comes through an outside agency like the government, and that independent people will be victimized by the powerful. Each side denies any noble intentions of the other. True believers often think that the people with whom they disagree are simply lying to build populist support.
Lets touch on whether fascism is more like conservatism than liberalism. Like liberals, fascists did not want to conserve anything, but tried to remake their countries in new ways. But conservatism is indeed the new liberalism, and it is difficult to compare political movements that are seventy years apart other than to say that fascism was a type of liberalism in its day. Which movements favor or deny personal liberties like free speech? A liberal once bemoaned to me the coming Iraq war by stating that the Bush administration should not be sounding the drum beat of war; in this, he opposed the exercise of free speech. But there are numerous examples of conservative and of liberal audiences shouting down a public speaker with whom they disagreed. And so, both seem somewhat opposed to free speech, like the fascists (if book burnings are an indication of their disdain of free speech.)
I’ll conclude with a Hitlerism (can’t remember the exact quote). He said that if through your own words, someone sees something good about your political opponents, then you have failed your cause. Both conservatives and liberals in America have taken this to heart. Each camp intently portrays its opponents as loathsome oafs. This attitude is repugnant. But it segues back to the main point, which now I modify to state: today's conservatives and liberals are both much like 1940's fascists.
I tire of these peas in a pod. It's time to try something different.
