The Fascist Epithet; M. Tanner

Therefore, once a political opponent has been appropriately labeled, that person can be shouted down and driven from the po dium without the need of further discussion. Using epithets is obviously not engaging in logical political discourse, but politics isn't about logic, it's about winning and who gets to use legal force for their own advan tage. Anyone who looks seriously at the American political system can only con clude that elections are won on an emotional level, not through rational debate. Usually, the politician who scares the voter the most is the one who wins. Lovers of individual freedom generally agree that politicians, news commentators, and government bureaucrats who want to increase the size and power of government, raise taxes, further limit personal freedom, and give us socialized medicine are mis guided at best, or crooked, power-hungry thieves at worst. If we believe that they support evil ideas, shouldn't we use an epithet that makes it clear what we think about them? Ultimately, freedom can only be won by those willingto fightfor it, and the first weapon in any fight are fighting words.

Mr. Tanner, who lives in Moscow, Idaho, is a retired American diplomat andfree-lance writer. We need a single word epithet that paints the enemy as black as we believe the enemy to be. Words like statist, liberal, or conservative simply don't get the blood boiling. Use them, and the listener yawns and continues to ignore well-reasoned arguments. More important perhaps, the targets of such sweet-sounding epithets usually accept the words as compliments that explain what they consider themselves to be. The Best Epithet To be effective, an epithet must make the target angry. An effective epithet must also have a basis in truth. The best epithet is one that describes a truth that the targets refuse to recognize about themselves and their political positions. By making an angry target deny the truth of the epithet or to try to explain it away, we might finally get a rational, logical discussion going as we ex plain why the epithet does honestly apply.

There is a very appropriate epithet that fits perfectly everyone who favors more government control of business, the econ omy, society, and health care. But first some political and philosophical background. With the collapse of Communism as a threat to our modern society, it's not sur prising that the two most damning political epithets that can be hurdled these days are Fascist and Nazi, the second epithet being an even more dangerous mutation of the first evil. Those who usually throw those hated epithets think they know what they accuse 284 an opponent of being. In the popular mind, the two words are assumed to mean anyone who is a bigot, a racist, an extreme nation alist, or a political ultra-conservative. Understanding Fascism If we examine the political evolution that produced fascism, we find that fascism has an entirely different meaning. Once we un derstand what that meaning is, it's easy to understand why it is that while the epithet fascist is so popular with liberal politicians and commentators, hence little is ever writ ten about fascism as a political philosophy.

Liberal statists don't want the public to know that when they point the finger of fascism at someone else, they are pointing four fingers at themselves. From a logical perspective, a fascist may be a racist, a bigot, an ultranationalist, a violent sociopath, or a blond Swede, but all racists, bigots, ultranationalists, socio paths, and blond Swedes are not fascists. Fascism is a specific form of government, just as feudalism, monarchy, socialism, communism, and constitutional democracy are specific forms of government. The foots of fascism are found in the French Revolution. While the American Revolution was founded on the philosophi cal idea that all men should be free, and that the primary role of government should be to guarantee that freedom, the intellectuals and politicians of the French Revolution argued that government should guarantee not only freedom, but economic equality as well.

While this is an appealing idea, the reality is that as government goals, freedom and economic equality are mutually exclusive. When people are free, those with greater intellectual capacities, creative abilities, physical prowess, initiative, or good luck will probably end up with the most eco nomic wealth. The only way a government can create economic equality is to take wealth forcibly from the most productive members of society and redistribute it to less productive citizens. The economically suc cessful lose their freedom so that the unTHE FASCIST EPITHET 285 successful can share the wealth. The more economic equality the government guaran tees, the more it must restrict the freedoms of its most productive people. Socialism The original political philosophy that promised both freedom and equality was socialism. Socialism proved to be a power ful rallying cry for revolution in economi cally backward countries where tyrants ruled, especially in countries where foreign tyrants ruled. However, intellectual sup porters of the socialist dream soon discov ered that it was hard to sell socialism in democracies or even in those nondemo cratic countries where rulers had allowed the population a degree of economic free dom.

The voters in the Western democracies not only didn't want socialism, they were terrified of the prospects of a violent social ist revolution. In the United States, most citizens quickly decided that socialism was un-American. Not willing to give up the impossible dream that a government could guarantee both freedom and equality, the utopians proposed an alternative to socialism: the idea of a strong, nationalistic government which would allow private enterprise and privately owned property, but would con trol and regulate it to insure that the prop erty owners and entrepreneurs served the public good instead of their own selfish greed. Under this scheme, politicians prom ised that they could achieve the goals of socialism without the otherwise inevitable pain of revolution and confiscation. It is not surprising that these utopian intellectuals began calling themselves Pro gressives. What they were proposing was progressive socialism rather than revolu tionary socialism. They also pre-empted the word liberal, redefining the liberalism of the American founders which held individual freedom as the ideal of a limited government into modern American liberalism in which the government limits individual freedom in order to insure economic equality.

286 THE FREEMAN • JUNE 1994 The Promises of Progressivism Academic economists like John Maynard Keynes threw in the promise that a strong central government could also smooth out economic cycles of boom prosperity fol lowed by bust depression. Progressive dem ocratic government thus not only promised freedom and equality, but also the good life of economic prosperity and perpetual growth. The liberal democracies proved to be especially vulnerable to this philosophy which promised the voters significant im provements in their economic station wi~h out the need for great sacrifice on their part. While the successful and wealthy did have to pay the bill, initially, the bill presented extracted only a minor portion of their personal wealth and they accepted the ar gument that it was a cheap price if they were to avoid a socialist revolution. In America, this system of progressive, socially engineered economic democracy was adopted so slowly that only a few thinkers recognized that it represented a total and complete break from the philoso phy of government as espoused by those who wrote the American constitution. By the mid-1930s, this progressive idea that a strong government could resolve all prob lems of human society had thoroughly per meated the popular political thought of Western democratic governments.

Fascism This philosophical counterpoint to social ism in which people were permitted to retain property and personal wealth while the state regulated how private property and wealth would be used to achieve the common good was given a name by Benito Mussolini when he founded the Fascist Party in Italy. He promised to give the Italians the same things that Roosevelt promised to give Americans. Mussolini called the political process for doing that Fascism. In like manner, Adolf Hitler promised the Germans equality and prosperity through regulation and control of private wealth and industry. Hitler called his movement Na tional Socialism (which was shortened to the acronym Nazi) because he was promising the same utopian benefits as the socialists promised, but without the pain of the im mediate confiscation of all property and wealth. Like the democratic progessives, the fascist tyrants argued that the fascist way to prosperity and equality was the only hope for defeating the Communists.

Fascism was and is a political philosophy in which a strong central government per mits, but regulates and taxes, private wealth and property in order to achieve the utopian socialist ideal. Hitler played on frustrated national pride and used hate and envy of the German Jewish population in selling his fascist dream. To be a fascist one must not neces sarily hate the same things the Germans hated at the time Hitler rose to power. But hatred is an inevitable by-product of fas cism. A primary fallacy offascism and socialism is the belief that intelligent, selfless people can be found within any society-people who are so wise and knowledgeable that they can determine what constitutes the common good and what individual sacrifices are necessary to achieve that good. The fallacy dictates that such wise citizens are morally entitled to do whatever is necessary to ensure that all other members of the society make the necessary sacrifices. Other members of the society have a moral obli gation to make the personal sacrifices, even if in making them, they suffer a significant decrease in the level of their own comfort and personal happiness. By definition, any one who resists making such a personal sacrifice is deemed an immoral, evil, selfish beast who deserves whatever punishment the state decides to inflict.

Because fascist controls of business and private property can never produce the promised result of equality, freedom, and economic prosperity any more than socialist promises can, fascist politicians must al ways be looking for someone to blame for their failures while continuing to promise even greater future economic and social miracles. Both socialists and fascists must demonize those who object to the state taking over control of their property, busi nesses, and lives in order to justify the violence that the political leaders will inflict on them. Fascism and socialism grow only in the soil of envy and hate. Like socialism, fascism has fatal flaws that can lead to excesses like those of Nazi Germany just as socialism led to the gross excesses of violence in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and on down to the killing fields of Cambodia. But the excesses of racism, the violent suppression of minority views, ruling class elitism, and aggression against other states are symptoms of fas cism, not descriptions of the political economic system.

Hitler picked the German Jews as hate targets. Modern fascist politicians demonize Wall Street bankers, entrepreneurs, well paid CEOs, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, illegal immigrants, creative fi nancial managers, gun owners, fundamen talist religious leaders, and dead white guys who wrote criticism pointing out the falla cies of fascism and socialism. World War II started out as a confronta tion between the two competing utopian systems for building a brave new world. Hitler expected that the democratic fascist THE FASCIST EPITHET 287 countries of England and the United States would either support his efforts, or remain neutral. How we ended up on the side of the most extreme socialist country in the world rather than the most extreme fascist country requires a complicated historical examina tion beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, once Germany was de feated, the ongoing worldwide struggle im mediately reverted back to a conflict be tween fascism and socialism and continued on for another 45 years. The primary issue of the Cold War was never freedom or slavery; it was whether total state control would be achieved through Communist rev olution or through progressive subversion of the democratic process.

Now that socialism has collapsed under its own weight, we will next learn how long it will take democratic fascism to collapse because of the same fatal flaws in economic and political theory that are common to all socialist systems. Much of modern American liberalism is fascism and always has been. We ought to start calling it that. By calling it what it really is, we can draw attention to what is happening in our country and explain why we keep losing freedom while violence and hate grow and spread .through our society. D THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY ECONOMIC FASCISM by Thomas J. DiLorenzo W hen most people hear the word "fas cism" they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "cor poratism, " that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a "model" by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called "fascism" but "planned capitalism." The word fascism may no longer be politically acceptable, but its synonym "industrial policy" is as pop ular as ever.