While I would never say that my liberal friends are fascistic, the political left in this country certainly is. The idea that fascism can only come from the right is wrong. Ever hear of the Nazis? You know the National Socialist Party.
The left has really gotten hung up on the word fascist. As if the governing methods of the Soviets or Maoist were much different. In Nazi Germany when you spoke out against the govt the Gestapo took you away, in soviet East Germany if you spoke out against the govt the Stazi took you away. Big difference.
I read an article where the historian author said the difference between socialism and fascism were that socialism is global in outlook, fascism is national in outlook and often racial. The only other difference is that fascism has the facade of private ownership, you may own the steel mill but just like in socialism, the govt controls it.
And liberalism is not the opposite of fascism, a constitutional conservative is the closest thing I can think of to a polar opposite of fascism. Seperation of powers and states rights are not exactly the basis of fascism. Even my liberal friends have a bad habit of supporting the centralizing of power at the federal level. Fascists love that.
What was socialist about Nazi's?
Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian
"The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.
What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed
in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was
the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the
substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners."
Hitler and the socialist dream
Hitler's discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.
