With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.
The bad guys – the Democrats – put up a great fight but the Republicans won in the end. It was Republicans who made possible the Civil Rights laws that finally and belatedly secured equal rights for blacks and other minorities. Democrats are the ones who bitterly resisted the Civil Rights Movement, and had the Democrats been the only party in America at the time, none of these laws, from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the Fair Housing Bill, would have passed.
I show in a subsequent chapter how the Democrats were the party of slavery, and how the slave-owner mentality continues to shape the policies of Democratic leaders today.
Fascism is an Italian term that means “groupism” or “collectivism.” The fasci in Italy were groups of political activists who got their name from the fasces of ancient Rome – the bundles of rods carried by the lictors to symbolize the unified strength of the Romans. The core meaning of the term fascism is that people are stronger in groups than they are as individuals.
This is how Hillary conducts government policy. She is ruthless, she is grasping, she appears to have little empathy or concern for people. She is old, and mean, and even her laugh is a witch’s cackle. There is almost nothing appealing about her. How, then, could she be the first choice of progressive Democrats and the apparent frontrunner for winning the presidency in November 2016?
Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3.
Imagine the horror of Obama and his aides, therefore, when one of the leading academic champions of Obamacare, economist Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, decided to reveal the con, even to the point of confessing it was a con. Gruber himself received $2 million in consulting fees related to Obamacare.
Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.
Gruber said that Obamacare was sold based on lies. He said the lies only worked because of the stupidity of the American people. Of one key Obamacare provision, Gruber said it was a “very clever exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” He said that while the administration promised transparency, lack of transparency was the key to getting the legislation through. Basically Gruber’s message to his fellow con men was, we fooled the rubes, and we got away with it.
At first the left tried to dismiss Gruber by saying he wasn’t an important architect of Obamacare. But earlier this same Gruber had been hailed by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and others as the Oracle of Obamacare.
The fascist synthesis did not view Italy as a society divided by class but rather as a unified country in which all sectors of society could come together. The fascists replaced the old Marxist divide between unproductive capitalists and productive labor with the single category of the productive nation.
It’s all very well to talk about the nation of producers and the interests of the nation, but who decides what its true interests are? Socialists claim to be in favor of equitable redistribution of income and wealth, but who determines what is equitable and does the actual redistribution? To these questions, the fascists answered: we do, through the instrument of the powerful centralized state. And this is also, in America, the answer that today’s progressives give.
In addition, the fascists adopted an economic policy that is closely parallel to, and in many respects identical with, today’s progressivism. Mussolini called this policy “corporatism,” but a more descriptive term would be state-run capitalism.
Mussolini envisioned a powerful centralized state directing the institutions of the private sector, forcing their private welfare into line with the national welfare. Isn’t this precisely how progressives view the federal government’s control of banks, finance companies, insurance companies, health care, energy, and education?
And just weeks into his presidency, even before Trump had done anything that could remotely be considered unconstitutional, Democratic Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Tulsi Gabbard raised the issue of impeachment.
Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism.
Moreover, neither the founders nor their successors implemented racist schemes like comprehensive state-sponsored segregation or created institutions like the Ku Klux Klan for the purpose of terrorizing and exterminating blacks. These were inventions of a later era and of a new party founded in the 1820s, the Democratic Party.
She is more than just a liar; she and her husband Bill are corrupt and known to be corrupt, going back to their Arkansas days. Just prior to leaving the White House, the Clintons pardoned a notorious fugitive who had fled the country to escape prosecution on racketeering and tax fraud. Pardons don’t come free – the man’s family and friends poured millions of dollars into the Clinton coffers in exchange.
When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism – they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx anticipated and hoped for.
Goldberg argues that fascism and communism, far from being opposites, are “closely related historical competitors for the same constituents.
If religion is so bad, what should be done about it? It should be eradicated. According to Sam Harris, belief in Christianity is like belief in slavery. “I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. Still the same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century.”6 But.