Stop Me Before I Vote Again

What's not to like about a man who 'on the first anniversary of' his 'march on Rome...publicly confirmed that, far from fascism being opposed to liberalism, all good Liberals had a duty to support the new regime.' And he promptly followed the footsteps of his illustrious Liberal predecessors in launching "humanitarian interventions" abroad:

Mussolini's colonial atrocities in Ethiopia and Libya (where in Cyrenaica he killed half the population) as well as his opportunistic entry into the second World War was all too much in keeping with "Liberal" traditions.

Remember how all of the Liberal blogs howled about Jonah Goldberg magnum opus "Liberal Fascism"? It brought to mind the line "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Then along came Obama.

par4
i think
the joke and the jolt
in father's analogy
hitler- benito
mitt-barry

is lost
if its made into an equation

that social liberals
like social democrats
shared notions of corporatism
with fascism
in some highly generalized sense
indeed generalized beyond ability to ID
the three different movements
really is far from enlightening

to boot
barry is in fact not a social liberal

he's a cultural liberal

in the end
an implicit advocate of
business is business

culutuiral liberalism
is a confection of the second half of the twentieth century not the first half
like post WWI social democracy
and the new deal

call it imperialism with a human face

barry's overseas economics is
strictly neo liberal

his domestic agenda
re-regulation lite
hands off the FED
and returing
to a balanced prudent pruning
tax increasing and entitelement cutting
fiscal policy

his imperial policy is nothing new
its the sunny side of a bi partisan
"make the planet everywhere "
"safe" political and market freedoms
ie
for multi national cross border private venture profiteering

this bi partisan policy
has held both party's perminent cores
more or less in thrall
since 1946

tr's turn of the century
progressive imperialism
and st woodrow's
liberal internationalism
were earlier book ends for this same policy set
the two titans of global americaism
only disagreed if vehemently
on tactis and exculpatory rhetorical florishings
not long run strategic
politico- economic objectives

mussolini's "foreign " policy
shared a world view
more with alfred hugenberg
then with adolph hitler

Jokers like Goldberg can hardly be taken seriously but a more recent work which is several orders of magnitude more rigorous does explore the fascination that fascism held for many liberals, especially in its early years. Although to be fair as "the two beauties" spiraled out of control in the late 30s most liberals within their societies soured on them, but again this was due more to the crudity and (national) self-destructiveness of their actions and rarely due to any disagreement over principle:

German liberalism was not only the opponent and victim of National Socialism, Kurlander suggests, but in some ways its ideological and sociological antecedent. That liberalism could be both has crucial implications for understanding the genesis of authoritarian regimes everywhere. Indeed, Weimar democrats' prolonged reluctance to oppose the regime demonstrates how easily a liberal democracy may gradually succumb to fascism.

I thought that the original lesser evil was Satan.

Give it a rest, Oxy.

One is already too many.