Trying to handle the crisis, the Fascist government
nationalized the holdings of large banks which had accrued
significant industrial securities. The government also issued
new securities to provide a source of credit for the banks and
began enlisting the help of various cartels…. The government
offered recognition and support to these organizations in
exchange for promises that they would manipulate prices in
accordance with government priorities. A number of mixed
entities were formed… whose purpose it was to bring together
representatives of the government and of the major businesses.…
This economic model based on a partnership between government
and business was soon extended to the political sphere, in what
came to be known as corporatism.… The Fascists began to impose
significant tariffs and other trade barriers.… Various banking
and industrial companies were financially supported by the
state.… [The national leader] created the [New Governmental
Entity]….[which soon] controlled 20% of [the nation’s]
industry through government-linked companies.…
[The national leader] also adopted a Keynesian policy of government spending on
public works to stimulate the economy.… Public works spending
tripled to overtake defense spending as the largest item of
government expenditure.
As much as that description sounds like U.S. government policy
begun under George W. Bush and now greatly expanding under Barack
Obama, the above passage of course describes the economics of
fascist Italy in the 1930s, as summed up
by Wikipedia. (A quick Google search produces plenty of similar
summaries of “economic fascism.”) Furthermore, “The Fascist
conception of life,” Mussolini wrote, “stresses the importance of
the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his
interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical
liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the
individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as
expressing the real essence of the individual.”
Obama came close to those same sentiments in his most recent
press conference: “But one of the most important lessons to learn
from this crisis is that our economy only works if we recognize
that we’re all in this together, that we all have
responsibilities to each other and to our country…. We’ll recover
from this recession, but it will take time, it will take
patience, and it will take an understanding that, when we all
work together, when each of us looks beyond our own short-term
interest to the wider set of obligations we have toward each
other, that’s when we succeed, that’s when we prosper, and that’s
what is needed right now.”
Just as Mussolini did (in slightly different words), Obama
repeatedly talks about using government to “leverage” private
investment for the greater good. And now, as of this week, he
actually dared to force a private corporation, General Motors, to
fire its CEO. Meanwhile, his close ally Barney Frank
introduced a bill to give the Treasury Secretary the power to
set all salary levels for all employees of any companies in which
the government has a capital stake.
As George Will has
written, Congress has delegated so much economic authority to
the Treasury, the Fed, and the president that the Constitution
itself has almost certainly been shredded in the panic.
Meanwhile, in Congress’s rush to pass a huge
expansion of “national service” programs, almost exactly as
outlined by Obama in a 2007 speech, few congressman likely
realized that the details
included “campuses” with “superintendents” of uniformed
youth, formed into “cadres,” and indoctrinated even in math and
science classes in the ideals of “service learning” financed
through a “social innovation fund” funneled through favored
“community organizations.” (ACORN, anyone?) Even elementary
school students would be recruited for these government-sponsored
efforts.
As the Washington Examiner editorialized, it all sounds
like a “creepy authoritarianism” on the loose. (See
these examples just
from last year’s campaign.)
Again and again, Obama has called not just for a change of
policies, but to “change America” or to “remake” this nation. And
here, from his national convention speech last August, is his
notion, his collectivist notion, of change: “That’s the promise
of America — the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but
that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief
that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.”
Well, no, not when it comes to state power. Government should
have no authority to make us be our brothers’ “keepers,” lest the
state itself become Big Brother. Obama said that “mutual
responsibility” is the “essence of America’s promise,” but that’s
not in any Constitution or Declaration of Independence I can
find. Oh, yes, voluntary mutual responsibility is
essential for a healthy civic society — but if government starts
determining the shape of that responsibility and forcing it upon
us, that is where freedom starts to fade.
Since when was it government’s role, as Obama claims, to
“invest” in all sorts of new technologies, and to “help our auto
companies re-tool” while somehow making it “easier for the
American people to afford these new cars”? And who is doing the
insisting when Obama talks about “our insistence on something
larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life”?
Sorry, but if our public life — defined by the left, in the end,
always as that part of life subject to government control — is
larger, it means our private lives, our free lives, are smaller
and more constrained.
All of this economic intervention and government expansion, all
of this use of collectivist language and collectivist goals,
combined with the first big steps towards Obama’s goal of “a
civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as
strong, just as well-funded” as the American military, is
straight out of Mussolini’s playbook.
Then you combine it with the Obamanation of a growing, Il
Duce-like cult of the leader. The stadium speeches in front
of a Greek emperor’s columns. The permanent campaign, the
deliberate ubiquity. The “public service” radio ads with the
president himself urging national service upon us. The iconic
imagery on campaign materials. The millennial language about his
own election as the moment when seas stopped rising and Earth
started healing and about the need to “save the planet.” The
traveling abroad with an official entourage of 500 people (and a
limo nicknamed “The Beast”). The fawning media. The simplistic
slogans chanted over and over.
Then there were the words of Michelle Obama in February of 2008:
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand
that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions.
That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your
comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that
you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives
as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
Finally, there is Obama’s elevation of raw science to what he
calls its “rightful place” as an end in itself, as if divorced
from questions of morality. As Charles Krauthammer
wrote, “how anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe
this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee…is hard to
fathom.”
To be clear, none of this is to even come close to equating the
Obama administration with Nazism. The conflation of Nazism with
fascism is a gross misunderstanding of history; the original
fascism and Nazism are entirely different breeds of vipers, with
the latter being far more deadly.
Nevertheless, the comparison of today’s situation to that of
Italian fascism is no mere scare tactic, but a serious concern.
Just because fascism wasn’t Nazism — no master race ideology, no
genocide — doesn’t mean it wasn’t anathema to everything
Americans hold dear. The diminution of liberty, the enhanced
state control, the indoctrination of youth, and the cult of the
leader all violate basic tenets of the American experiment.
Already, there is an organized movement afoot to repeal the 22nd Amendment
that limits presidents to two terms. The site specifically posits
that multiple terms for Obama would help the United States emerge
from “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
As if it is not the native abilities of the American people, but
only the genius of an extraordinary leader, that can help us
overcome.
A leader for life? All of this, every bit of it, is an insult.
And it is frightening.
