I’ve discovered, since I’ve been palling around with liberals lately, that there is an F-word much more horrible to them than the one referring to a loving expression of dirty, sinful lust. It’s “fascist.” If a liberal calls you a fascist, that’s it. You’re on The List. The big, black list. They hate you.
Just as conservatives are constantly (no, seriously; read pretty much anything by conservative pundits since the 1950s) warning us that the country is becoming more communist or socialist, liberals crying from the wilderness against America’s slide toward fascism. There seem to be innumerable websites dedicated to enumerating the “characteristics of fascism,” where the characteristics are chosen by people who already believe we’re becoming more fascist, but that’s a bit circular, and surely biased. I have become interested in this (most recently because of a nifty Lew Rockwell interview with Naomi Wolf on the topic), so I wanted to find something less ideologically biased, describing the key characteristics of fascism.
Encyclopedia Britannica seemed like a good choice. According to the encyclopedia online (with thousands of clicks to get its “please buy now” banners to go away), here are what it lists as the common characteristics of fascist movements: Continue reading →