Identity policies is the most toxic of all, since if it does not have real identities, it will invent them to achieve its political goals.

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“Humankind has long since become accustomed to the mass destruction of those identified as enemy combatants—and the enslavement of others taken in war. In the past, millions have been put to the sword arbitrarily, because of their ethnic origin or their religious convictions. But it was the twentieth century that managed to bring even more capriciousness and inhumanity to the mayhem. By the mid-twentieth century, mass murder came to typify an entire class of political regimes.

Even before the coming of the Second World War, millions of citizens were destroyed by those who governed, even though their rulers were nominally at peace with everyone. Untold numbers were threatened with ‘shunning,’ incarceration, expulsion, or death—because of membership in a proscribed class, ethnic, or religious community. However prepared those threatened might have been to abandon those identities—to become whatever they wished by those who ruled—that possibility was foreclosed. Those afflicted with ‘counterrevolutionary class consciousness’ could do little, if anything, to have themselves restored to good favor. Those so unfortunate as to have ‘bourgeois’—landlord or capitalist—backgrounds were denied schooling or employment, and were often marked for destruction. Rulers sometimes sentenced them to thankless labor, exiled them, transported them, incarcerated them, and frequently, if not always, killed them. Finally, those deemed members of a scorned race or despised class could do very little to earn tolerance, much less security. Minimally scheduled for abuse, many, if not most, were ultimately consigned to martyrdom.

In the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of human beings suffered unnatural deaths at the hands of those who governed them. Of course, mass murder has not been unique in history, but its sanction by public rationale—providing motives to rulers, and influencing the behavior of the masses—may well be. That such a rationale licenses the systematic destruction of entire groups within a community at peace, contributes to the enormity.

That such a homicidal public enterprise has behind it the persuasiveness of moral counsel, the force of law, and the power of the state, renders its enormity almost incomprehensible. In such instances, the murder of those the state is expected to protect is not random, but governed by principle, and facilitated by carefully contrived organization. Murder on such scale, supported by public endorsement, and employing public instrumentalities, must necessarily engage the overt or tacit participation of large segments of the community—so that virtually all are made complicit. In substance, in the twentieth, humanity has experienced a century in which governments have sponsored, sanctioned, and created special facilities for the mass destruction of innocent lives. It has engaged almost everyone in the doing. All of which makes the mass murders of the twentieth century perhaps unique in history.”

• Totalitarianism and Political Religion An Intellectual History, 2012 by A. James Gregor

21st century: Hold my beer! Ups, I meant hold my gay beer. My bad.

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"The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments.

Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises—of class, nation, or race—and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.

In short, “fascist” is a modern word for “heretic,” branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic. The left uses other words—“racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “christianist”—for similar purposes, but these words have less elastic meanings. Fascism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. George Orwell noted this tendency as early as 1946 in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.

American Progressivism—the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent—is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.

Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to understand why anyone doubts the fascist nature of the French Revolution. Few dispute that it was totalitarian, terrorist, nationalist, conspiratorial, and populist. It produced the first modern dictators, Robespierre and Napoleon, and worked on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the “general will.”

The paranoid Jacobin mentality made the revolutionaries more savage and cruel than the king they replaced. Some fifty thousand people ultimately died in the Terror, many in political show trials that Simon Schama describes as the “founding charter of totalitarian justice.” Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: “There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man…[W]e must exterminate all our enemies.

Fascism’s success almost always depends on the cooperation of the “losers” during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes—the people who have just enough to fear losing it—are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this “status anxiety” as the source of Progressivism’s quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against “fat cats,” “international bankers,” “economic royalists,” and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues.

Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified.

Only because so many were determined to label fascism right-wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It’s still a “power to the people” ideology,

Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact—an inconvenient truth if there ever was one—is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space.

In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the “true leader” uses the masses like “tools.” He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue."

― Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning