We’re All Fascists Now, ApparentlyFascism for facile journalists and the knee-jerk Left is like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous test for obscenity: They know it when they see it. And they see it everywhere.
By Ben Boychuk
June 23, 2022
David Von Drehle wouldn’t know real fascism if a Blackshirt was kicking him in the face with a steel-toe boot while belting out “Giovinezza.” And in these exceptionally stupid times, he’s certainly not alone. Nevertheless, the Washington Post columnist last week decided to share his thoughts about a new national conservative statement of principles drawn up by the Edmund Burke Foundation and published at The American Conservative.
The manifesto, Von Drehle writes, is “a rather slapdash document” that “has an awful lot in common with fascism.”
Yet Von Drehle’s only real support for invoking the f-word amounts to an aside three-quarters of the way through his column. The manifesto’s relationship with fascism, he asserts, is “its faceless conspiracy of the globalist imperium, its exaltation of a cultural coherence that never existed, and its casual licensing of government power to enforce conformity.”
That certainly sounds unseemly. But is it fascism? And, incidentally, is that what the document actually says? By all means, read it and decide for yourself. But here is an executive summary.
The manifesto affirms 10 (arguably 11) principles: National independence; rejection of imperialism and globalism; national government; God and public religion; rule of law; free enterprise; public research; family and children; immigration; race.
On independence: “Each [nation] has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.” Sovereignty, in other words.
That isn’t fascism. That’s John Quincy Adams.
* * *
Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/23/were-all-fascists-now-apparently/
