When will democrats make concerted effort to equate "conservatism" to "fascism"?
Rethugs have done an enviable job in tying "liberalism" to something bad, deplorable and anti-american to such as extent that many democrats run away from being called liberal. I think it is time to make conservatism as bad, anti-american and anti-twenty-first century. It should be tied tightly to fascism and autocracy.
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Back in the late 40s and 50s, there were plenty of people on the right who had a history of having been fascist sympathizers or enablers before the war -- but the right was very successful in making it impossible to talk about any of that.
I suspect this was one of the real objectives of McCarthyism. It made even indirect connections to communism by anyone on the left so toxic that it both dulled the impact of the old fascist ties on the right and made the left scared to bring them up for fear of McCarthyite retaliation.
If you look at magazines and political cartoons of the period, for example, you find that certain sorts of things were being discussed quite frankly during the Truman years, but just sort of disappeared from the discourse around the time of the 1952 election.
Even when the John Birch Society sprang up at the end of the 50s, it managed to launder the fascist origins of its pet conspiracy theories (like by going through and substituting the word "bankers" for "Jews"
and pass as home-grown right-wing nutjobs instead of outright fascists.
Libertarianism has also been a useful "beard" for the right, in that it's pro-capitalism but also undeniably anti-totalitarianism. They're just careful not to let any actual libertarians get their hands on real power.
Given 60 years of obfuscation, it would be almost impossible at this point to go back and make a case for the fascist roots of present-day conservatism. They're there, but they're as well-buried as Jimmy Hoffa.
