Building a "New State"

(More thoughts inspired by Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascisim)

The next "man of the left" in Europe to embrace fascism was Adolf Hitler. "What Hitler got from Italian Fascism was the importance of having an idea that would arouse the masses." ("Hope and Change?") Hitler was willing to say or do anything to achieve and hold onto power. He loved to orate to "massive, exquisitiely staged rallies>" Sound familiar? "Without the loudspeaker, Hitler once observed, we would never have conquered Germany." Without the teleprompter, Obama never would have conquered America.

Hitler had four significant ideas: "power concentrated in himself, hatred - and fear - of Jews, faith in the racial superiority of the German Volk, and, ultimately, war, to demonstrate and secure the other three."

"Nazism and fascism were both popular movements with support from every stratum of society. Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological."

Goldberg notes that Hitler was "first and foremost a revolutionary." That made him a man of the left. "For conservatives, revolutions are almost always bad - unless as in the case of the United States, you are trying to conserve the victories and legacy of a previous revolution."

Hitler was all about building a "new state." In Mein Kampf he wrote, "Either the German youth will one day create a new state founded on the racial idea, or they will be the last witnesses of the complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world."

American conservatives, writes Goldberg, "seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution. American conservativism straddles these two distinct but overlapping libertarian and traditionalist strains, whereas Hitler despised both of them."

Hitler was into "identity politics," hating Jews and glorifying blue-eyed blonde Germans. He also suffered from an enormous intellectual inferiority complex. More important, he resented his father for any number of perceived offenses. Women, in his mind, were little more than terrifying syphilis carriers."