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How Conservatives are the Death Eaters of Fascism
Keep it warm. Even if it’s gone underground, it will sprout again.
Conservatives have shepherded Fascism through its dark night of the soul. Having had its butt whipped during World War Two, it was not, unfortunately, dispelled completely. Discredited, yes. Rendered clawless, kind of. Muzzled, more or less. Extirpated from the human political vocabulary and excreted into History’s lavatory? Certainly not.
What happened to Fascism in the wake of World War Two was more of a Voldemort experience: Its killing-the-Potter-Child-moment (taking over the World) rebounded. Just as Voldemort disappeared from view only to reappear a decade later, Fascism went dark for a time, but has come back, albeit as a deformed baby, with no nose.
Upon the defeat of Nazi Germany and the ultimate collapse of the Axis powers in 1945, a small part of Fascism’s soul detached from its dying body and lodged itself in the right half of the Western mainstream body politic, thus ensuring its escape from obliteration and its ability to stage a comeback when the time was ripe, that is to say when the winning ideology of Liberalism and Parliamentary Democracy ran into economic trouble. Such trouble was inevitable, as the post-war world economy, as designed at Bretton Woods, was premised on constant (therefore unsustainable) growth, ensuring there would be booms and busts, as well as winners and losers. Unfortunately the Fascist shard that lodged itself in the human body politic fed greedily on economic malaise, the latter providing the excuse for latent anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, etc., to rise to the political level.
After a half-century of quiet recuperation, and even notwithstanding the baby-Fascist’s hideous deformity, its return is proving surprisingly effective. This is because, like the Dark Lord himself, there is an army of Death-eating Neo-Fascists ready to assist.
They are called Conservatives.
I know, I know, hold your outrage for a second. Not all Conservatives are Fascists, and certainly the two should not be conflated. And I also know that we rush to hurl the Fascist epithet at those we dislike. But two points pertain here. The first is that the beliefs that post-war Conservatives maintained in the United States mirror in many ways the ideologies that…
