When I was 18, I joined the Marine Corps Reserves. After four years, I decided to go full-time.
It turns out one does not just go from the Marine Corps Reserves to active duty. Recruiters told me I could do a year of recruiter duty, but after that I’d be right back in my reserve unit.
I really wanted to go full time.
A buddy of mine was transitioning from the Army National Guard to active duty in the Army, and he mentioned to his recruiter that I was getting the runaround from the Marines. This recruiter contacted me, and I decided that instead of reenlisting in the Marine Corps Reserves, I’d switch branches and go into the Army.
Shortly thereafter, I got orders to go to the 82nd Engineers in Bamberg, Germany, where I lived from 1994 to 1997.
Bamberg is a beautiful city in Northern Bavaria, between Nuremberg, Schweinfurt, and Wurzburg, and before long I started attending a German/American men’s group that met monthly in Nuremberg.
My father was a history teacher who collected history books, particularly about Europe between World Wars and the European theatre of World War Two. I grew up reading them, and eventually inherited them.
My father’s biggest question regarding Nazi Germany was how a powerful, industrial country like Germany could have followed Hitler. I don’t know if my dad ever found an answer he was satisfied with, but I had opportunities to ask not only Germany/American Men’s Group members who remembered the war, or had even fought in it, but also some of their family members who had fought in the war.
Of course, this all occurred twenty years before Donald Trump first became President.
By my father’s estimation, Trump was the worst President in American history, and that was true even before Trump was sworn into office.
My father honestly believed that the election of Donald Trump was the single most calamitous event in American history, beating out 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression, or you name it. Dad believed America could survive one Trump term, but not two. Trump, by my father’s estimation, wanted to make himself King of what would become a Russian vassal-state.
My father was a little miffed when I voted for Trump. To my father, the son who had read all of the same history books he’d read, and had grown up asking the same kinds of questions he’d asked – with the added insight of having talked to actual former members of the Nazi party (and even some former SS officers) – was suddenly voting for the American equivalent of Hitler.
Let me be clear with my definitions: ‘Fascism‘ is an economic system in which the means of production are centrally planned and controlled – just like in socialism – but left nominally in private hands. Fascism uses profit and pay, under tight state control, to incentivize people to work and to incentivize those who manage companies (technically who ‘own’ them, but what is ‘ownership’ without control?) to manage them competently.
Fascism is Marx-style socialism with an incentive system added in.
Nazism is a form of fascism in which the concept of ‘nation’ was defined in ethnic, rather than geographic, terms.
Had my dad followed my writing, he might have noticed that I too was watching everything going on in our country, and I even agreed with my father that the United States was drifting toward a fascist autocracy. I’ve been writing about this going back to the late 1990s (right after rotating back from Germany), when my first blog won the Rush Limbaugh Conservative Website of the Week award.
I was pulled aside by my First Sergeant a couple of weeks after Rush’s recognition, and told to take my site down before someone ‘much higher up in the chain of command’ poured through it, looking to find anything that could be construed as a ‘disloyal statement.’ Nobody wanted to punish me, but someone up in my chain of command (how far up I do not know) did not want my website to exist.
Making a ‘disloyal statement’ is a felony under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I’d written a couple of articles on the Clinton Whitewater scandal, and since Bill Clinton was Commander in Chief, any criticism of him could have been used to put me in prison. I took the site down, but I’ve always regretted doing so.
Years later, when out of the Army, I began writing again.
I wrote about our modern fascism directly in an essay titled, “Fascism was Socialism 2.0 – Now we’re living in 3.0.” This version of fascism wasn’t brought on by Donald Trump though. My father was wrong about that. Trump, in fact, is hated because he comes from outside our fascist system and is working to take it down.
Seeing that our country did go fascist does not tell us exactly how it happened. I answer that partially in an article titled, The Quiet Coup: How the Intelligence State Took Over America, and partially in They Broke the Market—Now They’re Selling You the Cage.
I’ve actually written about this topic quite a bit. I have articles discussing how modern censorship works, how modern indoctrination works, how the connotations of words have been weaponized to help program the public, how ‘social justice’ is the opposite of actual justice, and a bunch of other relevant essays. At least half of my Stubstack touches on various aspects of this exact topic.
My dad has not read any of my Substack. Of course, he was dead before I wrote on Substack, but I’ve been writing about the same topics (albeit not in the long-form essay format) for almost 30 years.
I did write one piece my dad read. It wasn’t an article though. It was a paper I wrote about the Pharmaceutical Industry for a class, as a part of my MBA. My dad liked it so much he printed out copies and distributed them to his friends. But since my father and I differed on all things religion and politics, my broader writing never appealed to him and had he read it, it would only have upset him.
My most profound historic insight did not come from a history book, either. It came from The Road to Serfdom, by economist Friedrich Hayek, who claimed that President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt’s New Deal, and particularly his National Recovery Act and the National Industrial Recovery Administration, were modeled directly on Mussolini’s Italy.
This hit me like a lightning strike, providing a tremendous amount of explanatory power covering the rise of the American Bureaucratic Administrative State.
My father did not like populism and believed that we should defer to experts for decision making. He learned his history from historians, and as a history teacher he stayed in his lane. It would never have occurred to him that a central historical insight that answered his deepest historic question might come from an economics book rather than a history book.
Anti-populism errs not because ‘elites’ don’t have tremendous knowledge within specific intellectual circles, but because in many cases the critical insights are scattered across multiple circles, and none of the elite can see all of them.
Mussolini – not Hitler – was the original fascist leader, and as I examined the historical record more closely, I found that Franklin Roosevelt openly admired Mussolini’s methods of governance. Roosevelt referred to Mussolini as “that admirable Italian gentleman” and directed Ambassador Breckenridge Long to consult with Mussolini on how Italy organized its economy and state institutions. Multiple New Deal intellectuals and administrators openly described fascist Italy as a successful laboratory for modern governance. While they avoided the word “fascism” in public discourse, the Roosevelt Administration continued, even after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, to praise Mussolini’s economic and administrative outcomes.
We pretend that World War Two ended fascism, but Francisco Franco continued to rule Spain as a fascist, well into the 1970s. Democrats did not like Franco’s autocratic rule but they openly admired the control he had over Spain’s economy right up until Franco died in 1975.
This distinction matters now that generations of Americans who have no emotional connection to World War Two have reached adulthood. Such people are not instinctively repulsed by the same labels we are, and if they study history (as some do), they see the hypocrisy between using the word ‘fascist’ as a bludgeon, while admiring what are clearly fascist regimes.
When young adults see the word ‘fascism’ used in ways that are clearly dishonest, they don’t just question the application of the word, but also the historical judgments shown toward the people the term is used against.
When we ‘teach’ our youth things they can see are not true, we invite them to also reject things that are. This is dangerous.
Fascism as a word fell out of favor in both parties, but as an economic system it did not. Only the word fell out of favor. The Democrats spun that word off as ‘far right’ on the grounds that it came from Germany’s right, ignoring that Otto Von Bismarck created the German state as a socialist country such that their right was socialist. Suddenly we began ‘teaching’ that libertarianism is a ‘gateway drug’ that leads to fascism, when in fact libertarianism rejects all forms of totalitarianism in both politics and economics.
Without economic freedom a person cannot decide where to work, what to buy, what to wear, what to eat, or anything else of any real significance. As such, any system that centrally plans the economy, by definition also centrally plans the people, and will become authoritarian by necessity even if not by design.
The current model is far more threatened by freedom than by communism, tolerating the ‘far left’ while working to make anything even moderately on the right look extreme. Like my father, it blames the political right, and particularly Donald Trump, for everything, but that’s deflection.
I did not just inherit my father’s history books. I also inherited a framed copy of ‘The Unfinished Portrait of FDR,’ officially licensed by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff. This painting was one of my father’s prized possessions. I gave it away to a young friend who, like my dad, teaches history, and who, also like my father, is unknowingly a fascist.
Giovanni Gentile’s political portion of fascism recognized that socialism must occur within a state (thus it was national rather than global in scope), and recognized that central planning required a level of authoritarianism that is not compatible with democracy. Fredrich Hayek made the same observation: central planning is not compatible with democracy.
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and other ‘democratic socialists’ show us how silly the concept of ‘democratic socialism’ is whenever they run for office. They say, ‘tax the rich,’ and then they promise that they will ensure everyone who is not rich has free food, free healthcare, free housing, free bus rides, free child care, free college, etc. etc. etc..
If we took every penny every billionaire in the country has – not just their incomes, but also their wealth – it would pay for ‘Medicare for All’ for less than three months. Add in the millionaires and you’ll get another six. After that, there would be no billionaires or millionaires left to pick up the tab, and we would have no way to pay for ‘Medicare for All.’ That is the economic reality of ‘free.’
Democratic Socialists ignore this fact. They also ignore that bankrupting the nation to get nine months of free healthcare would do nothing to feed or house anyone.
Democratic socialist point to countries that have free healthcare as proof that free healthcare is possible, but they ignore that these countries do not just tax the rich.
Democratic Socialists ignore that according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s research, the poorest American workers pay only 7% of their income in total, combined taxes, while the richest Americans (the top 0.01%) pay about 46% on average, and in some states pay more than half. The Middle Class pays about 25%.
That’s not just federal taxes. That’s all taxes at all levels of government. State and local taxes are based on national averages and will vary from place to place.
In the Nordic countries, the poorest workers pay around 40% of their income in total, combined taxes, while the Middle Class pays around 50%, and the richest earners pay about 55%.
Not only do Nordic workers pay much more in taxes than do workers in the United States, but their incomes are lower as well.
Nordic countries have high minimum wages, but professional workers, such as nurses and engineers, earn roughly 30 to 70 percent less, depending on the profession, than their counterparts in the United States.
There is zero appetite in the United States to tax the poor and middle classes at the rates it would take to pay for Medicare for All, whereas without doing so we simply cannot pay for it.
‘Tax the rich’ is a marketing ploy. We already do that.
Giovanni Gentile saw, as did Friedrich Hayek, that the populace would never vote for a viable central plan. Nobody wants to accept rational tradeoffs, and so people vote for, not the person offering the best set of tradeoffs for a functional central plan, but the guy from Vermont with crazy hair who promises more of everything, paid for by someone else, under the slogan, ‘Feel the Bern.’
People do that irrespective of whether or not the promises made are possible to deliver, and then in order to try and keep those promises, such people are forced into authoritarianism whether they like it or not.
The European Union is a bureaucratic administrative state in which officials are not elected. People within the EU have the right to vote in national elections (as long as the EU approves of the people running – ask Marine LePen what happens when they do not), but there are no EU elections.
The EU is not a democratic body, and it does not govern like one.
Whatever member states consider themselves, the EU is fascist, and if we look at how our government actually runs rather than at the window dressing we call ‘elected officials,’ we’ll see that other than our Bill of Rights, we operate largely in the same way.
And of course we do. Giovanni Gentile’s political model for fascism was created in support of the economic model rather than the other way around, and any nation using the economic model of fascism will be forced to create the authoritarianism central planning requires. Whether that authoritarianism is done in the open, as in the European Union, or surreptitiously through an administrative bureaucracy that runs the country independently of those we elect, it’s authoritarianism either way.
Fascists and communists hate one another not because they are opposites, but because fascists see communists as ideological fools whose hatred of profit blinds them from economic reality, whereas communists see fascists as ideological sellouts who put the desire for a functional model ahead of ideological purity. They are not dissimilar models so much as brother ideologies fighting over inheritance. The original fascists all came from Marxism.
Both systems are collectivist, and both require authoritarianism to survive. Central plans must be enforced, and as such, any system that uses central planning requires authoritarianism to survive.
That is the lesson my father failed to learn, and though it is too late for my father, there is still time for the rest of us.
Fascism and socialism are both totalitarian in nature. We should reject both.
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