12 thoughts on “Fascism Works”

  2. “Hayward is the best Powerline guy by a large margin. He deserves a bigger platform”

    As you say:

    “THE DAILY CHART: AUTHORITARIAN DEMOCRATS
    The pop psychology term “projection” gets thrown around promiscuously, and when I hear the left charge that Trump is an “authoritarian,” I recall this survey finding from last year”

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/04/Democrsts-COVID-opinions.png

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/04/the-daily-chart-authoritarian-democrats.php

  3. I don’t think the fascism is working.
    It could be a plot, to increase gun sales-
    and in that sense, it’s working quite well.

    1. Red states are loosening restrictions but blue states are banning guns. How will the courts decide? In the long term, its unknown but for right now, it is punishment through process. The process isn’t just litigation or Jim Crow laws for gun owners but bankrupting firearms companies before cases can work their way through the courts.

      How many businesses can stop work for two years and still exist?

      Democrats know they will lose with the current SCOTUS and pass these laws knowing they will be struck down because of all the damage they do to people Democrats hate.

  4. As Orwell wisely surmised, fascism evolved into socialism is only quasi-stable. To maintain authoritarian control there must always be an existential crisis. In Orwell’s world it wasn’t the planetary eco-system it was continuous changing war and alliances between the three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. But that is a triviality. It works just as well with existential threats to Gaia.

  5. I’ve found that most people are OK with any methods used as long as their short-term goals are met. That doesn’t bode well for long-term stability.

  6. This was the argument made by the fictional Federation of Planets AID (Agency for Interplanetary Development) worker John Gill in Patterns of Force. Kirk demanded Gill to justify why he used Nazism as the template for political organization. As McCoy’s “hypo” brought him out of the drug-induced haze imposed by his minder, Gill replied that the inhabitants of the planet were on the verge of social collapse and that “Nazism was the most efficient system” to bring them back from ruin.

    There is some British “WW-II nerd” with a YouTube “channel” who talks like Ringo Starr (a pronounced Liverpool regional accent, I suppose). He claims that the “efficiency” of the Nazi system was a myth and the “stuff show” (my words cleaned up for Rand’s family-oriented Web site) of their bureaucratic edicts were their eventual undoing.

    In any of these Socialist regimes, there are gifted individuals (I am thinking of Albert Speer with the Nazis, Sergei Korolev with the Soviets) who are motivated by the dedication to their work who succeed in spite of the economic system. But overall, the claim is that Socialist systems are abject failures.

    1. In any of these Socialist regimes, there are gifted individuals (I am thinking of Albert Speer with the Nazis, Sergei Korolev with the Soviets) who are motivated by the dedication to their work who succeed in spite of the economic system. But overall, the claim is that Socialist systems are abject failures.

      Speer might have been a functional Nazi, many were, but the real German economic drivers were the industrial powers that the Nazi socialists (except for setting national priorities for production) largely left alone, like Krupp and I.G. Farben to name a few.

      Korolev, like Kurchatov before him, were allowed to function only because they were useful to the state at the time. Had the need passed, so would have they. As Beria was fond to point out: show me the man and I’ll show you the crime. Outside of selected pet projects, the Soviet economy was a ruin.

    2. From what I’ve read, the Nazi system only worked at all because when they took power they were smart enough to leave the old bureaucrats in place, because they realized that a bunch of street thugs had no idea how to make all the checks get mailed on time.

      Their jobs programs like the Autobahn had pretty appalling working conditions and underperformed, and where they tried their hand at socialist economics the usual result was shortages because they tried to dictate who should sell what to whom and at what price, at the wholesale level.

      The economic improvement was likely due to abandoning the gold standard so early, as countries recovered from the depression in pretty much the same order that they abandoned gold as a basis for their currency.

      During the war they were horribly inefficient in regards to gaining any benefit from occupying Western Europe, or ramping up war production. They didn’t even move to a war economy until I think 1944, as they still wanted to believe that Germany could win without much economic pain.

      When I watched wartime German newsreels (I watched all of them, which were released as a 17 DVD set), their farms and factory production systems looked to me like the way the US would’ve been doing things in the 1910’s.

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