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Originally Posted by ottopilot
Fascism is inherently a liberal/socialist concept.
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Hehehe....
Fascism can fit into basically any political structure, including but not limited to conservatism and libertarianism. Any time that authority by not just a government but any organization opposes freedom and equality you have fascism to some degree. It's marked by great power with a singular authority.
We can see clearly in the Bush Administration the degenerate marriage of conservatism and fascism. How do those find themselves as bed-fellows? Simple. Conservatism enjoys ideals like patriotism, militarism, corporatism, and populism. Those ideals happen to be shared by fascism, which makes the transition less uncomfortable. Much like putting a frog in slowly boiling water. In addition to this, conservative ideology in it's current state actually seems to want authority. This, of course, is a contradiction with traditional conservatism and is probably the most important point of this thread.
A few years ago I created a thread which basically asked: what is conservatism? I posted what I know to be traditional conservative ethics, beliefs, and ideals... but they didn't look anything like conservatism today. In fact, conservatism today is not conservatism of yesterday at all, it's a new beast: neo-conservatism. Neo-conservatism isn't just far right, it's far right, up and towards fascism. That marriage makes neo-conservatism extremely far from center, so far in fact that it manages to change the entire scale of where the center is.
In a country where liberalism lies on the left and traditional conservatism lies on the right, Host is very much correct that he lies just to the left of center. I'd lie a bit more left, and probably towards socialism a bit more, but I don't know of any radical liberals on TFP in the traditional scale. Now that neo-conservatism is on the board, it's thrown off the scale completely. So yes, compared to neo-conservatism (conservative-fascism), Host is far left. Compared to traditional conservatism, host is just left of center.
Just an aside, those who wish to discuss what conservatism means probably shouldn't do it in this thread but rather in the old thread, located
here