“Fascism” has a certain pride of place in self-consciously leftist political theory, and that is precisely why I initially had very little interest in “the fascism debate.” The sorts of people who seemed especially invested in that debate also appeared to be the sorts of people who considered “liberal” to be its own special sort of pejorative; less hateful than “fascist” but perhaps more contemptible. I was a liberal then, I am a liberal now. I am more interested in the particulars of how regimes and social systems function, in a political science and sociological sense, than in the internecine dispute of obscure corners of political theory.
John Ganz changed my mind on this. So today I thought I would dip my toe in a bit, approach the fascism debate from my own peculiar angle.
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