Wait; so progressives can no longer progress ?
Hallelujah, we're done here
Hallelujah, we're done here
Have I got this right, a Leftist and legit Nationalist Socialist
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You know who has been quoting Gentile over and over and over the last 40 to 50 years? Democrats.
And Gentile would strongly disagree with your assessment. He was a socialist and a leftist. He just didn't agree with Marx on how to implement it.
Absolutely a leftist.
The myth that fascism and Nazism are phenomena of the right relies heavily on Americans not knowing what fascism and Nazism really mean, what those ideologies stand for. Leftists in academia and the media have worked hard to portray fascism and Nazism in terms of sheer demagoguery and generic authoritarianism, carefully concealing the ideological roots that would reveal fascism and Nazism’s true political colors.
Let’s meet the man himself, Giovanni Gentile, who may be termed fascism’s Karl Marx. Gentile was, in his day, which is the first half of the 20th century, considered one of Europe’s leading philosophers. A student of Hegel and Bergson and director of the Encyclopedia Italiana, Gentile was not merely a widely published and widely influential thinker; he was also a political statesman who served in a variety of important government posts. How, then, has such a prominent and influential figure vanished into the mist of history?
Let’s consider some key aspects of Gentile’s philosophy. Following Aristotle and Marx, Gentile argues that man is a social animal. This means that we are not simply individuals in the world. Rather, our individuality is expressed through our relationships: we are students or workers, husbands or wives, parents and grandparents, members in this or that association or group and also citizens of a community or nation. To speak of man alone in the state of nature is a complete fiction; man is naturally at home in community, in society.
Right away, we see that Gentile is a communitarian as opposed to a radical individualist. This distinguishes him from some libertarians and classical liberals, who emphasize individuality in contradistinction to society. But Gentile so far has said nothing with which conservatives—let’s say Reaganite conservatives—would disagree. Reagan in 1980 emphasized the importance of five themes: the individual, the family, the church, the community and the country. He accused the centralized state—big government—of undermining not merely our individuality but also these other associations.
Gentile now contrasts two types of democracy that he says are “diametrically opposed.” The first is liberal democracy, which envisions society made up of individuals who form communities to protect and advance their rights and interests, specifically their economic interests in property and trade. Gentile regards this as selfish or bourgeois democracy, by which he means capitalist democracy, the democracy of the American founding. In its place, Gentile recommends a different type of democracy, “true democracy,” in which individuals willingly subordinate themselves to society and to the state.
Gentile recognizes that his critique of bourgeois democracy echoes that of Marx, and Marx is his takeoff point. Like Marx, Gentile wants the unified community, a community that resembles the family, a community where we’re all in this together. I’m reminded here of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s keynote address at the 1984 Democratic Convention. Cuomo likened America to an extended family where, through the agency of government, we take care of each other in much the same manner that families look out for all their members.
While Marx and Cuomo seem to view political communities as natural, inevitable associations, Gentile emphasized that such communities must be created voluntarily, through human action, operating as a consequence of human will. They are, in Gentile’s words, an idealistic or “spiritual creation.” For Gentile, people by themselves are too slothful and inert to form genuine communities by themselves; they have to be mobilized. Here, too, many modern progressives would agree. Speaking in terms with which both Obama and Hillary would sympathize, Gentile emphasized that leaders and organizers are needed to direct and channel the will of the people.
Despite Gentile’s disagreement with Marx about historical inevitability, he has at this point clearly broken with modern conservatism and classical liberalism and revealed himself to be a man of the left. Gentile was, in fact, a lifelong socialist. Like Marx, he viewed socialism as the sine qua non of social justice, the ultimate formula for everyone paying their “fair share.” For Gentile, fascism is nothing more than a modified form of socialism, a socialism arising not merely from material deprivation but also from an aroused national consciousness, a socialism that unites rather than divides communities.
Gentile also perceived socialism emerging out of revolutionary struggle, what the media today terms “protest” or “activism.” Revolutionaries, Gentile says, must be ready to disregard conventional rules and they must be willing to use violence. Gentile seems to be the unacknowledged ancestor of the street activism of Antifa and other leftist groups. “One of the major virtues of fascism,” he writes, “is that it obliged those who watched from the windows to come down into the street.”
It's weird because because Gentile assessed himself as a fascist and then went on to say that fascism is the rejection of socialism and opposed to Jacobins
Again, it's a weighty statement that Reagan made about fascism manifesting itself in liberalism.
You claim that upper academia has been infiltrated by leftists who have interpreted history incorrectly and maliciously so and have brainwashed their students, and your counter-evidence to what is a pretty well accepted premise in academia (fascism being right-wing) is D'Souza, who is certainly not a writer without biases, nor his he a historian and Reagan, who is also not a historian.
Have you read Goldberg’s "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning?"
Dozens and dozens of them. I'm a history teacher. I get paid by collegeboard in the summer to grade AP European History essays. I trust them over Dinesh D'Souza, certainly.
Of course. You're immersed in a liberal echo chamber.
Tell me fair-minded liberals, what do you think about the actions of Antifa?
What are your thoughts about the Electoral College?
What are your thoughts about the Electoral College?
Yes, I've read how your collective interprets the Reagan years. I was there and remembered what really happened.
Inaccurate reinterpretation with a liberal agenda. You can't be trusted.
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You know who would support an electoral college over the popular vote? That's right, Gentile.
Fascism/Nazism and Socialism/Communism are two sides of the same coin. Totalitarian forms of government are shitty forms of government.
But they each have a distinct shittiness to them, that makes them uniquely shitty.
A distinct shittiness that makes them uniquely shitty... I laughed out loud, sir! I'm going to file that one for the future.
I don't usually evaluate turds on any other quality than being turds. Does the distinct shittiness make one of those turds better than the other turds? I'm an equal opportunity flusher.
I'd say that depends on the individual's nose. Some people even think some of them smell pretty good, apparently.
