"We're all fascists now"

Along those lines, you write, "What is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to force us to be healthy for our own good." And you cite the example of a state legislator who wants to ban using iPods when crossing the street. Under that definition, how are, say, seat-belt laws, helmet laws, laws against drunk driving, the drinking age, all that, not fascistic?

First of all, again, I think we need to remember that something can be fascistic just like something can be socialistic and not be evil. It can just be wrong ... And so I think you can make the argument that a lot of the things you cite are fascistic in one sense, but that doesn't mean they're automatically bad ideas. The autobahn was fascistic -- that doesn't mean that we should ban highways.

That said, a lot of the things you listed, if I heard you right, are laws for preventing people from harming others. And that is a legitimate function of government: to protect the general welfare, to protect people's privacy and property and lives. That is perfectly within the Anglo-American tradition of constitutional law and all the rest. But where you get into scarier territory is when you have people saying that you can't smoke in your own home or that you can't eat certain foods or that because of the healthcare system that we have and that Democrats want to expand, since harming yourself costs the taxpayer money, you have no right to harm yourself.

I mentioned seat-belt laws, which are really aimed at the individual who's supposed to be wearing the seat belt. And on the right, there's the Terri Schiavo debate.

Yeah. Well, but the Terri Schiavo debate is an interesting example. The Nazis were grotesque euthanizers. Long before they went to the Jews they started exterminating the mentally ill, the enfeebled, what they called "useless bread gobblers," people who couldn't contribute to the society. And there are all sorts of criticisms that I think are legitimate that you can aim at pro-lifers, but you can not argue that pro-lifers are somehow Nazi-like in their support of the pro-life cause, because it is exactly contrary to the way the Nazis operated to believe that every life is sacred.

You write, "[Liberalism] is definitely totalitarian -- or 'holistic,' if you prefer -- in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists."

Couldn't that just as easily be said of the American right? You've got, certainly, conservatives judging entertainment from political perspectives; I remember discussion on [National Review group blog] the Corner of the 2006 Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl through a political lens. There were "Freedom Fries" and boycotts of French food and wine. And, I mean, your wife worked for [former Attorney General] John Ashcroft, so you know that on the right, sex can certainly be political.

I will first stipulate right upfront that I agree with you that there are lots of places on the right where this is so, and I don't like that stuff either ... That said, I don't think that the equation between liberalism and conservatism goes as far as you would like to take it. You know, you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on.

I don't have any problem with liberals or conservatives criticizing stuff that goes on in the popular culture ... [I]t's when you want to dragoon the state into these things, everything from hate crimes to these early interventions in childhood. You read "It Takes a Village" and Hillary [Clinton] declares that basically we're in a crisis from the moment we're born and that justifies the helping professions from breaking into the nuclear family at the earliest possible age.

You have a lot of this stuff on the right, I agree. [George W.] Bush had his marriage counseling stuff that he wanted to propose, I didn't like that. I think Ashcroft gets a very bad rap, but one of the things I did not like was him basically having this philosophy that since the federal government was an agent for a left-wing agenda that therefore it should be an agent for a right-wing agenda. I agree with you to that extent, that that stuff is bad, and it constitutes a kind of right-wing progressivism that I really do not like and I see in people like Mike Huckabee and I see to a certain extent in compassionate conservatism, as I discuss at the end of the book.

You write about militarism being central to fascism, and a militaristic strain remaining in today's liberalism -- the war on cancer, the war on drugs, the War on Poverty. Why include the war on drugs formulation with liberalism? It was Richard Nixon who declared it, then it withered under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan really brought it back and was the drug warrior.

I think that's probably a fair criticism. But I should start at the beginning ... What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization ... That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They're not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at.

As for the war on drugs part, I think you make a perfectly fine point, except I would argue that Nixon was not a particularly conservative guy. Measured by today's standards and today's issues, Nixon would be in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

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