Tuesday, October 27, 2009

KRAUTHAMMER VS. "LIBERAL FASCISM"

Charles Krauthammer may be the leading public intellectual for conservatives and in this Der Spiegel interview, he contradicts one of the movement's lesser stars, Jonah Goldberg. You may recall that Goldberg vainly tried to show that liberalism and fascism are really the same in his agit-prop book.

In this passage, Krauthammer correctly observes that there is a continuum, going from Communism at one end to Fascism at the other and liberalism is somewhere in between.
Krauthammer: I don't know whether I should call it a mistake, but it turns out he is a left-liberal, not center-right the way Bill Clinton was. The analogy I give is that in America we play the game between the 40-yard lines, in Europe you go all the way from goal line to goal line. You have communist parties, you have fascist parties, we don't have that, we have very centrist parties.

So Obama wants to push us to the 30-yard line, which for America is pretty far. Right after he was elected, he gave an address to Congress and promised to basically remake the basic pillars of American society -- education , energy and health care. All this would move America toward a social democratic European-style state. It is outside of the norm of America.

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