4. What does fascism look like in North America?

It certainly looks different from fascism in Hitler's 1930s Germany or Stalin's 1940s Soviet Union? For one thing, it is "nice." Today, liberal social workers are far more likely than paramilitary goons to advance fascism in North America.

Have you heard anything like this recently?

You must stop punishing yourself for failing to try very hard. There is no such thing as failure, and you can't help who you are anyway. Celebrate yourself just as you are! And we will teach a lesson to the people who are making you feel bad about yourself. Leave it to us ...

or

Whether you really behaved abusively is irrelevant. The important thing is you are perceived that way.

The basic message is, everything is about feelings, and nothing is about facts. You are helpless, but never mind, the government will take care of you. Or - if you are the liberal fascist's identified enemy - and the government will punish you.

Such a government neither wants nor needs free citizens or free speech. So, not surprisingly, as Goldberg observes,

Free speech, too, is under relentless assault where it matters most - around elections - and it is being sanctified where it matters least, around strippers' poles and on terrorist Web sites. (p. 20)

What fascist government can certainly use is enraged, dependent rant boys - and it soon acquires the tax money to reward them. Typically, left-wing fascists dress down, and rant for food banks or safe injection sites, whereas right wing fascists dress up and rant for military build-ups or crime crackdowns.

Anyone familiar with Canada today will recognize how much more numerous the former type of fascist is.

An important liberal fascist goal is to make Canada as much like European welfare states as possible. Such states are constantly praised as models, even when even minimal research shows that many things are going badly for them. From Goldberg again:

The American fascist tradition is deeply bound up with the effort to "Europeanize" America and give it a "modern" state that can be harnessed to utopian ends. ... American fascism is milder, more friendly, more "maternal" than its foreign counterparts; it is what George Carlin calls "smiley-face fascism." Nice fascism. The best term to describe it is "liberal fascism." And this liberal fascism was, and remains, fundamentally left-wing. (p. 8)

Just like in Canada, eh? He warns,

... if there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help. (p. 334)

Next: 5. But what is the ultimate goal of today's liberal fascism?