...of Jonah's book, by someone (shockingly) who has actually read it--Daniel Pipes:

To understand fascism in its full expression requires putting aside Stalin's misrepresentation of the term and also look beyond the Holocaust, and instead return to the period Goldberg terms the "fascist moment," roughly 1910-35. A statist ideology, fascism uses politics as the tool to transform society from atomized individuals into an organic whole. It does so by exalting the state over the individual, expert knowledge over democracy, enforced consensus over debate, and socialism over capitalism. It is totalitarian in Mussolini's original meaning of the term, of "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Fascism's message boils down to "Enough talk, more action!" Its lasting appeal is getting things done.

In contrast, conservatism calls for limited government, individualism, democratic debate, and capitalism. Its appeal is liberty and leaving citizens alone.

I've been arguing with people for decades that there is little useful difference between fascism and socialism/communism. Certainly what difference there was was pretty transparent to the user. I think that nine out of ten (if not ninety nine out of a hundred) times that the word "fascist" is used (particularly as an epithet) it is utterly mindless. As Pipes notes, "Already in 1946, George Orwell noted that fascism had degenerated to signify 'something not desirable.'"

Classical liberalism is as far as it's possible to be from both fascism and socialism. While the notion of a one-dimensional scale to describe political views is ludicrous enough in its own right, the notion that, on such a scale, libertarians and fascists would be on the same side is demented, but many people (particularly ignorant leftists) continue to maintain this delusion.

I'd like to think that Jonah's book will provide a corrective to this decades-long calumny, but sadly, as is often the case, the people who need to read it the most probably won't. They'll just continue to ignorantly fulminate about the cover.

[Late morning update]

Jonah writes in USA Today today about Putin's role model:

While Time saw fit to linger on "the Russian president's pale blue eyes," they left out a fascinating rationale for Putin's power grab. For much of the last year, the Russian government has been lionizing an American president who roughly seized the reins of power, dealt briskly with civil liberties, had a harsh view of constitutional niceties and crafted a media strategy, which critics derided as "propaganda," that went "over the heads" of the Washington press corps.

George W. Bush? Nope. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Putin has routinely invoked FDR as his role model. "Roosevelt laid out his plan for the country's development for decades in advance," he gushed at a news conference last fall. "At the end of the day, it turned out that the implementation of that plan benefited ordinary citizens and the elites and eventually brought the United States to the position it is in today."

"Roosevelt was our military ally in the 20th century, and he is becoming our ideological ally in the 21st," Putin's chief "ideologist," Vladislav Surkov, explained at a state-sponsored conference commemorating the 125th anniversary of FDR's birth.

There's a rich irony here. For years, liberals have wailed about the moral hazard of Bush's supposedly crypto- (or not-so-crypto) fascist presidency. And yet it's FDR, Lion of American Liberalism, who, some seven decades after his death, endures as the role model for Russia's lurch toward authoritarianism, if not fascism.

An inconvenient truth.

So, class, is Vlad a communist? A fascist? Both? Neither?

And if you don't want to take Putin's word for it, Hitler and Mussolini are involved, too.

Also, he notes the Bush derangement:

Back in the here and now, GWB has done nothing remotely like what FDR did (for good or for ill, some might say). Despite the constant bleating about his hostility to the rule of law and civil liberties, he hasn't tried to, say, pack the Supreme Court, or round up hundreds of thousands of Japanese (or Muslim) people.

Bush's critics certainly have a point that our leaders need to think about the example we set. It's advice liberals should have heeded long ago.

Indeed, though I disagree that they're liberals.

I think Putin may represent something somewhat new - a Mafiacracy, in which criminal elements have so perfectly pervaded the State that they become the State.

I don't think that this can last more than a generation or two before it devolves into something more closely resembling Monarchy or neo-Feudalism, however.

You've got it backwards; the criminals haven't pervaded the State, the criminals, and most of the criminal enterprise, *evolved* out of the State. In the freewheeling 90's, after the fall of the SU, state enterprises and resources were auctioned off and acquired by the nomenklatura. This was, effectively, the genesis of the Russian mafia that we see today.

I think Putin may represent something somewhat new - a Mafiacracy, in which criminal elements have so perfectly pervaded the State that they become the State.

I'm not so sure it's something new. Granted, what one sees on an edutainment TV channel may not be reliable, but the partnership between Batista and Lucky Luciano seems to have gone pretty deep.

Also, Andy's point parallels something I remember was said about the USSR back in the pre-Gorbachev '80s by a former KGB officer who had defected -- that the Soviet regime wasn't so much a government as organized crime on a geopolitical scale.

If anything, under Putin it seems to have diminished in stature, if not in scope.

Rand's question:
"So, class, is Vlad a communist? A fascist? Both? Neither?"

Answer:
All of the above to the extent they can be combined (i.e. he's somewhere between "both" and "neither" depending on what is discussed) but it doesn't matter all that much because he represents the best option among those that currently have any realistic chance of being in power in Russia.

My bias: the various forms of democracy are by the very definition significantly influenced by the cultures of the countries they exist in (changing over time as the dominant culture changes) and Russian culture has a love for strong leaders (or at least the perception of such).

While things could be better (and hopefully will be) the rest of the world could do a lot worse than having Putin (and future Putinesque inheritors) in charge of Russia. Zhirinovsky anyone? Or how about a new batch of blood red USSR communists, does that sound tempting? Thought not and they're the two main venues of alternatives that exist and has a chance. They both make Putin seem like a moderate.

Just trying to point out how easily perfect can become the enemy of good in relation to Russia: Gorbachev ("commie!") then Yeltsin ("drunkard!") then Putin ("thug!") and it's time to apply the brakes to avoid the options given above.

I could be wrong but I've got the distinct impression most Russians actually living in Russia view Kasparov and his kind like most Americans living in the US view Ron Paul or Kucinich. While they might agree with, sympathize with, or at least understand the reasoning behind this or that detail the message in total gets very alien to their own view of the world. And if Russians vehemently disagreed with their current leadership in significant numbers they wouldn't be shy of revolting (they're pretty good at it ^_^).

Increasing affluence is effective and hard to reverse: give Russia more time and hope Russians will use it well rather than descend into official outspoken fascism of the goose-stepping* kind (which while terribly bad would likely still be better than the old USSR unless they start killing tens of millions again).

* I guess most here already know that the USSR and Nazi Germany shared an affinity for that style.