"The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus" by Ayn Rand

Tonight's topic is the new Fascism ruled by consensus. And when an audience of this size on a night such as we are going through now appears, you obviously don't want to hear from me. You want to hear from Ms. Ayn Rand. Ms. Rand. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I shall begin by doing a very unpopular thing that does not fit today's intellectual fashions and is therefore anti consensus. I shall begin by defining my terms so that you will know what I'm talking about. Let me give you the dictionary definition of three political socialism, fascism, and statism. Socialism, a theory or system of social organization which advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, etc. In the community as a whole. Fascism, a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation, industrial, commercial, etc. Statism, the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty. These definitions are from the American College Dictionary, 1957. It is obvious that statism is the wider generic term of which the other two are specific variants. It is also obvious that statism is the dominant political trend of our day. But which of those two variants represents the specific direction of the trend? Observe that both socialism and fascism involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories. Socialism negates private property rights altogether and advocates the vesting of ownership and control in the community as a whole, that is in the state. Fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals, but transfers control of the property to the government. Ownership without control is a contradiction in terms. It means property without the right to use it or to dispose of means that the citizens retain the responsibility of holding property without any of its advantages, while the government acquires all the advantages without any of the responsibility. In this respect, socialism is the more honest of the two theories. I say more honest, not better, because in practice there is no difference between them. Both come from the same collectivist statist principle. Both negate individual rights. Both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government. And the differences between them are only a matter of time, degree, and superficial detail, such as the choice of slogans by which the rulers delude their enslaved subjects. Which of these two variants of statism are we moving toward? Socialism or fascism? To answer this question, one must first ask which is the dominant ideological trend of today's culture? Ladies and gentlemen, the shocking the disgraceful the terrifying answer is there is no ideological trend today. There is no ideology. There are no political principles, theories, ideals or philosophy. There is no direction, no goal, no compass, no vision of the future, no intellectual element of leadership. Are there any emotional elements dominating today's culture? Yes, one fear. A country without a political philosophy is like a ship drifting at random in mid ocean at the mercy of any chance, wind, wave or current. A ship whose passengers huddle in their cabins and cry don't rock the boat. For fear of discovering that the captain's bridge is empty. It is obvious that a boat which cannot stand rocking is doomed already and that it had better be rocked hard if it is to regain its. But this realization presupposes a grasp of facts, of reality, of principles and a long range view. All of which are precisely the things that the non rockers are frantically struggling to evade. Just as a neurotic believes that the facts of reality will vanish if he refuses to recognize them, so today the neurotics of an entire culture leads men to believe that their desperate need of political principles and concepts will vanish if they succeed in obliterating all principles and concepts. But since in fact neither an individual nor a nation can exist without some form of ideology, this sort of anti ideology is now the formal, explicit, dominant ideology of our bankrupt culture. This anti ideology has a new and very ugly name. It is called government by consensus. If some demagogue were to offer us as a guiding creed the following tenets that statistics should be substituted for truth, vote counting for principles, numbers for rights and public polls for morality. That pragmatic range of the moment. Expediency should be the criterion of a country's interest. And that the number of its adherents should be the criterion of an idea's truth or falsehood. That any desire of any nature whatsoever should be accepted as a valid claim, provided it is held by a sufficient number of people that a majority may do anything it pleases to a minority. In short, gang rule and mob rule. If a demagogue were to offer it, he would not get very far. Yet all of it is contained in and camouflaged by the notion of government by consensus. This notion is now being plugged not as an ideology, but as an anti ideology. Not as a principle, but as a means of obliterating principles. Not as reason, but as rationalization, as a verbal ritual or a magic formula to assuage the national anxiety, neurosis, a kind of pep pill or or goofball for the non bot rockers and the chance to play deuces Wild for the others. It is only today's lethargic contempt for the pronouncements of our political and intellectual leaders that blinds people to the meaning, implications and consequences of the notion of government by consensus. You have all heard it and I suspect dismissed it as politicians oratory, giving no thought to its actual meaning. But that is what I urge you to consider. A significant clue to that meaning was given in an article by Tom Wicker in the New York Times of October 11, 1964. Referring to what Nelson Rockefeller used to call the mainstream of American thought, Mr. Wicker writes, quote, that mainstream is what political theorists have been projecting for years as the national consensus, what Walter Lippman has aptly called the vital center. Political moderation, almost by definition, is at the heart of the consensus. That is, the consensus generally sprawls over all acceptable political views, all ideas that are not totally repugnant to and do not directly threaten some major segment of the population. Therefore, acceptable ideas must take the views of others into account, and that is what is meant by moderation. Now let us identify what this means. The consensus generally sprawls over all acceptable political views. Acceptable to whom? To the consensus. And since the government is to be ruled by the consensus, this means that political views are to be divided into those which are acceptable and those which are unacceptable to the government. What would be the criterion of acceptability? Mr. Wicker supplies it. Observe that the criterion is not intellectual, not a question of whether certain views are true or false. The criterion is not moral, not a question of whether the views are right or wrong. The criterion is emotional. Whether the views are or are not repugnant. To whom? To some major segment of the population. There is also the additional proviso that those views must not directly threaten that major segment. What about the minor segments of the population? Are the views that threaten them acceptable? What about the smallest segment, the individual? Obviously, the individual and the minority groups are not to be considered. No matter how repugnant an idea may be to a man, and no matter how gravely it may threaten his life, his work, his future, he is to be ignored or sacrificed by the omnipotent consensus and its government, unless he has a gang, a sizable gang, to support him. What exactly is a direct threat to any part of the population? In a mixed economy, every government action is a direct threat to some men and an indirect threat to all. Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force to some men at the expense of others. By what criterion of justice Is a consensus government to be guided by the size of the victim's gang? Now note Mr. Vicar's lessons. Therefore, acceptable ideas must take the views of others into account. And that is what is meant by by moderation and just what is meant here by the views of others of which others, since it is not the views of individuals nor of minorities, the only discernible meaning is that every major segment must take into account the views of all the other major segments. But suppose that a group of socialists wants to nationalize all factories and a group of industrialists wants to keep its properties. What would it mean for either group to take into account the views of the other? And what would moderation consist of in such a case? What would constitute moderation in a conflict between a group of men who want to be supported at public expense and a group of taxpayers who have other uses for their money? What would constitute moderation in a conflict between the member of a minority group, such as a Negro in the south, who believes that he has an inalienable right to a fair child, and a much larger group of thousand races who believe that the so called public good of their community permits them to lynch him? What would constitute moderation in a conflict between me and a communist, or between our respective followers, when my views are that I have an inalienable right to my own life, liberty and happiness, and his views are that the so called public good of the state permits him to rob, enslaved or murder me? There can be no meeting ground, no middle, no compromise between opposite principles. There can be no such thing as moderation in the realm of reason and of morality. But reason and morality are precisely the two concepts abrogated by the notion of government by consensus. The advocates of that notion would declare at this point that any idea which permits no compromise constitutes extremism, that any form of extremism, any uncompromising stand, is evil, that the consensus sprawls only over those ideas which are amenable to moderation, and that moderation is the supreme virtue superseding reason and morality. This is the core, the essence, the motive, the real meaning of the doctrine of government by consensus, the cult of compromise. Compromise is the precondition, the necessity, the imperative of a mixed economy. The consensus doctrine is an attempt to translate the brute facts of a mixed economy into an ideological or anti ideological system and to provide them with a semblance of justification. A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls, with no principles, rules or theories to define either, since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to Further controls. It is an unstable, explosive mixture which ultimately has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, no principles to define its goals, no principles to define its laws, no principles to limit the power of its government. Government. The only principle of a mixed economy which necessarily has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged, is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. Such a system, or more precisely anti system, breaks up a country into an ever growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense as the nature of such a jungle demands. While politically a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order. Economically, it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries. A chaos of robber gangs looting and draining the productive elements of the country. A mixed economy is ruled by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies all fighting to seize the momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government that is by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all. By all is compromise, compromise on everything and in every realm, material, spiritual, intellectual, so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rapid structure. If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain terms solid, absolute, untouchable. Everything and everyone has to be fluid, flexible, indetermined, approximate by what standard the expediency of any immediate moment. The only danger to a mixed economy is any not to be compromised, value, virtue or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group or movement. The only enemy is integrity. It is unnecessary to point out who will be the steady winners and who the constant losers. In a game of that kind. It is also clear what sort of unity of consensus that game requires. The unity of a tacit agreement that anything goes, anything is for sale or for negotiation, and the rest is up to the free for all of pressuring, lobbying, manipulating favor, swapping, public relationing, give and taking, double crossing, begging, bribing, betraying and chance the blind chance of a war in which the prize is the privilege of using legal armed force against legally disarmed victims. Now observe that this type of prize establishes one basic interest held in common by all the players. The desire to have a strong government. A government of unlimited power, strong enough to let the winners and would be winners get away with whatever their secrets. A government uncommitted to any policy, unrestrained by any ideology and hoarding power, an ever growing power, power for power's sake, which means for the sake and use of any major gang who might cease it momentarily to ram their particular piece of legislation down the country's throat. Observe therefore, therefore, that the doctrine of compromise and moderation applies to everything except one issue. Any suggestion to limit the power of the government. Observe the torrents of vilification, abuse and hysterical hatred unleashed by the moderates against any advocate of freedom, that is of capitalism. Observe the structure. Such designations as extreme middle or militant middle are being used by people seriously and self righteously. Observe the inordinately vicious intensity of the smear campaign against Senator Goldwater which had the overtones of panic, the panic of the moderates, the vital centrists, the middle of the roaders, in the face of the possibility that a real pro capitalism movement might put an end to their game. A movement, incidentally, which does not exist as yet. Since Senator Goldwater was not an advocate of capitalism and since his meaningless, unphilosophical, unintellectual campaign has contributed to the entrenchment of the consensus advocates. I don't know whether you're with me or against me, but. Thank you. Then we understand each other. But what is significant here is the nature of their panic. It gave us a glimpse of their wanted moments, moderation, their democratic respect for the people's choices and their tolerance of disagreements or opposition. In a letter to the New York Times, June 23, 1964, an assistant professor of political science fearing Goldwater's nomination wrote as follows, quote, the real danger lies in the divisive campaign which his nomination would provoke. The result of a Goldwater candidacy would be a divided and embittered electorate. To be effective, American government requires a high degree of consensus and bipartisanship on basic issues. Unquote. When and by whom has statism been accepted as the basic principle of America and as a principle which should now be placed beyond debate or dissension so that no basic issues are to be erased any longer? Isn't that the formula of a one party government? The professor did not specify. Another letter writer in the New York Times of June 24, 1964, identified in print as a liberal Democrat, went a little further. Let the American people choose in November. If they choose overwhelmingly for Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats, then once and for all the federal government can get on with no excuses with the job. Millions of negroes unemployed, aged, sick and otherwise handicapped persons expected to do, to say nothing of our overseas commitments. If the people choose Goldwater, then it would seem the nation was hardly worth saving after all. Moderation. Woodrow Wilson once said that there is such a thing as being too proud to fight. Then he had to go to war once and for all, let us have it out. While the battle yet can be fought with ballots instead of bullets, unquote. Does this gentleman mean that if we don't vote his way, he will resort to bullets? Your guess is as good as mine. The New York Times, which had been a conspicuous advocate of government by consensus, said some curious things in its appraisal of President Johnson's victory. Its editorial of November 8, 1964, stated, quote, no matter how massive the electoral victory, and it was massive, the administration cannot merely ride the crest of the popular wave rolling along on a sea of platitudinous generalizations and euphoric promises. No, now that it has a broad popular mandate, it has the moral as well as the political obligation not to try to be all things to all men, but to settle down to a hard, concrete, purposeful course of action. Unquote. What kind of purposeful action? If the waters were offered nothing but platitudinous generalizations and euphoric promises, how can their what be taken as a broad popular mandate, A mandate for an unnamed purpose? A political blank check? And if Mr. Johnson did win a massive victory by trying to be all things to all men, then which things is he now expected to be? Which voters is he to disappoint or betray? And what becomes of the broad popular consensus? Morally and philosophically, that editorial is highly dubious and contradictory, but it becomes clear and consistent in the context of a mixed economy's anti ideology. The president of a mixed economy is not expected to have a specific program or policy. A blank check on power is all that he asks the voters to give him. Thereafter, it's up to the pressure group game which everybody is supposed to understand and endorse, but never mention which things he will be. To which man depends on the chances of the game and on the major segments of the population. His job is only to hold the power and to dispense the favors. In the 1930s, the Liberals had a program of broad social reforms and a crusading spirit. They advocated a planned society. They talked in terms of abstract principles. They propounded theories of a predominantly socialistic nature. And most of them were touchy about the accusations that they were enlarging the government's power. Most of them were assuring their opponents that government power, power was only a temporary means to an end, a noble end, the liberation of the individual from his bondage to material needs. Or so they said. Today, nobody talks of a planned society. In a liberal camp, long range programs, theories, principles, abstractions and noble ends are not fashionable any longer. Modern liberals deride any political concern with such large scale matters as an entire society or an economy as a whole. They concern themselves with single, concrete bound range of the moment, projects and demands without regard to cost, context or consequences. Pragmatic, not idealistic is their favorite adjective. When they are called out upon to justify their stance, as they call it not stand. They are militantly opposed to political philosophy. They denounce political concepts as tags, labels, myths, illusions, and resist any attempt to label, that is to identify, their own views. They are belligerently anti theoretical and with a faded mantle of intellectuality is still clinging to their shoulders. They are anti intellectual. The only remnant of their former idealism is a tired, cynical, ritualistic quoting of shop worn humanitarian slogans when the occasion demands it. Cynicism, uncertainty and fear are the insignia of the culture which they are still dominating by default. And the only thing that has not not trusted in their ideological equipment, but has grown savagely brighter and clearer through the years, is their lust for power, for an autocratic status, totalitarian government power. It is not a crusading brightness. It is not the lust of a fanatic with a mission. It is more like the glassy eyed brightness of a somnambulist whose stupor is despair has long since swallowed the memory of his purpose, but who still clings to his mystic weapon in the stubborn belief that there ought to be a law, that everything will be all right if only somebody will pass a law, that every problem can be solved by the magic power of brute force. Such is the present intellectual state and ideological trend of our culture. Now I shall ask you to consider the question I raised at the beginning of this discussion. Which of these two variants of statism are we moving toward? Socialism or fascism? Let me submit in evidence, as part of the answer, a quotation from a very liberal editorial which appeared in the Washington Star in October 1964. It is an eloquent mixture of truth and misinformation and a typical example of the state of today's political knowledge. Quote, Socialism is quite simply the state ownership of the means of production. This has never been proposed by a major party candidate for the presidency and is not now proposed by Lyndon Johnson. True, there is, however, a whole series of American legislative acts that increase either government regulation of private business or government responsibility for individual welfare. True, it is to such legislation that warning cries of socialism refer. Besides the constitutional provision for federal regulation of interstate commerce, such intrusion of government into the marketplace begins with the antitrust laws. Very true. To them we owe the continued existence of competitive capitalism and the non arrival of cartel capitalism. Untrue. Inasmuch as socialism is the product one way or another, of cartel capitalism. Untrue. It may reasonably be said that such governments in interference with business has in fact prevented socialism worse than untrue. Continuing the quote, as to welfare legislation, it is still light years away from the cradle to grave security sponsored by continental contemporary socialism. Not quite true. It seems much more like ordinary human concern for human distress than like an ideological program of any kind. The last part of this sentence is true. It is not an ideological program. As to the first part, ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one's neighbors. This editorial did not mention, of course, that a system in which the government does not nationalize the means of production but assumes total control over the economy is fascism. Here's another piece of evidence. This one is less crudely naive than the first and much more insidiously wrong. This is from a letter to the New York Times on November 1, 1964, written by an assistant professor of economics. Quote, viewed by almost every yardstick, the United States today is more committed to private enterprise than probably any other industrial country and is not even remotely approaching a socialist system as the term is understood by students of comparative economic systems and others who do not use it loosely. Socialism is identified with extensive nationalization, a dominant public sector, a strong cooperative movement, egalitarian income distribution, a total welfare state, and central planning. In the United States, not only has there been no nationalization, but government concerns have been turned over to private enterprise. Income distribution in this country is one of the most unequal among the developed nations, and tax cuts and tax loopholes have blunted the modern progressivity of our tax structure. Thirty years after the New Deal, the United States has a very limited way welfare state compared with the comprehensive Social Security and Public housing schemes in many European countries. By no stretch of the imagination. Is the real issue in this campaign a choice between capitalism and socialism or between a free and a planned economy? The issue is about two differing concepts of the role of government within the framework of an essentially private enterprise system. System, unquote. I hope you are not applauding this quotation, but if you are, I am just about to take it up. The role of government in a private enterprise system is that of a policeman who protects men's individual rights, including property rights, by protecting men from physical violence. In a free economy, the government does not control, regulate, coerce, or interfere with men's economic activities. I do not know the political views of the writer of that letter. He may be a liberal, or he may be an alleged defender of capital, but if he is this last, then I must point out that such views as his are more damaging and derogatory to capitalism than the ideas of its avowed enemies. He regards capitalism as a system compatible with government controls and thus helps to spread the most dangerous misconceptions. While full laissez faire capitalism has not yet existed anywhere. While some unnecessary government controls were allowed to dilute and undercut the original American system more through error than through theoretical intention, this professor should not permit himself to ignore the fact that the principles, the theory, and the actual working of capitalism rest on a free, unregulated market, as the history of the last two centuries has amply demonstrated. He should not permit himself to ignore the exact meaning of the term laissez faire and of the term mixed economy, which clearly indicates the two opposite elements involved in the mixture the element of economic freedom, which is capitalism, and the element of government controls which is stated. There is an insistent campaign today to make us accept the Marxist view that all governments are tools of economic class interest and that capitalism is not a free economy, but a system of government controls serving some privileged class. The purpose of that campaign is to distort economics, rewrite history, and obliterate the possibility and the existence of a free country and an uncontrolled economy. Since a system of nominal private property ruled by government controls is not capitalism but fascism, the only choice this obliteration would leave us is the choice between fascism and socialism, which all the statists in the world of all varieties, degrees and denominations are struggling frantically to make us believe. It is thus that the views of that professor, which are shared in various degrees by most conservatives, lend credence and support to the vicious leftist propaganda which equates capitalism with fascism and Howls that fascism is a move of the political right. But there is a bitter kind of justice in the logic of events. That propaganda is having an effect which may be advantageous to the communists, but which is the opposite of the effect intended by the liberals, the welfare status, the socialists who share the guilt of spreading it instead of smearing capitalism. That propaganda has succeeded in whitewashing fascism in this country. Few people care to advocate, to defend, or even to understand capitalism, yet fewer still wish to give up its advantages. So if they are told that capitalism is compatible with controls, with the particular controls which they think further their particular interests, be it government handouts or minimum wages or price supports or subsidies or antitrust laws or censorship of dirty movies, they will go along with such programs in the comforting belief that the results will be nothing worse than a modified capitalism. And thus a country which does abhor fascism is moving by imperceptible degrees through ignorance, confusion, evasion, moral cowardice and intellectual default, not towards socialism or any mawkish altruistic ideal, but toward the plain, brutal, predatory, power grabbing, de facto fascism. No, we have not reached that stage. But we are certainly not an essentially private enterprise system any longer. At present, we are a disintegrating, unsound, precariously unstable mixed economy. A random mongrel mixture of socialistic schemes, communistic influences, fascist controls, fascist centralization of power, and shrinking remnants of capitalism still paying the costs of it all, the total of it rolling not by plan or conspiracy, but by default and necessity, the necessity of an uncontested mixed economy in the direction of a fascist state. Consider our present administration. I don't think I'll be accused of unfairness if I say that President Johnson is not a philosophical thinker. No, he's not a fascist. He is not a socialist. He is not a pro capitalist. Ideologically, he is not anything in particular. Judging by his past record and by the consensus of his own supporters, the concept of an ideology is not applicable in his case. He is a politician, A very dangerous yet very appropriate phenomenon in our present state. He is an almost fictional, archetypical embodiment of the perfect leader of a mixed economy. A man who enjoys power for power's sake, who is expert at the game of manipulating pressure groups, of playing them all against one another, who loves the process of dispensing smiles, frowns and favors, particularly sudden favors, and whose vision does not extend beyond the range of the next election. Can you see President Johnson as a socializer of industry? Like all his predecessors in office, Mr. Johnson knows that Businessmen are the milch cows of a mixed economy and he does not want to destroy them. He wants them to prosper and to throw his welfare projects, which the next election requires. While they, the businessmen, are eating out of his hand, which they seem to be anxiously eager to do. The business lobby is certain to get its fair share of influence and of recognition, just like the labor lobby or the farm lobby or the lobby of any major segment. At his own pleasure and on his own terms, he will be particularly adept at the task of creating and encouraging the type of businessman whom I call the aristocracy of pool. This is not a socialistic pattern. It is the typical pattern of fascism. A substantial number of Republican businessmen switched to the side of Mr. Johnson in the last election. Election. Here are some interesting observations on this subject from a survey by the New York Times of September 16, 1964. Quote. Interviews in five cities in the industrial Northeast and Midwest disclose striking differences in political outlook between officials of large corporations and men who operate smaller businesses. The business executives who expect to cast the first Democratic presidential vote of their lives are nearly all affiliated with large companies. There is more support for President Johnson among business executives who are in their 40s and 50s than there is among either older or younger businessmen. Many businessmen in their 40s and 50s say they find relatively little shifting towards support of Mr. Johnson on the part of younger business executives. Interviews with Those in their 30s confirm this. The younger executives themselves speak with pride of their generation as the one that interrupted and reversed the trend toward more liberalism in younger persons. It is on the issue of government that deficits that the division of opinion between small and large businessmen emerges most dramatically. Officials of giant corporations have a far greater tendency to accept the idea that budget deficits are sometimes necessary and even desirable. The typical small businessman, however, reserves a very special scorn for deficit spending. Unquote. Does this give you an indication of who are the vested interests in a mixed economy and what such an economy does to the beginners or the young? The particular form of economic organization which is becoming more and more apparent in this country as an outgrowth of the power of pressure groups is one of the worst variants of statism. Guild socialism. Guild socialism robs the talented young of their future by freezing men into professional castes. It represents an open embodiment of the basic motive of most statists, though they usually prefer not to confess it the entrenchment and protection of mediocrity from a black competitors, the shackling of the men of superior ability down to the mean average of their professions. That system is not too popular among socialists, though it has its advocates. But the most famous instance of its practical large scale application was Fascist Italy in the 1930s. A few perceptive men said that Roosevelt's New Deal was a form of guilt socialism and that it was closer to Mussolini's system than to any other. They were ignored. Today the evidence is unmistakable. It was also said in the 30s that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come disguised as socialism. In this connection I recommend that you read or reread Sinclair Lewis. It can happen here with special reference to the character, style and ideology of Berzelius Windrip, the fascist leader. Now let me mention and answer some of the standard objections by which today's liberals attempt to come across camouflage the nature of the systems they are creating. Quote Fascism requires one party rule, unquote well, what do you think the notion of government by consensus will amount to in practice? Quote Fascism's goal is the conquest of the world, unquote. What do you suppose is the goal of those global minded bipartisan champions of the United nations? And if they reach it, what positions do they expect to acquire in the power structure of one world? Quote Fascism preaches racism, unquote. Not necessarily. Hitler's Germany did, Mussolini's Italy did not. Quote Fascism is opposed to to the welfare state, unquote Check your premises and your history books. The father and originator of the welfare state, the man who put into practice the notion of buying the loyalty of some groups with money extorted from others, was Bismarck, the political ancestor of Hitler. Let me remind you that the full title of the Nazi party was the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany. Let me remind you also of some excerpts from the political program of that party adopted in Munich on February 24, 1920. Quote we ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand an end to the power of the financial interest. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand the broad extension of care for the aged. We demand the greatest possible consideration of small businesses in the purchase of of the national, state and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious citizen the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all around enlargement of our entire system of public education. We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents. The government must undertake the improvement. Improvement of public health by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor, by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that the permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good. Unquote. This is from the original program of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany. For many more quotations of this kind revealing the altruist, collectivist base of the Nazi and fascist ideology, I will refer you to the lecture I delivered at this forum about two years ago entitled the Fascist New Frontier. There is, however, one difference between the type of fascism toward which we are drifting and the type that ravaged European countries. Ours is not a militant kind of fascism. Not an organized movement of shrill demagogues, bloody thugs, hysterical third rate intellectuals and juvenile delinquents. Ours is a tired, worn, cynical fascism. Fascism by default, by moral cowardice. Not like a flaming disaster, but more like the quiet collapse of a lethargic body slowly eaten by internal corruption. Did it have to happen? No. Can it still be averted? Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, if any of you doubt the power of philosophy to set the course and shape the destiny of human societies, observe that our mixed economy is the literal, faithfully carried out product of pragmatism and of the generation brought up under its influence. Pragmatism is the philosophy which holds that there is no objective reality, no permanent truth, no absolute principles, no valid abstractions, no firm concepts that anything may be tried by rule of thumb. That knowledge is to be gained by means of public polls, among special elites of competent investigators. That objectivity consists of collective subjectivism, that whatever people wish to be true is true. Whatever people wish to exist does exist, provided a consensus says so. If you want to avert the final disaster, it is this type of thinking, every one of those propositions and all of them, that you must face, grasp and reject. Then you will have grasped the connection of philosophy to politics and to the daily events of your lives. Then you will have learned that no society is better than its philosophical foundation. And then, to paraphrase John Galt, you will be ready not to return to capitalism, but to discover it. Thank you. It.