FDR also supported racist Democrats in Congress in their efforts to thwart anti-lynching laws. This was a key condition the racists put before FDR. They said they would not support FDR’s New Deal programs unless FDR supported their effort to block Republican anti-lynching bills. So FDR convinced even northern Democrats and progressives to back their southern counterparts in keeping these bills from coming to the floor for a vote. This is one of the most disgraceful legacies of the FDR presidency and it goes virtually unmentioned in progressive FDR biographies.
Indian-American political commentator (born 1961)
FDR Franklin D. Roosevelt cozied up to and made deals with the worst racists in America… FDR appointed Hugo Black, a former Ku Klux Klansman, to the Supreme Court. Black was completely unqualified—his only judicial experience had been eighteen months as a municipal court judge—but he had a reputation as an enthusiastic New Dealer who had publicly endorsed FDR’s court-packing plan. Black was also an active Klan member who had spoken at and led Klan rallies and marches throughout his native Alabama.
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As he thought about these problems, Hitler’s attention was turned to America. Hitler didn’t know a lot about America. He had never been to America. And he despised America. ‘My feeling against Americanism,’ he later said in 1942, ‘are feeling of hatred and deep repugnance.’ Why? He claimed, ’Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized and the other half negrified.’ Moreover, America is ‘a country where everything is built on the dollar.’ For Hitler, America represented the worst case of unrestricted Jewish capitalism
The fascists adopted an economic policy that is closely parallel to, and in many respects identical with, today’s progressivism. Mussolini called this policy ‘corporatism,’ but a more descriptive term would be state-run capitalism. Mussolini envisioned a powerful centralized state directing the institutions of the private sector, forcing their private welfare into line with the national welfare… Although today’s American Left dares not invoke Mussolini’s name, the honest among them will have to admit that it was he and his fellow fascists who were their pioneers and paved their way.
If you read the Nazi platform without knowing its source, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you were reading the 2016 platform of the Democratic Party. Or at least a Democratic platform drafted jointly by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Sure, some of the language is out of date. The Democrats can’t talk about ‘usury’ these days; they’d have to substitute ‘Wall Street greed.’ But otherwise, it’s all there. All you have to do is cross out the word ‘Nazi’ and write in the word ‘Democrat.’
One might naively expect the Left, then, to embrace and celebrate Gentile. This, of course, will never happen. The Left has the desperate need to conceal fascism’s association with contemporary leftism. Even when the Left uses Gentilean rhetoric, it’s source can never be publicly acknowledged. And since the Left dominates academia and popular culture, it has the clout to perform this vanishing trick. That’s why the progressives intend to keep Gentile where they’ve got him: dead, buried, and forgotten.
Gentile also perceived fascism emerging out of revolutionary struggle, what the media today terms ‘protest’ or ‘activism.’ Unlike Marx, he conceived the struggle not between the working class and the capitalists, but between the selfish individual trying to live for himself and the fully actualized individual who willingly puts himself at the behest of society and the state. Gentile seems to be the unacknowledged ancestor of the street activism of Antifa and other leftist groups. ‘One of the major virtues of fascism,’ he writes, ‘is that it obliged those who watched from their windows to come down into the street.’
Gentile was, in fact, a lifelong socialist. Like Marx, he viewed socialism as the sine qua non of social justice, the ultimate formula for everyone paying their ‘fair share.’ For Gentile, fascism is nothing more than a modified form of socialism, a socialism arising not merely from material deprivation but also from an aroused national consciousness, a socialism that unites rather than divides communities.
By limiting state power, conservatives seek among other things to protect the right of the people to keep the fruit of their own labor. Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Republican president, placed himself squarely in the founding tradition when he said, ‘I always thought the man who made the corn should eat the corn.’ Lincoln, like the founders, was not concerned that private property or private earnings might cause economic inequality. Rather, he believed, as three of the founders themselves wrote in the Federalist Papers No. 10, that ‘the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property’ is the ‘first object of government.’
Slavery existed all over the world. The Egyptians had slaves. The Chinese had slaves. The Africans did. American Indians had slaves long before Columbus. And tragically, slavery continues today in many countries. What's uniquely Western is the abolition of slavery. And what's uniquely American is the fighting of a great war to end it.