How Fascism Is Being Reborn From the Ashes of Conservatism

Why Conservatism’s Becoming Fascism (Again)

Luke. Luke! I am your… it was, in one of those great, absurd, funny ironies of history, New Gingrich who said it was finally going too far. Reacting to the new bill in Florida to make…bloggers…register with the state…so as not to criticize Ron DeFascist…Newt said: “The idea that bloggers criticising a politician should register with the government is insane…It is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately.”

Now, this is funny because of course, Gingrich is to conservatism what Don Corleone was to the mob. Godfather. Way back in the 90s, he kicked off a movement that metastasized into what we now see before our eyes. The goal of that movement, famously, was One Big Idea: to “drown government in a bathtub.”

What does it mean you finally go too far for Newt Gingrich? Let me ask that another way. I wonder how Newt feels about the rest of it. Book bans. Banning words. Persecuting kids. Tiplines to report parents. Teachers being slandered as “groomers.” On and on it goes.

What is it, though? What is Newt objecting to, with comedy horror, like Dr Frankenstein suddenly realizing he’s created — uh oh — a monster? Well, back in the 90s, when Newt helped invent this thing that’d come to be called “neoconservatism,” it was about drowning government in a bathtub — nope, nothing disturbing going there, totally normal to dream about killing things in bathtubs — and that came to be represented by a set of by now well-worn cliches. Individual liberty, personal responsibility, and so forth.

Newt’s beside himself because all this is anathema to conservatism. It hardly takes a genius to see that a governor — a government — banning words and books and people it doesn’t like, because it considers them inferior is…precisely the opposite of neoconservative style not-just-small-but-no government. It’s funny. It makes us all laugh. And yet there’s a serious series of points here.

What’s really going on here? Conservatism is dead. It is becoming fascism. And in many ways, even Nazism.

You can see it very, very clearly in what’s happening in Florida. DeSantis repudiates every last principle that conservatives like Gingrich once stood for. He wants to expand government — radically so — creating everything from “election police forces” to Gestapos for The Gay and The Trans to agencies that check if all those banned books are being read or not and on and on. He’s enacting the precise opposite of individual liberty and personal responsibility — which would be something much more like, hey, kid, you want to change your name, hey, you guys, you want to live, love, be whomever you like? Great, go for it, it’s your life.

Gingrich has finally spoken out because he had to. He was the Godfather of neoconservatism, and yet, he’s watching turn itself inside out, and embrace the polar opposite of what he’d hoped it’d end up being. Let me put that another way.

This isn’t about limiting government so that people can be free anymore — if ever that were even theoretically true. Now, it’s about expanding government to eviscerate the rights of hated groups, to institutionalize hate, to limit people’s choices when it comes from everything to books to names to relationships to ways of life. And that is precisely the difference between conservatism and fascism, too.