Hedges: I Would Expect A Fascist Like You To Say That!

Ryan Anderson at First Things‘ blog has a good post on Chris Hedges’ awful book, American Fascists, saying some of the same things I wrote in a post on the book about two months ago.  Besides the many obvious problems with Hedges’ strident, unreasonable attack on Christians, there is the more general problem of flinging around the word “fascist” as a term of abuse.  The problem is widespread and does not seem to be in any danger of going away anytime soon.  In that post, I wrote:

If I can overgeneralise a little, left-liberals are liberals who tend to see fascists all around them at home, while neocons are liberals who see fascists everywhere else in the world.  They are two sets of liberals who use the same kind of language, the same warnings, the same lame allusions to mid-twentieth century politics and international affairs and work from roughly the same assumptions about what constitutes the good, liberal democratic alternative.  All of them are preoccupied with finding and combating the new fascism and with preventing the rise and/or success of some supposed echo of Nazism; their shared moment, which they pretend they are always reliving, are the years just before and during WWII.