A couple of meanderings, today, shot over the bow of my Facebook page.

First was this piece by Jeffrey Tucker of Libery.me, via his Beautiful Anarchy page: Has Donald Trump Unleashed the Neo-Nazis?

I am daily taken aback at the abject ignorance of history in this country and the circumstances that gave rise to National Socialism (“Nazi,” for short) in Europe, in the 1930’s. Just like east meets west, the political right eventually meets the political left, just with different styles. Here’s a quote from the article.

It’s time libertarians get serious about realizing that there exists such a thing as Brown-shirted socialism. It masquerades as patriotism. It seeks national greatness. It celebrates the majority race and dehumanizes the other. It is violently protectionist. On cultural matters, it is anti-leftist (“politically incorrect”). It is unapologetically authoritarian.

Even given all this, we are mostly mystified by it. It doesn’t strike us as a coherent ideology. It seems like a string of bad policy ideas (and some not terrible ones too) rather than a real political tradition. This is because we, as libertarians, are well-schooled to fear the socialist left but have little preparation to understand the threat from the other side.

Events of the last weeks should heighten our consciousness. There really is a brown-shirt movement in the U.S. It’s been building for many years. They have their organizations, books, websites, and splits within splits. The neo-Nazis are the most extreme variant. But fascism has many other types of expression, each reflecting a special interest, but each of them leading to a special kind of authoritarianism.

Then this: