The Communist-Fascist-Leftist Democratic-Socialist-Progressive Totalitarians: A Glossary of Dictatorship

This post can be thought of as a kind of compendium of dictatorship, with many links to previous posts where I have touched on the notions.

All terms in the title represent people who desire to, or do, exercise absolute authority or power over the citizenry. Differences between the terms and the people who espouse them are negligible. The consequences of such absolute power are not pretty.

Let me start with the totalitarians. They are the ones who want to and do use total coercive, governmental control to tell us what we can and cannot do in our personal and professional lives. Like, you know in recent times, to leave our homes, travel, sit down in a restaurant, run our businesses, etc., and perhaps even talk to our neighbors. In other words, covid totalitarianism.

The “left,” as in the left-right continuum, refers to the degree of government intrusion in and control of our personal and professional lives. The “far left” wants to control all, which means they are totalitarians. The right limits the government to self-defensive coercion against those who initiate physical force.

The left is Leninist socialism (there is no other type). It is Lenin’s giant post office that we all work for (government ownership of the means of production), protected by an armed proletariat (or other such “protectors”). The right is laissez-faire capitalism.*

The left wants to and does use physical force to establish and control everyone through a dictatorship. The right wants to and does establish the protection of individual rights, including especially property rights, political freedom, and equality before the (rationally defined, objective) law.
 
The middle ranges of the continuum are varying mixtures of freedom and dictatorship (or freedom and controls, as some say). The societies are also called mixed economies. “Moderates,” so called, fall within these ranges. They apparently like to distinguish themselves from the “extremists” on both ends of the continuum.

The freer countries of today’s world, including the United States, are mixed societies of freedom and dictatorship, the dictatorial control coming from the deep states’ and their governments’ overabundance of overly broad, vague laws and administrative rules (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83).

Putting the word “democratic” in front of socialism does not make it a kinder, gentler Garden of Eden in which the lion lies down beside the lamb, nor does it make socialism more peaceful than Marx’s violent revolution. It just means democrats want to use the vote and discussion to abolish private property and establish Lenin’s post office, in increments by gradually moving the mixed economy to total control. In recent times, note how less gradual and more quickly this move seems to be occurring.

The problem with democratic socialism, as F. A. Hayek (chap. 10) and George Reisman (part I) have pointed out, is that the democrats’ policies require coercion to enforce. And because the policies violate some citizens’ rights for the favor and privilege of others, sooner or later the citizens whose rights are being violated start thinking about rebelling. Eventually they disobey the dictatorial edicts. To maintain control, the “lions” in the government will gladly sacrifice the lambs to their favor and privilege.

The worst in moral character, as Hayek demonstrated, rise to the top of government leadership because democrats lose their nerve to enforce coercive policies. Reisman, putting it more bluntly, says that armed robbery and murder become necessary to overcome the citizens’ armed resistance to coercive policies. The worst who have risen to the top gladly comply with this requirement. (Motivation? Envy and hatred.)

This is the time when society becomes rather inelegant or unpretty, you know, as in one-party rule, political imprisonment and executions, expropriation of property, and censorship—and often is followed up with gulags and concentration camps.

Democracy (Applying Principles, pp. 101-05) means unlimited majority rule, which is a form of dictatorship. A modest search of the US’s founding fathers will reveal a frequent use of the word “tyranny” in conjunction with democracy. That’s why they called our new nation a constitutional republic, the constitutional part including a bill of rights that restrains the majority. “Democracy” and “free society” only go together if the words “classical liberal” are its modifiers, as in classically liberal democracy.

The significance of the vote in modern history, as identified by Ludwig von Mises (sec. 8, chap. 1), is its use in the transition of leadership, i.e., the vote in place of guns, which means the avoidance of civil war.

The progressives are socialists through and through, though divided into two eras of American history. The early progressives (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), from 1880s to about 1930, were educated by German professors who were democratic socialists. Back in the US, the progressives’ goal was to replace classical liberalism with the so-called social variety (social liberalism, Applying Principles, pp. 36-39) by establishing an administrative state, i.e., a large bureaucracy of “experts” voting in new laws and establishing regulatory rules to tame the alleged “capitalist beast.” In other words, to establish a mixed economy that would move steadily toward socialism.

The modern version of progressivism, from 1930 to the present, was initially explicit communism or socialism, at least until the mid 1950s. It was Nikita Khruschev’s leaked secret speech about Stalin that caused the leftists to hide behind the banner of progressivism, often dressed up as democracy. (A “soviet is an elected governmental council in a Communist country.”)

Communism and fascism, the final terms to mention, are both forms of socialism, and both decidedly leftist. Marx, Engels, and Lenin all considered communism a synonym of socialism. Fascism (Mussolini’s term) and Nazism (Hitler’s version) were systems that inherited industrial economies with large private sectors. The essence of fascism, as identified by Mises, is a nominal—in name only—private ownership of the means of production, with severe or total control and regulation by the government. Mises’ essentialization (chap. 7) makes it clear that fascism, as “socialism of the German pattern,” belongs on the left in the left-right continuum. It is only the manner of control that differs.

This means today’s mixed economies that have private property and private ownership of the means of production and are controlled and regulated by the government are fascistic. This includes present-day United States. The amount and severity of control pushes the country closer and closer to a de facto socialism.

Other issues associated with fascism, such as racism, militarism, intimidation of voters, concentration camps, and declarations of emergency powers, are either nonessential to the meaning of fascism or are shared with socialism. Not all fascist countries were racist, for one thing, and Hitler learned his tactics from Lenin and Stalin.

Where does this put the United States today? No matter what you call it, we are headed toward a communist-fascist-leftist democratic-socialist-progressive totalitarianism.

Keep in mind, as David Horowitz says (quoted in his website’s masthead), “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

And as Ludwig von Mises (p. 52) put it, “Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends’ unrestricted omnipotence.”


* The “right,” traditionally, has been said to be the home of fascistic, military dictatorships, and the notion can be traced to what is called right-Hegelianism and to the French Revolution. This designation is often meant to denigrate capitalism as fascistic and the accusation comes from the communist-socialist leftists.