despite this i still think romneycare was the template for obamacare and that it’s unconstitutional fascist play for single payer. romney may have opted for an R after his name but his actions show he’s leftist all the way when it comes to ‘health care’. there’s nothing whatsoever conservative about forcing people against their will into a contract with a private business over the care of their own bodies- ie the government dictating how one sees to one’s own body.

Fascism is truly left-wing.

PatriotGal2257 on January 16, 2013 at 7:49 PM

Romney pushed for individual mandate in Massachusetts health care law, emails show

Fascism is truly left-wing.

PatriotGal2257 on January 16, 2013 at 7:49 PM

Here’s video of Romney explaining how the mandate is the “ultimate conservatism”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIPynMZuQtI

Here’s an article explaining how Romneycare was the template for Obamacare:
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/01/study-romneycare-was-template-for-obamacare/

FloatingRock on January 16, 2013 at 7:24 PM

If I recall correctly, this was Heritage’s position.

What Obama and the government eventually did with Obamacare and what Heritage proposed in the 1990s are two different things.

Fascism is truly left-wing. Again, as others have said here, as well as Jonah Goldberg in his book, it was the Left who disassociated themselves from Fascism and successfully made it stick as a concept to discredit the Right. It’s yet another instance where a person needs to examine critically everything the Left says, because ten times out of ten, they are being fundamentally dishonest and can never be trusted.

socialism is always fascism because it is contrary to human nature therefore ‘socialism’ has to be forced upon a free people by a government, usually a jackbooted police state. or you dumb them down for a few generations in the public schools, expand the ‘welfare state’ until it becomes a set of ‘ entitlements’( a right similar to those enumerated in the bill of rights) make vast swathes of them dependent on the government then try to bludgeon the rest of the population into compliance (in part by turning flash mobs and hippie-hobo camps of ignorant feral youths upon the law abiding, by emptying out the prisons and taking all the guns away from the law abiding…)- Barry Dearest’s route apparently. for all their swoony love of particular political theories and practices, liberals know absolutely nothing about history or the writings of the theorists they’re enamored with. it’s as if most of them never heard of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

only to me obama and the likes of liz warren don’t exactly resemble the ‘proletariat’.

in_awe on January 16, 2013 at 5:40 PM

I was going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. Excellent book, by the way, and worth having in one’s library.

PatriotGal2257 on January 16, 2013 at 7:09 PM

Romney and the Heritage Foundation, the GOP think tank that Rush Limbaugh is always touting, were the architects of Romneycare, the model for Obamacare. In other words the reason that Obamacare is fascist is because he basically copied it from the right-wing, specifically Romney and Heritage. So it’s simply not true that fascism is only left-wing; it’s both.

Jonah Goldberg demolished the meme years ago that fascism was a right wing political movement. His book “Liberal Fascism” covers in great detail the reality that fascism is a movement of the left.

in_awe on January 16, 2013 at 5:40 PM

I was going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. Excellent book, by the way, and worth having in one’s library.

You picked 2! Like a good conservative.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 2:51 PM

Not really. We simply reject you and thinkprogress as the leftist anti-American tripe that you are.

btw: You’re an idiot.

Jonah Goldberg demolished the meme years ago that fascism was a right wing political movement.

in_awe on January 16, 2013 at 5:40 PM

And Romney 2012 proved that Jonah GOldberg was wrong, in fact corporatism/fascism is alive and well on the right as well as the left.

Well after all, Barack Obama, he’s an ordinary liberty grabbing fascist man
Who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance
To make all people live exactly as he wishes, and do precisely what he wants…
An average fascist man is he, of no especially clever whim
Who wants to control everyone else’s life
While he goes golfing or on yet another royal vacation with his beastly wife
With everyone supinely doing whatever he commands
Well… just an ordinary fascist man is he …

Cheshire Cat on January 16, 2013 at 2:51 PM

Nice adaptation. (Sorry for the sentiment that was required.)

There was nothing right-wing about Mussolini or fascism in Italy at all.

This is just another example of people redefining terms to make them feel more comfortable. They don’t like fascism being associated with the left, so they try to shove it off on the right.

tom on January 16, 2013 at 2:49 PM

The leftist idiots who call fascism “right-wing” would have us believe that fascists are Jeffersonians who believe in free markets and a well-armed population – these idiots tell us that 0dumba isn’t a manipulative narcissist, and that his governmental intrusion into Chrysler and GM were not fascistic.

Mussolini was a Communist who added Italian fetishism to Marxism.

The Italian Fascists called their philosophy “Totalitarianism,” in that the state must be an integral part of the whole (total) of society.

Stalin decreed that any socialists that did not acknowledge the supremacy of Stalinism (making a fetish out of Russian socialism) was to be referred to as a Fascist.

Akzed on January 16, 2013 at 3:33 PM

Exactamundo. Mussolini and later Hitler were both hard core Marxist revolutionaries who didn’t exactly go out of their way to hide their militant left wing roots. It was the Stalinists who came up the idea of calling national socialists “right wing” as a way to discredit what was quickly becoming a far more popular movement than what the Bolsheviks horked up.

The smear stuck. Today most people equate “fascist” and “right wingers” with charismatic figures who pompously strut around in military garb while denouncing various enemies of the state, burning books, invading their neighbors, and carting off millions to die in concentration camps. Never mind that the Communists on the “left wing” were not only doing the very same thing, but did it decades before and after the fascists were defeated in 1945.

Today’s Progressives, of which Obama and his clique draw a great deal of popular support, exhibit many of the same characteristics as past Marxists, but instead of adopting the tactics of militant revolutionaries, they’ve chosen a more evolutonary path. Their goal of transforming the United States is based on decades of patient planning. Obama is simply closing several Overton Windows so that he can open some more.

Del Dolemonte on January 16, 2013 at 3:04 PM

Heritage article has already been featured on Hotair

lester, it’s time for your violin lesson! on January 16, 2013 at 3:22 PM

And yet you still ignore that your Think Progress piece states up front that the Heritage study uses misleading Right Wing language. And endorse you it anyway, simply because it fits your simplistic agenda.

But hey, it’s nice to see a Dim Bulb Leftist like yourself cite Heritage. By doing so, you’re also endorsing their positions on other things, like the following:

1. They endorse Intelligent Design

2. Deny climate change

3. Endorsed Bush’s liberation of Iraq

4. Deny that poor people even exist.

And as rationalwiki notes:

Yes, they do pull these studies out of their ass.

Now go stand in line for your flu shot like a good little Benito.

F-

Heritage Foundation Ranks Countries With Government-Run Health Care As The Freest In World

Damn reality and it’s liberal bias.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 2:39 PM

I’m glad you brought this up.

All you’ve done is emphasise the correctness of the Whole Foods CEO’s statements. In terms of economic freedom we are now to the left of European basket cases.

Of course northern Europeans aren’t deluded about the economic and personal fiscal demands of a super state. They know that the middle class must bear the biggest burden because that’s were all the money is.
When they vote themselves cradle to grave entitlements and “income inequality” they expect to pay through the nose for it. Here in America we have the European sized government (and in a lot of cases a federal bureacracy much bigger and more intrusive than they are) but we don’t have European sized middle class taxes.

Congratulations – you’ve managed to point out how lost America is.

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini

Maybe so, but fascists are socialists and are not “right wing” anything.

It’s the collective, baby.

Ask Italian immigrants who either were from Italy during WWII or their parents were. He was a left wing dictator. But loved by many of his people because “the trains ran on time.” He had the cult of personality like the current White House occupant.”

IIRC, the trains bit was pure propaganda to bolster Mussolini. In fact, the trains weren’t on time all that much, and when they were it was due to policy and decisions predating Mussolini, but for which he was glad to take credit, much like Barry enjoys taking credit for things not of his making.

I spent the weekend trying to work through a recent 144-page IRS PROPOSAL about what would be classified as a full-time worker vs a part-time worker. These are proposals, mind you; the IRS can’t actually answer the question with certainty because it wasn’t in the law. Here’s the kicker: in 2014, when Obamacare kicks in, they will look back at 2013 employment records to decide who employers have to cover. Employers today can’t know where to draw the line because the line DOESN’T EXIST YET. So, the IRS has told businesses to take a guess and hope they get it right.

Doesn’t the Constitution prohibit ex post facto laws?

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and was later applied to the Nazis and the authoritarian leadership of Francisco Franco in Spain.

The only reason Nazism was re-assigned to the right side of the political spectrum is because of their emphasis on race — which is not even accurate in itself, since racism is hardly either exclusive to the right or more common on the right.

There was nothing right-wing about Mussolini or fascism in Italy at all.

This is just another example of people redefining terms to make them feel more comfortable. They don’t like fascism being associated with the left, so they try to shove it off on the right.

But playing so fast and loose with the terms “right” and “left” leaves us with a dog’s breakfast. Nazism was totalitarian, socialist, and the people existed for the benefit of the state. The only big difference between Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy was the German emphasis in designating themselves as the master race. And even that was the sort of eugenics that has been often found on the left.

tom on January 16, 2013 at 2:49 PM

Well put. The American Left in the twenties and thirties was very impressed with European Fascism, especially the Italian variety. We had our own American Mussolini, -Woodrow Wilson.

The reassignment of Fascism to the right of the political spectrum was done because of that inconvenient holocaust, which made Fascism radioactive in the West. Because of the war, the Western Left had to choose between favoring nominally German and Italian socialism and Soviet socialism, and they chose the Soviet label.