Why the Left sees Fascists under every bed

The Left sneers at the Right for seeing Communists under every bed.  They seem to be impervious to the irony of how they see Fascists under every bed.  Via Sean Sorrentino, we find a very interesting post at The Other McCain:

Liberals refused to confront the reality of Soviet-sponsored subversion and therefore attributed malign motives to anti-Communists, most especially such Republicans as McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The true extent of Soviet efforts to influence U.S. policy was not known for decades; only with the post-Cold War release of the Venona Papers and other documents was conclusive evidence obtained, and few historians have re-examined the record in light of such revelations. (See In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage by John Earl Haynes for a discussion of academia’s failure in that regard.) Thus the mythic terror of “McCarthyism” took root and grew in the liberal imagination, fostered with the aid of cultural Marxists like Theodor Adorno, such of Adorno’s liberal disciples as Richard Hofstadter, and the young leftists who took up the “Long March Through the Institutions” in the 1960s to become a dominant force in contemporary academia.

It's a long and interesting post, and you should RTWT.  I would add, though, that this explains what's happening on our side of the Atlantic.  European leftists have a somewhat different historical perspective, and in fact are likely justified in seeing a clear and present danger from a resurgent Fascism.

The entire post war history of Europe has been the story of transnationalism.  The French strategy of being too close to Germany to punch was pretty successful, even if it took hundreds of thousands of American troops in a decades long occupation to pull it off.  But the explicitly nationalist socialist movements from all the Western European countries gracefully moved to a internationalist socialism world view.

It was really the same thing - top-down control by a strong technocratic State  working in close cooperation with big business - but instead being informed by local patriotic feeling, it was informed by a Pan-European vision of "ever closer" integration (i.e. control of the periphery from the Paris-Brussels-Berlin core).

And so the increasing restiveness of the populations strikes the Intelligentsia with horror.  As the State has increasingly lost claim to legitimacy, the public in all of the European countries have become increasingly annoyed at the EU's increasingly desperate attempts to keep the wheels from coming off the EU Bandwagon.

Most horrifying of all is the German public's stubborn unwillingness to fund bailouts for the Southern European nations.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel has dug in her heels to stop this, because it would spell the end of her government.  And this stirring of die Deutsche volk to oppose the Transnational Elite should have all Right Thinking People™ thinking on a resurgent fascism.

This is a very different thing than what's happening over here.  While our Elite has us going down that same road, we're nowhere near as far along as Europe is, and there aren't competing national consciousnesses here to worry about.  The blather here about the right and fascism is precisely as Stacy McCain describes.

But as Tam once said, Europe has shown that they can go from zero to Jackboots in five years.  It was only a half step from National Socialism to International Socialism, and it will only be a half step back.