This looks interesting. Pricey, but worth it.
The career of John T. Flynn, an old-style liberal who was one of the leaders of the America First Committee, exemplifies the course followed by many other liberals and progressives of the 1930s: his opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s warlike foreign policy — and super-centralism on the home front — exiled him from the precincts of the Left and drove him into the ranks of the “isolationist” (i.e. pro-peace) Right. After reading Lew Rockwell’s recent piece on “red-state fascism,” I thought of Flynn, who foresaw our present predicament in 1943, the year his book As We Go Marching (now sadly out of print) was published:
“When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.
“But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are dealing by this means with the problem of fascism. Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy.”