Is it Fascism? Is it Socialism?

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When I taught at Dartmouth many years ago, I used to argue politics at the coffee machine in the main office with a colleague who was far to my left. (We were good friends and we used to host the student radio station’s election coverage together.) I was pretty far to the right back then, and he was a former 1960s campus radical, and so it was easy for us to end up shouting at each other every day.

We’d run through a whole lexicon of political insults, but my favorite moment was a day when I exclaimed “Bolshevik!” and he barked “Hun!” and the two of us broke up in a prolonged fit of laughter.

Neither of us got tenure at Dartmouth, but let’s not open that can of worms.

Anyway, we enjoyed these jousts, in part because we understood the words we were using and knew when we meant them and when we were kidding. We argued over who had the better policies, and over whose view of human nature and the right order of society should