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Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

One of the strangest experiences I had in college stretched out over several weeks in, I think, my senior year,

when I was enrolled in a class called The Philosophy of Fascism.

This was mostly an elective class for me. I was a student in the departments of physics and astrophysics,

so I didn't really need to take a big political science class on the intellectual roots and supposed ideological boundaries of Italian fascism.

But this was just a couple years after 9-11, at the apex of the with us or with the terrorists, politics of the Bush presidency.

It was Berkeley, California, where I think it's fair to say the term fascism gets bandied about and stretched beyond meaning from time to time.

And the class was understood to be something like a counterpoint to supposed progressive hysteria about the rise of fascism in America and elsewhere.

The professor was an Italian fascism scholar, and I think a sympathist named James Greger,

and people who had taken it in the past didn't exactly recommend it, but they said it was a trip, so I tried it out.

And they were right. I ultimately dropped out of the class for a number of reasons, but my takeaway at the time, now filtered through 20 years of blurring memory,

was that Greger had drawn up a bunch of elaborate rules and rubrics to distinguish his Italian fascism not just from George W. Bush's new conservatism, but from all the failed despotisms of the 20th century.

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