As a result of looking into Bush family history and related matters, I've come to several conclusions:

1) Support for fascism -- or at least for a kind of Americanized fascism-lite -- was extremely widespread among American business leaders in the 1930's. Some actively endorsed Nazi racial ideology or funded domestic fascist groups. Some merely looked to Germany for a model of a government that would overturn the New Deal and destroy the unions.

2) When the US entered World War II, a deal was struck with these near-traitorous corporations. They would help in the war effort and all would be forgiven. Then, following the war, there was a massive re-writing of history to conceal the inconvenient facts of what had gone before. In this sense, Orwell's 1984 wasn't prediction -- it was a straightforward description of what was happening as he wrote in 1948.

In this rewritten version of history, the Republicans' only fault in the 1930's had been excess devotion to Hooverian economics. They and the corporate elite had never been disloyal, never turned against democracy, never looked approvingly at Hitler. The nation had always been unified where it counted and had responded seamlessly during World War II.

3) Until about 1953, there were still plenty of people who knew what was what and weren't afraid to call a spade a spade. But after Eisenhower was elected and Dulles became head of the CIA, this rewritten history was ruthlessly imposed. Much of Operation Mockingbird had to do with cementing it into place. At the same time, it became unacceptable to call extremist forces in the United States "fascist." You could decry McCarthyism or the hijinks of right-wing oil millionaires, but expressing the idea that the f-word might apply to Americans was considered almost a form of libel.

At its mildest, this was a kind of deal between the right and left -- we won't call you communists if you won't call us fascists. At its worst, it was more like a threat -- of course we're not fascists, and only a dirty commie would suggest we were.

4) There have been cracks in the we-were-never-fascists myth from time to time. The explicit reliance of the John Birch Society on fascist conspiracy theories. The willingness of movement conservatives in the US to associate with outright fascists in Latin America in the 1970s and 80's. But those have never gotten any traction. The power of the myth is too strong.

But the history of the Family lays the whole thing out too clearly to ignore -- from its fascist-lite origins in 1935 to its wartime re-imagining of itself as a patriotic organization bent on bipartisan religious uplift to its maintenance of clearly fascist doctrines for its elite inner circle. I still have no hope that the MSM will ever acknowledge this, but it's time for us to start putting the real nature of the extreme right in context.