It's amazing how you can cherry pick quotes to believe... yet ignore history and direct quotes from nazis and progressives.
The only explaination is that you only believe that which reinforces what you have been indoctrinated to believe.
Enlightenment must mean belief in a thin set of ideological talking points.
H. G. Wells, one of the most influential progressives of the 20th century, said in 1932 that progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” Regarding totalitarianism, he stated: “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic.” Calling for a “‘Phoenix Rebirth’ of Liberalism” under the umbrella of “Liberal Fascism,” Wells said: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”
The poet Wallace Stevens pronounced himself “pro-Mussolini personally.”
The eminent historian Charles Beard wrote of Mussolini’s efforts: “Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made [in Italy], an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism.”
Muckraking journalists almost universally admired Mussolini. Lincoln Steffens,for one, said that Italian fascism made Western democracy, by comparison, look like a system run by “petty persons with petty purposes.” Mussolini, Steffens proclaimed reverently, had been “formed” by God “out of the rib of Italy.”
McClure’s Magazine founder Samuel McClure, an important figure in the muckraking movement,described Italian fascism as “a great step forward and the first new ideal in government since the founding of the American Republic.”
After having vistited Italy and interviewed Mussolini in 1926, the American humorist Will Rogers, who was informally dubbed “Ambassador-at-Large of the United States” by the National Press Club, said of the fascist dictator: “I’m pretty high on that bird.” “Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government,” Rogers wrote, “that is, if you have the right dictator.”
Reporter Ida Tarbell was deeply impressed by Mussolini's attitudes regarding labor, affectionately dubbing him “a despot with a dimple.”
NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois saw National Socialism as a worthy model for economic organization. The establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, he wrote, had been “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.” In 1937 DuBois stated: “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”
FDR adviser Rexford Guy Tugwell said of Italian fascism: “It's the cleanest,neatest,most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious.” In late 1934 he noted: “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary.... Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has.”
New Republic editor George Soule, who avidly supported FDR, noted approvingly that the Roosevelt administration was “trying out the economics of fascism.”
Playwright George Bernard Shaw hailed Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world’s great “progressive” leaders because they “did things,” unlike the leaders of those “putrefying corpses” called parliamentary democracies.
The education reformer and socialist John Dewey spoke of the “social possibilities of war” and the “immense impetus to reorganization” that it afforded. He added,with an air of hopefulness,that the conflict might force Americans “to give up much of [their] economic freedom”; to abandon their “individualistic tradition” and “march in step”; and to recognize “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.”
The progressive financier George Perkins said the “great European war … is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.”
Grosvenor Clarkson,Chairman of the Federal Interdepartmental Defense Board, said the war effort “is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole.”
The social worker Felix Adler said the regimentation imposed on society by the war effort was helping America create the “perfect man…a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any…that has yet existed.”
President Woodrow Wilson stated, “I am an advocate of peace, but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war.”
Mussolini in a 1921 speech: “Between us and the communists there are no political affinities but there are intellectual ones. Like you [communists], we consider necessary a centralized unitary state which imposes iron discipline and all persons, with this difference, that you reached this conclusion by way of the concept of class, and we by the way of the concept of nation.”
"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions." Hitler 1927
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