The people who really don’t like authoritarian regimes are the ones whose freedoms are curtailed and who are not in control (obviously).

Conditions may recurr in which government authoritarianism will increase (Klaus, you’ll probably agree this may already be happening with the various anti-terror measures already implemented in the West – Skepticlawyer has a neat argument about the financial punishment of smokers to pay for the wider societal and health costs of their freely-chosen habit) but authoritarianism occurs completely independently of political affiliation.

Legalise neo-nazis today and give David Irving a chat show but we will NOT see another Nazi government arise. We may see governments that share some of their authoritanian attributes – not because they are neo-liberal, libertarian, neoconservative or even green, but because they feel authoritarian tools are necessary to implement their political, social or financial agenda. The only requirement for it to happen is that the wider public is either largely in agreement with their goals or unable to prevent it.

The only place I’d put a question mark over your remarks, DEM is this: “ample protection for personal liberty”. I don’t know about elsewhere, but there were some fairly extreme changes in Australia recently to limit those protections in certain situations, not all of which have been reversed. What some call the ‘state of exception’ may, at any time, be sufficient to bring out the extremity of the moderates.

Fascism isn’t over. It’s waiting in the wings. It is and will be an extension of neoliberalism or its equivalent.

I’ve always felt that the panic over the ‘far-right’ is overstated by the left. It’s what ended a brief fling I had with the Greens in the UK (their national policies were sensible but on the ground they turned out to be all ex-socialist alliance types).

To my mind there will ALWAYS be activity at both extremes of the political spectrum (sorry, I’ve always thought the right-wing-bad, left-wing-good is a crock) but like any population distribution, numbers at the extremes tend to be very small and their influence proportional.

On the rare occasions they manage to pinpoint a grass-roots issue that might boost their following, their political teeth are inevitably pulled by mainstream parties eventually appropriating their policy (as Howard’s Liberals did with One Nation).

Our society has ample protection for personal liberty already entrenched in law so it would require an electoral tsunami to sweep an extremist party into office with enough power to change this (which is why I don’t expect that “black flag of Islam” to be flying over Downing Street anytime soon). Historically this only tends to happen when mainstream politics has been fatally compromised by gross economic incompetence or institutionalised corruption.

Actively banning parties at the extreme, as is still done in Germany for example, undermines any claim to democratic credentials.