Remember back in the day, liberals, when you were shocked, shocked at the way the business sector in the Reich just went along with the H-word?  Oh, the outrage!  It just showed that businessmen were really crypto-fascists and should have been right there in the dock with the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.

I bring this up after being prompted by a reader, who, in the aftermath of the leaked post-election Googler video, wonders how far the current war on conservatives is going to go, how much farther corporations will go with the program of the left, what with credit card companies refusing to do business with "hate" groups – like David Horowitz.  The latest flap is over Amazon delisting titles of the notorious pick-up artist, "Roosh V."  Remember when liberals were beside themselves over suppression of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer?

After all, liberals, shouldn't the corporate chieftains bravely push back against politicians who want them to start discriminating against their customers on the basis of ideology?  Isn't that what you demanded that German businessmen should have done in the Nazi years?  Shouldn't businessmen say a customer is a customer, and what he or ze does in the privacy of his social media account has nothing to do with us guys just trying to make a buck?

That was the liberal line, way, way back in the day when liberals felt in their bones that they would be the likely victims of any move to censor speech or discriminate against people with unpopular views.  But now their identity politics has been such a smashing success, with everyone hiding in terror against the day when they will be shamed by a Twitter mob for unspeakable crimes against diversity and inclusion, that liberals feel they have the power to shut down conservative speech.  So they do.

Of course, nobody can know today whether an America in 50 years will excoriate today's businessmen for going along to get along with the left.  Or whether they will be celebrated as truly "woke" heroes who helped spread diversity and inclusion right across the fruited plain.

I wonder what the businessmen who toe the liberal line think they are doing.  Are they stupid?  Foolish?  Just going with the flow?  I'd say there are three things that prompt them to get with the liberal program.

First is the basic truth of the nation-state economy.  Despite everything that everyone believes, the political system calls the shots on business.  Who is paying taxes to whom?  Are businessmen collecting tithes from politicians and professors?  I don't think so.  Every now and again, with antitrust, the political system reminds next-gen businesses who is boss.

Right now, businessmen think the left is boss.

Secondly, there is the inescapable fact that businessmen are educated in our liberal-run schools and universities.  The only way in our society to acquire original ideas is to get out of the mainstream and read a book: otherwise, you get to be a cookie-cutter liberal.  So the default thing for a standard-issue businessman is to go with the liberal line; that is the safe thing.

Thirdly, I don't doubt that many businessmen think they are doing the Lord's work by buying into the liberal political line.  They think they get brownie points for doing transgender bathrooms like Target or for helping turn out Latino voters, like Google.

It's pretty obvious what we need to do.  We need to teach businessmen that kissing the ring of liberals is going to get them into trouble.  We need to teach them that they'd better kiss our ring, or else.

I must say I don't like this.  I'm a live and let live guy, or at least I pretend to be.  But our liberal friends don't believe in live and let live.  Politics is their religion, and politics is all about bullying.

I tell you what we need to do.  We need to start talking about fascism.

When you tell businesses what kind of customers they should kick out, that's fascism, liberals.  When businesses are kissing the ring of liberals to curry favor with them, that's fascism, liberals.  When you have a regime outfit like the SPLC with the power to say who is in and who is out, that's fascism, liberals.

You would know all about that, liberals.  You're the guys who know all about psychology and "projection."  You're the guys who are up on the Hegelian dialectic and how opposites are really the same thing, as in left-wing thugs and right-wing thugs.

Oh, and if you liberals had ever read a book, you would know what got Hitler riled up in the first place.  It was the multiculti politics of the Habsburgs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that made the German-speaking Adolf feel like an embattled minority in his own country.  Imagine!

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.