It’s what makes the Austrian school such a pernicious school of thought in my mind. It’s why it’s produced so many outright fascists! It’s goal is to convince the liberal by their predilections to reason, to give up on any notion of a Greater Good.

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Libertarianism and The Austrian School are not denials of The Greater Good. They both are the realization that distributed decision making is (by far) the most effective way to benefit The Greater Good.

Huh? I’m reading Mussolini’s autobiography, and he was all about the so called “greater good” at the cost of individualism.

I think OP is confusing the way full libertarian society could look like anarchic systems and could organize as company towns with Fascism. The assumed end state of company towns is that the individual can choose to stay or leave. The assumed end state of fascism is unconsenting individuals at the mercy of a private/public entity. In practice for true fascism to exist as your reading indicates it requires a collective to enforce the public/private power over the people. Both in Germany and Italy a strong collectivist government used the authority granted by the collective to compel corporations to control the people. In effect socialism and fascism are the same thing with a different optic of who's controlling the masses. Public/private vs private/public governence. If OP wanted to argue that fragmented individualist society was easier to control and take over by a fascist society that may have some merit but to insinuate that full libertarianism is fascism is just historically wrong.

Your conception of "fascist" makes a significant difference here. Like a lot of words, it gets used to describe so many things that aren't in the definition of the word, it's not safe to assume we're talking about the same thing.

Sure, I am trying to tighten up the category of what I think a fascist is. Guilty as charged. I just think when you think about fascism as an impulse or a tendency and ground it in things like a the desire for strong leadership, the fear of social chaos and disorder, the resentment of perceived enemies and outsiders, and the longing for a sense of national or ethnic identity and purpose, you can kind of make sense of the apparent contradictions in someone like Gabbard, Trump or Bannon. Basically all intellectualism boils down to just trying to formulate better categories, ultimately. In other words, I’m trying to set aside the idealistic frame in which most political science tries to operate and say: guys, we’ve learned a lot of about human nature and how it operates in political economies, so there might be a more useful framing for understanding the apparent ideological contradictions we see … which are only contradictions in the idealist notions of these ideologies. But not contradictions at all, if reduced to core tendencies. What I think is when you do this simple reframing, you can see the fascist golem for what it is. I actually think we try hard not to see it, and make bad mistakes trying to categorize it, because a synthesis like this has better explanatory power, in my view. In conclusion, to me, fascism is better understood as an impulse in people to wield permanent political and economic power, by capitalizing on cynicism of polities, and using cultural control (propaganda) and pseudo-religious mythos to contain the political conservation in a cultural envelope, that leads to extreme depoliticization of the average member of the polity.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. You and I wouldn't mean the same thing at all when we use the word, so an intelligent conversation isn't possible without clearly defining terms first. I have a much better understanding of your position and ideas now.