Another good book is Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeao-Christian View by Gene Edward Veith, Jr.
That's the interesting thing about all this. Progressivism had a strong Christian streak to it, with its ties to temperance and suffragette movements, and it's Calvinistic desire to bring God's kingdom to this world. But then it evolved into the 1960's liberalism, where God was replaced by worship of the state, and traditional religion became a dangerous competitor which had to be eliminated. Replacing one God with another, one morality with another.
The dirty secret of turn of the 20th century progressivism is that it spoke favorably of fascism and often the movements exchanged ideas and tactics, back when fascism was viewed as the future of human societal ordering, with liberal democracy viewed as a tired failure. The idea that individualism was selfish and inevitably led to bad outcomes so that people should (made to) be thinking first of the collective good is not new or exclusive to communism. Even though I learned the phrase in school, I was never taught the depth of meaning behind Warren Harding's "return to normalcy". Far more than just the uncertainty of the Great War, it was a repudiation of the reordering of American society that the war had made possible, the original crisis opportunity not to be wasted. But voters were not interested in continuing it, fortunately.
Sterling Spatz
