A book we strongly recommend is "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg.

Goldberg states firmly and truly: "Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right … it is, and always has been a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if ever there was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites.. In reality… in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal."

And if that comes as a surprise to some readers, this further truth will probably surprise them even more: "American Progressivism – the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent – is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Hitler and Mussolini." And: "Modern liberalism is the offspring of twentieth-century progressivism, which in turn shares intellectual roots with European fascism."

The book is crammed with evidence for these contentions.

Goldberg draws the right distinction between  classical liberalism (free-market liberalism, individualism) and statist liberalism, the would-be totalitarianism that "views  everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good [and] takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action."  This is the liberalism of political correctness, of bans on drinking and smoking, of prescribing what and how much we should eat. It is the liberalism, or more accurately the fascism of Al Gore and the other Man-Made Global Warming fanatics who would change our way of life to something austere and miserable in the name of a higher good; and of "Hillary Clinton and her friends – the leading proponents and exemplars of liberal fascism in our time", to whom an entire chapter is devoted, and whose universal health-care proposal is a perfect example of tyranny in the name of the general good. 

Of course American liberalism, he concedes, is not intended to be a brutal but a "nice" totalitarianism, "nannying, not bullying".  But it is "definitely totalitarian in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance."

The author rightly traces all modern totalitarian regimes back to Rousseau and the French Revolution. But totalitarianism did not begin there. He stresses that statism is often presented and welcomed as an alternative religion. What he neglects to mention is that the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was as cruelly totalitarian as it could get, and so were branches of Protestantism where and when they had the power to be so.