What follows is an essay adapted from my new book “The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State,” originally published in The American Mind.
The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who came of age in the 1930s and observed with horror the emergence of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in his native country, warned that “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.” He explained:
