OK, time to post again the 14 defining characteristics of fascism.

[cthulu2016]

26. I dislike the focus on the term "fascism"

These are not really defining traits of fascism. They are universal traits of a modern authoritarian state, and will be found in any such state independent of ostensible ideology.

Take Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia and any Muslim Theocracy and we'll find that the methods and practices are pretty much the same despite the vast differences in ostensible ideology.

This is just how a totalitarian authoritarian state works. (Pharaoh's Egypt was probably much the same.)

Liberalism's historical charm is that it was anti-authoritarian categorically, and was able to condemn both the French Monarchy and the French Revolution.

(The reason the focus on "fascism" as if it were synonymous with authoritarian makes me uncomfortable in this context is that we are still a long way from completely getting over the right vs. left idea that there was a good guy and a bad guy on Germany versus Russia. It's a distorting idea.)

In his history of Europe (called EUROPE) Norman Davies spends a chapter running through a similar list of 17 points, expanded from from Arthur M. Hill's famous 15 points, that I find more interesting than this Lawrence Britt list. (Including the charming bullet point "Gangsterism," in the movement causing disorder and then selling themselves as protection from themselves.)