Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Fascism with a smile.

They smile as they pick our pockets and leave us bankrupt - emotionally, monetarily, socially and culturally bankrupt.

The current Empire's control and manipulation of media technology allows many to subscribe to advancements/legislation that may have otherwise caused revolt. Or perhaps not -- perhaps the efforts to dumb down the hoi polloi is but another piece of the puzzle leading to our current 'fascism-lite' malaise.

In the end though, I tend to agree with my paisan Mussolini (haven't read the entire thread though I presume his quote has been referenced a number of times already); any system successfully merging/integrating corporate and State power will yield fascism, light or otherwise..

[2012 Countdown]

^ (Savant) Yes, I agree, thats why I'd said Technological fascism in my first, and Jack had enumerated examples and application.
Some call it a scientific dictatorship, or technocratic corporatism. PR campaigns and manufacturing reality and consent so that the soft corporatism at home can be applied, but hard core tactics applied for Empire/corporations abroad.

[dada]

If, then, the definition of fascism is gonna be "whatever feels to me like fascism", or "stuff I don't like", or "somebody did something bad to me", or "I got a parking ticket I didn't deserve", can we at least spell it differently for those purposes? Like, let's call it phashism or something.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'



I'm sorry barracuda, I said I'd call it soft fascism if it would make you feel better, and then kept right on calling it plain old fascism. If it still bothers you, I can edit my post for you. Just let me know.

[barracuda]

Whatever else this discussion might be about, it's sure not about some notion of yours that I need to feel better. I could honestly give a damn what you call whatever you happen to want to call what you want to call anything that you feel you need to call something.

I'm feeling just fine, if you're really interested.

[Canadian_watcher]

"Justice" applied arbitrarily is also fascist.

[dada]

Whatever else this discussion might be about, it's sure not about some notion of yours that I need to feel better. I could honestly give a damn what you call whatever you happen to want to call what you want to call anything that you feel you need to call something.

I'm feeling just fine, if you're really interested.

My apologies again. I thought the 'phascism' post was directed at me. I am glad you're feeling fine.

I think this thread has done a good job defining the many faces of fascism. Which I think was the original point of the discussion, wherever else it may have gone.

There's original fascism, fascism-lite, cherry fascism, fascism the home version, creeping fascism, and the fascist creep. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

[compared2what?]

"It's *only* a free speech zone - fer fuck's sake ! if this were a REAL fascist state they'd open fire on protesters! Anyone claiming that there is fascism here is a fucking blowhard who neva been opposite real clip anyway.

You're mistaken.

I have to admit that it's kind of amusing to be vilified and condemned for multiple thought crimes and presumed acts of decadent moral cowardice by someone simply for having disagreed with the meaning she assigns to one of the words in her preferred party line, when that word is "fascism."

Crazy talk.

"Right now they are ONLY outlawing abortion in a coupla places. Why worry? That's no threat to the bodily integrity of women WHERE I LIVE, so go complain where it's appropriate!!"

Yeah, all right, you've got a point there. and by turning our backs on those who are being harmed by the legislation we're sure going to get a running start at fighting it when it comes to our own backyards - not to mention all the "Good" (vice evil) friends we're going to pick up along the way.

"At least there's no draft!"

Sure and there are no jobs, either. Canon fodder pays. Draft shmaft.

I never said that or anything remotely like it.

I'm degrading the quality of the discourse.

true

You're talking to yourself, so I guess it's your call.

Miss:

that you are choosing to take this personally is your own problem.

I don't take it personally. There's just not much else to respond to in an unprovoked personal attack that's entirely unrelated to the substance of anything that was actually said. Frankly, I'd be thrilled if you wanted to talk about the subject of the thread instead. Let's do.

[Canadian_watcher]

f. Poorly-defined. Fascist ideology was vague and protean. This is a source of endless frustration to those who expect to find a coherent definition of fascism in the the writings of party “philosophers”. But it reflects nothing more than fascism’s pragmatic approach to attaining its goals and its unwillingness to be bound (like its predecessors) to failed dogmas. Like all popular movements, fascism tried to encapsulate ideology in terse slogans – “Believe, Obey, Fight”, “Strength through joy”, “Work makes you free.”

http://www.anesi.com/Fascism-TheUltimateDefinition.htm

[JackRiddler]

CW, you really shouldn't have equated c2w?'s light touch of denial (or aversity to apply the term too readily) a Limbaughism. That was wrong.

If, then, the definition of fascism is gonna be "whatever feels to me like fascism", or "stuff I don't like", or "somebody did something bad to me", or "I got a parking ticket I didn't deserve", can we at least spell it differently for those purposes? Like, let's call it phashism or something.

So off. I want this addressed:

Before they send out death squads
Before pageants in the square
Before the leader speaks law from the balcony
Before the women shudder and the men howl with victory,
Before the bad elements disappear, the cowards are shot fleeing
Before the show trials
When they're still in brownshirts and bloody on the street
Or no, before that,
When they're still good burgers in the beerhall,
Suited and groomed dandies at the club
Angered by what this nation has become
Spitting about parasites and degenerates,
Saying, there ought to be a law,
I'd like to wring their necks,
One day a rain will come,
Look at all these sluts,
Are they fascists?

When they conciliate
When they call jubilees and elections
When they raise the workers wage and
Build a hospital for the poor
When they give an amnesty or name a civilian successor
Are they fascist now?

When the doctors who'd tormented the starving,
when the spymasters traded on their secrets
for a sinecure in Virginia or high office in their own, new, liberal nation
Were they still fascist?

When the arms and advisers sail to your key ally in the region,
When they are regrettably bastards, but your bastards,
Killers and sadists, but graduates of your school,
Planners of hunger and rape, but graduates of your school
Profiteers of blood and slavery, but always with other graduates of your school,
When you're only in it for the profit, and better you than the competition,
When anyway the Communists forced you into this fiendship with the devil,
When the only burning you do is from 30,000 feet or nine thousand miles distance
Does that make you a fascist?

barracuda:

Among other things, fascism is a kind of political reaction and degeneration that visits modern and modernizing societies when they enter severe economic crisis. It is usually a disease of capitalism. To define it as a particular kind of goosestep or style of monumentalism is to deny that it can come to any nation, and that it will have very different forms, and that it will call itself things like popular and socialist, and that it must be recognized and fought long before it reaches the full manifestations that you wish to rigidly define as the sole phenomena worthy of the name. Fascism has always been, curiously, an international phenomenon. One fascist revolution inspires another, they intervene to help each other at least until power is assured. No country lacks its fascists, even when they are not organized and in power. Few people are entirely immune to the fascist drive. I do not exclude the American sponsors of the classical foreign fascist movements and regimes from their guilt, just because they didn't manage to impose the full version here. Some of them tried, we all know the story of the 1934 plot.

And while I don't want to deny the truth of this:

to describe this country as being so does a criminal disservice to the suffering of the millions for whom the general quality of life here - not specific instances of severe repression of which indeed there are many, but the general quality - surely would be a fucking gigantic step in the direction of personal and political freedom.

to put this country under permanent protection from being described by the term in those cases when it does fit is a criminal disservice to the millions who live here in pockets outside that "general quality" to which you and I are privileged and lucky enough to belong, for example, in the world's largest prison system (in part thanks to a demented, delusional, public health policy with some of its roots in eugenic thinking, one that is called a war and pursued with jackboots and seizures of whole housing projects and evictions and yes, shootings of the people who usually lack the "general quality" of paler skin); and it is also a disservice to the hundreds of millions for whom "the general quality of life here" would have indeed been "a fucking gigantic step in the direction of personal and political freedom," only that they had the misfortune to be living, not in one of our designated totalitarian enemies, from whence they could at least expect the doors here to be open for them were they successfully to flee, but in one of our merely authoritarian allies, where our taxes were paying for the bullets and bombs murdering them.

Rosen auf den Weg gestreut

Ihr müßt sie lieb und nett behandeln,

erschreckt sie nicht – sie sind so zart!

Ihr müßt mit Palmen sie umwandeln,

getreulich ihrer Eigenart!

Pfeift euerm Hunde, wenn er kläfft –:

Küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft!



Wenn sie in ihren Sälen hetzen,

sagt: »Ja und Amen – aber gern!

Hier habt ihr mich – schlagt mich in Fetzen!«

Und prügeln sie, so lobt den Herrn.

Denn Prügeln ist doch ihr Geschäft!

Küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft.



Und schießen sie –: du lieber Himmel,

schätzt ihr das Leben so hoch ein?

Das ist ein Pazifisten-Fimmel!

Wer möchte nicht gern Opfer sein?

Nennt sie: die süßen Schnuckerchen,

gebt ihnen Bonbons und Zuckerchen ...

Und verspürt ihr auch

in euerm Bauch

den Hitler-Dolch, tief, bis zum Heft –:

Küßt die Faschisten, küßt die Faschisten,

küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft –!





Theobald Tiger

Die Weltbühne, 31.03.1931, Nr. 13, S. 452.

[Canadian_watcher]

CW, you really shouldn't have equated c2w?'s light touch of denial (or aversity to apply the term too readily) a Limbaughism. That was wrong.

JackRiddler, you really should not feed the bears. Why is it I've been more successful at ignoring the bait to derail this thread than you?

That being said, I respect you. I'd point you to a sampling of Limbaugh's style so that you might understand what I meant. Here he is defending the Iraq war by trying to point out that highway deaths are more of a problem:

On his August 23rd radio talk show (read the complete transcript here), Limbaugh used the most preposterous argument to date in defense of the war in Iraq:

Now, the number of highway deaths in this country, 43,443 in 2005, is 40 to 50 times our troop losses in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Well, ten or 20 times at least. And a whole lot more deaths per month than any civil war in Iraq, if there was or is a civil war in Iraq. I don't know whatever happened to "if it bleeds, it leads," but there's a whole lot more bleeding on our highways than in the war zone in Iraq out there, and a whole lot more dying going on in the American highway system than there is in the so-called civil war in Iraq. I don't hear a word from John Kerry who served in Vietnam or John Murtha or Joe Biden or Howard Dean. For every Cindy Sheehan, there are 40 to 50 mothers who have suffered far worse heartbreak. Cindy's son gave his life for his country, not for going to the drugstore.

In fact, the roadway deaths is at a highest level in 15 years, 43,443 Americans every year, ladies and gentlemen, and we're here turning ourselves into rags, pretzeling ourselves into contortions over the combat deaths in Iraq, regardless and mindless of the heroic mission that is taking place.

To me, there's a comparison. If you disagree, you disagree - but this thread is about fascism, not about what I did or didn't say to her Highness. I'm handling it, she's (trying to) handle it. Can we leave it alone?

[lupercal]

Not to discount any of the forgoing but I think you've put your finger on it here CW, in that it's largely a question of definition:

f. Poorly-defined. Fascist ideology was vague and protean. This is a source of endless frustration to those who expect to find a coherent definition of fascism in the the writings of party “philosophers”. But it reflects nothing more than fascism’s pragmatic approach to attaining its goals and its unwillingness to be bound (like its predecessors) to failed dogmas. Like all popular movements, fascism tried to encapsulate ideology in terse slogans – “Believe, Obey, Fight”, “Strength through joy”, “Work makes you free.”

http://www.anesi.com/Fascism-TheUltimateDefinition.htm

Since fascism derives from the Roman fasces, a bundle of rods with an axe in the middle -- a symbol of power much in evidence in US federal iconography incidentally, e.g. the Lincoln monument and the House Chamber -- and was part of the name of Mussolini's party ("'partito nazionale fascista,' the anti-communist political movement organized 1919 under Benito Mussolini," http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fascist ), I would say we need a new term to define the current species of Anglo-American corporate militarism. Unlike Italian Fascism and other earlier 20th-c movements, which built impressive monuments and didn't mind advertising themselves, the US-UK version is covert and invisible and thus much more insidious and dangerous, also much more powerful and successful.


1925 – Victor Emmanuel Monument (Il Vittoriano), Rome, Italy

As for a free press in the US, that's one of their illusions. When was the last time The Nation or NYT printed the truth about anything? For example: 12 African heads of state whacked or deposed in the last four years (counting Mali) and not a peep from frickin' ANYBODY except possibly at some future date a random libertarian whacko like AJ or offshore libertarian blogger like Corbett or Cartalucci. Maybe Tarpley if he gets around to it. Stay tuned. Anyway we're at a very dangerous juncture so it's an important discussion IMHO.

The bronze fasces, representing a classical Roman symbol of civic authority, are located on both sides of the U.S. Flag. Image courtesy of the Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives http://artandhistory.house.gov/art_arti ... strum.aspx

[barracuda]

I want this addressed:

Dear me, so demanding. And you quote yourself quite a bit. But okay.

Did you write the first poem? I'm going to pass on critiquing it for now and deal with the prose. Sorry for parsing it out, but I can't find a better way to respond at the moment.

Among other things, fascism is a kind of political reaction and degeneration that visits modern and modernizing societies when they enter severe economic crisis. It is usually a disease of capitalism.

It can visit them. I don't know if it's a requirement of those circumstances. Some countries in economic crisis seem able to avoid fascism. At least they avoid what I consider fascism to be. And that's part of the problem. Without describing in a fairly narrow sense just what fascism is, it's fair to middling impossible to ascertain whether or not your statement is so.

As well, under a too-vague set of defining characteristics, it's hard to figure out just what modernity has to do with the phenomenon. For example, if I partake of Canadian Watcher's definition, "'Justice' applied arbitrarily is also fascist," then I can't see much in the way of obstacles preventing me from retrofitting fascism to describe nations or societies or even small tribal gatherings going thousand of years back in history.

To define it as a particular kind of goosestep or style of monumentalism is to deny that it can come to any nation, and that it will have very different forms, and that it will call itself things like popular and socialist, and that it must be recognized and fought long before it reaches the full manifestations that you wish to rigidly define as the sole phenomena worthy of the name.

But that's not what I'm doing. I'm saying there is a discernible fascist aesthetic that is integral to the phenomenon as I see it playing out. That's not to deny that it can come to any nation, although I guess I can easily deny that it necessarily will, and point out nations which have pretty much avoided fascism. I mean there must be one or two out there.

Oppression has many forms, but while all fascism is oppressive, is all oppression fascist? What's the difference between oppression and fascism?

I suggest that part of the difference is aesthetic, an aesthetic that flows organically from some integral aspects of the process that impels the authoritarian communal ideology.

Fascism has always been, curiously, an international phenomenon.

Why is that curious, especially given the huge variety of actions and forms that you seem ready to denote as constituting it? The wider your definition seeks to aspire, the less curious it becomes that a wide variety of societies have fallen prey to fitting those definitions.

One fascist revolution inspires another, they intervene to help each other at least until power is assured.

Within certain limits that are proscribed by the nature of fascism, granted.

No country lacks its fascists, even when they are not organized and in power. Few people are entirely immune to the fascist drive.

Really? I'm not even sure what this means, it's so entirely generalized as to mean just about anything at all, pr to paint the taint of fascism on anyone at all. The broadest brush imaginable here. You must paint very large pictures, or small ones with only a stroke or two.

I do not exclude the American sponsors of the classical foreign fascist movements and regimes from their guilt, just because they didn't manage to impose the full version here. Some of them tried, we all know the story of the 1934 plot.

Neither do I. But is profiting from fascism in itself fascist?

And while I don't want to deny the truth of this:

to describe this country as being so does a criminal disservice to the suffering of the millions for whom the general quality of life here - not specific instances of severe repression of which indeed there are many, but the general quality - surely would be a fucking gigantic step in the direction of personal and political freedom.

to put this country under permanent protection from being described by the term in those cases when it does fit

Okay, stop right there. No one has put anyone under any sort of protection from description, not the least of which reasons why not being that no one, certainly not me, is granted the power of offering such protection by any force I can think of.

Also, this is a very long sentence that is at the very beginning of getting harder and harder to understand with any precision.

is a criminal disservice to the millions who live here in pockets outside that "general quality" to which you and I are privileged and lucky enough to belong,

Personally, I haven't belonged to any particularly blessed demographic here for any considerable amount of time, myself. I am a lifelong pauper, really, with all the lack of privileges that attend that position.

for example, in the world's largest prison system (in part thanks to a demented, delusional, public health policy with some of its roots in eugenic thinking,

My own periods of incarceration bear upon this, but it's a boring story for the most part.

one that is called a war and pursued with jackboots and seizures of whole housing projects and evictions and yes, shootings of the people who usually lack the "general quality" of paler skin);

Okay, but if you're going to use terms like "jackboots" you ought to realize that you are entering the realm of fascist aesthetics, at least as regards footwear.

and it is also a disservice to the hundreds of millions for whom "the general quality of life here" would have indeed been "a fucking gigantic step in the direction of personal and political freedom," only that they had the misfortune to be living, not in one of our designated totalitarian enemies, from whence they could at least expect the doors here to be open for them were they successfully to flee, but in one of our merely authoritarian allies, where our taxes were paying for the bullets and bombs murdering them.

You mean like Mexico?

Rosen auf den Weg gestreut

Now that poem, I quite love.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

As troubling as the term may be, one need to face the reality, I believe, that it is fascism itself which has evolved, rather than one or another nation "tending" or "moving" towards it. Anyone looking for a photo-repeat of the past will be caught looking forever.

How's It's-too-good-to-be-fascism?

EDITED TO ADD: or I Can't Believe It's Fascism! ?

[compared2what?]

Some of these answers have been very good in defining, on the one hand, the emotional qualities of social interaction that can be usefully described as fascist (82_28) and, on the other, the political qualities of explicitly fascist ideology, movements, parties or states.

So I'm quoting several of those below.

I think it would be useful at this stage to disentangle different ways in which the word is applied.

I think we can distinguish three types of usages, although they shouldn't be seen as mutually exclusive:

The fascist drive: Extreme authoritarianism coupled with a particular fetish for power expressed in outbursts of often arbitrary brutality, generally against the designated out-group and the weak. This can be highly individual. It is extremely patriarchal with a violent cult of manhood, that must be said up-front, although it may simultaneously allow selective images of women as warriors as well as faithful nurturers of the national offspring. Fascism's primary appeal is to stupid, violent, frustrated, fearful men. (As an aside, it should be noted that there are types of authoritarian personalities that are not fascist and do not fetishize violence, even if they recognize it as the necessary bottom-line for order.)

I think that fascism's primary appeal is less to men than it is to what would have been called "the petty bourgeoisie" during The Rise of Fascism v. 1.0, for which there's now no fully satisfactory term. But that's still to whom it primarily appeals, imo -- most middle-class people.

Minor point. And other than that, I agree with you.

Ideological fascism, movement fascism or "classical fascism" is the particular organized form that developed out of 1890s militarist nationalism and came to the fore in many European nations in the 1920s and 1930s, very much in response to the rise of communist revolution as well as the perceived depravities of liberal bourgeois society.

^^I don't disagree, exactly. Because, of course, you're right. It was responsive to those things. But if I had to name just one thing*** in response to which fascism arose, I'd say that -- as with communism and anger over the perceived depravities of liberal bourgeois society -- it arose in response to global fundamentally fin-de-siecle-ish-type anxieties over the social order.

I've always thought that was why (typical) fascist movements are not merely ultra-nationalist -- and nativist, and sexually, socially and culturally conservative, and so on -- but traditionalist. Or....It might be better to say "insanely traditionalist," since the nostalgia is almost always for glory days that never were.

It's a Ron Paul/Patriot Movement/Christian Right type of thing, atm, since we're at such a moment again, now.

(***Not including economic and political crises, of course, if that's not cheating.)

Its global faith was that racially-defined nations are at war with each other for survival and supremacy. The nation is the required state religion.

Again, I don't disagree. It just seemed worth noting that religion itself often has a more-than-incidental function in fascist idealogy. Not that it's a requirement. It just usually works out that way.

Society must be forged with violence into a unity that actively excises and ritualistically destroys the designated others and all who won't conform to the national way. All persons receive a defined role within a steep hierarchy that is considered organic and natural; in a functioning society, we are all parts or cells of a single body. Deviations cannot be tolerated and must be punished. And yet all this is in the service of traditional elites and those who were already rich and powerful. In the ideology, it is the modernist, foreign-influenced or internationalist abandonment of supposed national traditions that cause the chaos that the fascists arise to vanquish, so naturally they view their radicalism as a defense and renewal of conservative values. In the actual history, it was the majority of traditional elites and the powerful, again in several nations from Italy in 1922 to Spain in 1936-9, who chose to become or to support fascist parties as a response to real economic and political crisis. I should mention that all this was positively bathed in the idea that this was true "freedom," and I think that's still a word fascists like to front today. Also, fascism is going to take on an intensely particular national character in each nation, so that fascists regimes will not all look the same from the outside, and of course they are unlikely to label themselves fascist.

Third is the fascist way of governance, the mass-psychological handbook of how to use fear, hatred and national flattery; the institutional technology and ideological tropes that can actually be detached from a generally fascist worldview and deployed by any state or large organization. These techniques preceded and were also mutated within the classical fascist states, and continue to be developed and adapted and remain available for use to this day.

Agree.

It's untrue to simply call the US fascist, although I'd say a large part of the Republican Party has become ideologically so, and the likes of Limbaugh and Beck and the political Islamophobes a la "libertarian" Pamela Gellar as well as many of the televangelist Christianists are clearly would-be fascist rulers, not to mention leaders of movements large and small; though luckily the movement members are mostly obedient job-drones in the normal economy and otherwise couch potatoes. (Alex Jones is small-potatoes whose main contribution has been to muddy the waters around the so-called "conspiracy" issues beyond reclamation.) I've often said that if the German variant of fascism (its own species, indubitably) required total mobilization of all popular resources to enable a relatively small country's plans to conquer, the American leviathan's post-fascist imperialism does best when 80 percent of more of the people simply sleep. Gives a whole new meaning to Silent Majority.

Meanwhile, the highly compartmentalized and segregated realms of nation-state and society include many institutions that make use of fascist governance: within the prison-industrial complex, the military, the "drug war" and "war on terrorism," the reaction to protest and strong social movements (ranging up to mass imprisonment and assassination), and of course in the way that many corporations handle their "human resources." It's hard to look past the many elements of fascist ideology or rhetoric within the political discourse, and the degree to which these are far more top-down than in Nixon's time (when the white majority entered the grip of a genuine popular reaction). The US state has often supported regimes overseas that are classically fascist or neo-fascist, such as the Condor nations among many other examples. The US has been a pioneer of the fascist toolkit, establishing research programs and international schools of torture and violent counterinsurgency. The state has prepared and wargamed for decades for the contingency of implementing a full and open military rule in the name of freedom, if this is ever considered necessary; and the expansion and perfection of the surveillance regime is the most impressive achievement in that effort.

Finally, the term is absolutely subject to abuse and has been watered-down from over-use and projection. So we have PC fascists, feminazis, the idea that Obama leads a fascist movement, Islamofascists - these tend to come from people on the right who confirm that "projection is powerful" - and, of course, over-easy application by leftists of the fascist label to any authoritarian or arbitrary policy.

And as a post-script, it is useful to distinguish between what I've called classical or ideological fascism as opposed to post-fascism (the passing of the "toolkit" into the common realms of governance, which can also come in a liberal form) and neo-fascism (explicit attempts to revive classical fascism).

Totally agree.

Although, to be honest, there are any number of contexts in which I'd certainly come a lot closer to calling the present-day United States a fascist state than I have, and a few in which I'd just go the whole way. My argument isn't so much with that as it is with the stuff about how useless/meaningless all political action is when you're up against the omnipotent, all-seeing, all-controlling state. Because that's a dangerous thing to say. (To the people who say it, I mean.)

But since that would be even truer under a classically fascist system than it is in contemporary North America -- the more authoritarian your culture, the less safe/politically pragmatic it is to make broadcast announcements about what parts of it you're threatened by, basically -- it's not actually contingent on the extent to which I agree or disagree with the premise to which it's attached on this thread (ie -- that we're living under fascism). I just have a problem with it for its own sake.

^^In case it doesn't go without saying, I don't mean that there's nothing the present-day state does that's worth objecting to along those lines. There's plenty. More than plenty. It's the joining it to an assertion that there's no point in trying to do anything about it that I object to.

I might be hearing implications in it that aren't there, however.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

As troubling as the term may be, one need to face the reality, I believe, that it is fascism itself which has evolved, rather than one or another nation "tending" or "moving" towards it. Anyone looking for a photo-repeat of the past will be caught looking forever.

How's It's-too-good-to-be-fascism?

EDITED TO ADD: or I Can't Believe It's Fascism! ?

I mean, if that's not something the Mad Men cannot get behind , I don't know what is.