Dictionary definitions of fascism
George Orwell once said the word fascism was being twisted to mean nothing more than “something undesirable.” From the Italian fascio, meaning group or bundle, Mussolini’s Fascism promised to unite Italy against petty internal partisan riots.
What fascism is, if it is appropriate to describe a certain general class of political movements as fascist, is united action for the sake of unity. Fundamentally, fascism is populist activism.
This call for unity claims to transcend politics, but in reality attempts to push a particular policy, and browbeats any who oppose it as “partisan”, “divisive”, and “obstructive”. This obsession with unity ends up evading the means by which a policy is normally subject to debate and criticism.
To drive this united action almost always requires a threat – either an enemy or a crisis. This is necessary because people are naturally self-interested, and a collective threat, if real, is a perfectly justifiable reason for people to make an extra effort to work together. The difference between a fascist and the great leader is that the great leader is put there by circumstance and goes away when the job is done, while the fascist desires to be the great leader ahead of time, and may set in motion plans to create a suitable situation.
In modern leftism, I cannot help but taste the flavor of fascism when the supposed global warming crisis is used to justify legislation to place controls on various sectors of the economy, when various distinctly socialist causes like nationalized health care and mass public education are fraudulently cast as bipartisan goals, or when critics of these policies are aggressively marginalized in mainstream institutions.
