Well, I was one of the folks who started this brouhaha over the definition of "fascism," and while I very much appreciate all the useful material marshalled by various contributors to the thread, there's one point that seems worth repeating. At a certain point, it becomes academic whether you call it fascism; the fact remains that the greatest potential for a potent and invidious coalition of capital, the state, and the working class lies not in all the bogeyman-groups of the fringe right, but in the Democratic Party--for a couple of reasons, very broadly speaking: first and most obvious, because the Democratic Party is still the institution that claims greatest working class allegiance; and second, because the kind of racism required to appeal to the broad mass of Americans is concentrated there--the polite, genteel, muted... let's say *scientized* variety, of which dp moynihan was an architect. In re: racism in politics, one thing ought to be pretty clear by now, and that is that most Americans don't like outright bigotry and hate rhetoric. It scares and offends them; witness the precipitous decline in Pat Buchanan's popularity after his *kulturkampf* rants at the '92 convention, stemmed only by his conversion to nativist economic themes. Or consider Newt's freefall in the opinion polls following the election of the '94 Republican Congress, which is really what saved Bill Clinton's ass. There's no way that bogeys like Buchanan or the militia-monsters are going to get across with a plurality of Americans. But the kind of relentless pathologizing of the poor and dusky masses that neo-lib Democrats specialize in--you can sell that shit all day long, apparently.