Hi, This is part one of a reply to Todd Archer and others (see below)... Chip Berlet
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Despite the contention I give you, I do enjoy reading the posts and learn from them. So, please ignore the flak and post the rest of this essay, if there is more.
On what was posted, I think some mention of Franco and Spain is important since it formed a model for Latin American and possibly some East Asian developments.
In more general terms, I think this characterization has some social and historical problems:
``Fascism is a distinctive revolutionary form of right wing populism. Fascism glorifies national, racial, or cultural unity and collective rebirth while seeking to purge imagined enemies. It attacks both revolutionary movements and liberal pluralism in favor of militarized, totalitarian mass politics. Fascism appears as both a mass movement and a form of state power...''
These problems are mostly related to understanding why fascism can appeal in the first place.
I think that appeal is directly related to socio-economic and political crisis (which gives class analysis an opening here) that appear to bring into question and de-stabilize a perceived collective identity as a class, as a people and as a nation. On an individual level, you have to be suffering a great deal in some material or spiritual way before you can even entertain some of this bullshit as an answer. While that might be implicit in what you have written, it isn't exactly spelled out.
If you consider a mass movement a necessary pre-condition, then you have to lay out in broad terms how that mass movement can be formed. For example, it is not a given that fascism has an automatic appeal, and that appeal must be constantly resisted. Rather the question seems to me to be, how could such bullshit appeal to anyone, and why?
This might open up a bigger can of worms, but, I think it should be opened anyway.
Most of my reading on fascism comes from three sources: Thomas Mann, Ernst Cassirer and Hannha Arendt. They all deal with this question of why in different ways.
Chuck Grimes