Most of the characteristics Britt lists are actually properties than can be observed in any nation in a state of war. Warring states exhibit these characteristics to a greater or lesser degree because that is how they generate internal cohesiveness, which is essential to win wars, as well as maintain civilian morale. These characteristics are also useful in preparing for future wars. And since states are either preparing for or fighting wars much of the time, it is not surprising that one can find these characteristics in many historical situations. Sadly, a large part of what it means to be a nation is being a society which is capable of succeeding in war more often than not (otherwise, a nation tends to disappear before too long.)
The term "fascism" is, like "genocide" and most other political terms, subject to Humpty-Dumpty's Law -- they can be made to mean whatever one likes, up to a point -- so it may be quibbling to try to limit its denotation too much, but I think it is conducive to clear thinking to make the effort. For one thing, casting one's net as far as Britt does, from Nazi Germany to Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Suharto's Indonesia, and Pinochet's Chile, risks overlooking some rather important differences. More relevantly to contemporary U.S. conditions, lists of this sort usually imply that there is some sort of "fascist toboggan run," such that, if most or all of these 14 characteristics can be identified in the contemporary U.S. situation, even if only to a moderate degree, we must be on a fairly ineluctable slippery slope down to those horrific states.
The problem here, it seems to me, is that analyses like Britt's lack a dynamic or historical dimension. Little or no consideration is given to just *how* Germany, Italy, etc., arrived at their "fascist" conditions, how those conditions developed over time, and why these historical developments occurred. Lacking this dynamic dimension, they tend to confuse a lot of apples and oranges, and are not very helpful for understanding actual historical developments.
To take Nazi Germany as an example (which is the one I am most familiar with among those in Britt's group of samples), too little attention tends to be paid these days to the differences between Germany after WW I and the U.S. today. What is all too glibly referred to as the "Weimar Republic" or "Weimar democracy" was in fact a very weak and flawed political system at its best, regarded with contempt by large segments of the population on both the left and right and including *within the constitution itself* a provision for "emergency" rule by decree, which in fact was in effect at the time Hitler took power. This system was just too weak to withstand the aftereffects of the war, the hyperinflation of the mid-twenties, and eventually of course the Great Slump at the beginning of the thirties. In addition, the radical left was encouraged by the short-lived "workers' revolutions" in Munich and Bavaria right after the war to think that if the Weimar regime collapsed, a final Marxist revolution would take place, so leftist Germans tended to neglect shoring up the aspects of that regime which were genuinely democratic -- and of course paid a terrible price for that neglect.
If we review recent U.S. history with Britt's characteristics in mind, it is easy to see that most of them did in fact apply, more or less, when "hot" wars were in progress, and during the periods of "cold" war (especially from the late forties through the fifties) there were strong tendencies, to say the least, towards intensifying them. But what differentiates this country from cases like Nazi Germany is that, after each war, we were able to restrain ourselves from sliding too far down that toboggan run, whereas the German brakes were shot, and their toboggan crashed at the bottom. Let's hope that we can keep the current situation, which is sort of a "luke-warm" war state, perhaps, from developing the same way. That means that, unlike leftist Germans in the twenties, we have to do everything possible to keep the democratic, pacific characteristics of our society healthy.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ______________________________ If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.-- Isaac Newton If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.-- Hal Abelson, MIT professor