I've recently found myself using the term in similar contexts -- and with level-headed people who demand a reasonable amount of precision in applying such labels. Nobody has suggested I've gone overboard. Maybe that's because "fascism" really is an apt label for what we're seeing today -- particularly with respect to torture and civil liberties.
> I have used "Christofascist" to describe the
> militaristic theocrats at home, but that's probably
> just an epithet. I hear they may be forming a third
> party because they don't think the GOP candidates are
> Godly enough. We can hope!
I've used it too, but I think it's actually a pretty fair description of a specific tendency on the right:
-- The denigration of individual and human rights for the sake of the preservation of "the nation" -- A conception of "the nation" as having certain essential characteristics (e.g. a "Christian heritage," the English language, etc.) -- A sense that there is an internal enemy that conspires to undermine those essential characteristics. This is what Ann Coulter makes all her money off of. -- Distrust of cosmopolitanism, art, and intellectuals -- The promotion of a conception of masculinity that is strongly interwoven with militarism -- The idea that preserving "the nation" requires military aggression
I think the following quotes establish all of these as pretty distinct fascist values.
Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism:
For the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist state, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people ... The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right."
>From Giovanni Gentile's The Philosophic Basis of Fascism:
Is Fascism therefore "anti-intellectual," as has been so often charged? It is eminently anti-intellectual ... if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice. Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence. It is not that Fascism denies value to culture, to the higher-intellectual pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action. Fascist anti-intellectualism holds in scorn a product peculiarly typical of the educated classes in Italy: the leterato -- the man who plays with knowledge and with thought without any sense of responsibility for the practical world. It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men, but rather creates pedants and aesthetes, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent. It has no use, for instance, for the man who is "above the conflict" when his country or its important interests are at stake.
Alfredo Rocco wrote in The Political Doctrine of Fascism:
For man is not solely matter; and the ends of the human species, far from being the materialistic ones we have in common with other animals, are, rather, and predominantly, the spiritual finalities which are peculiar to man and which every form of society strives to attain as well as its stage of social development allows. Thus the organization of every social group is more or less pervaded by the spiritual influxes of: unity of language, of culture, of religion, of tradition and customs, and in general of feeling and volition, which are as essential as the material elements: unity of economic interests, of living conditions, and of territory.
Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century:
We stand today before a definitive decision. Either through a new experience and cultivation of the old blood, coupled with an enhanced fighting will, we will rise to a purificatory action, or the last Germanic-western values of morality and state-culture shall sink away in the filthy human masses of the big cities, become stunted on the sterile burning asphalt of a bestialized inhumanity, or trickle away as a morbific agent in the form of emigrants, bastardizing themselves in South America, China, Dutch East India, Africa...
-WD