@ChrisMayLA6

Any politicised term is likely to be a site of conflicting interpretations. If the concept ‘table’ was political people would be engaged in endless arguments over whether or not legs are essential. But terms are conflicted in interesting ways. Definitions of fascism that enumerate its ideological and cultural characteristics suit those thinking inside a ‘liberal democracy’ framework, in which politics is experienced as a perpetual ‘battle of ideas’ in a public sphere imagined as something like an Oxbridge debating chamber, an abstraction stripped of economic exploitation, power, and historical change, in which it would be bad manners to ask ‘who is paying you to say this ?’

Think instead of politics as the expression of conflicting economic interests and the historical context in which fascism actually arises moves to centre stage. In Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s it was the actual election of radical socialist governments; in 1920s-30s Italy, Germany, Austria, etc, it was the fear that capitalism was collapsing and the left about to take over, as it just had done in Russia.

What are the policy implications of understanding the current rise of fascism from the perpetual ‘battle of ideas’ perspective ? Not many, I would argue – even in education, learning the lessons of history seems pointless if fascism is always lurking somewhere in an abstract a-historical realm of ideas; may as well carry on as we are, into the holocaust... But understanding it in historical context makes the best policy choices clear: if fascism is a reaction to the actual or feared disintegration of capitalism, and imminent fundamental economic change (in the past to socialism, now eco-socialism), then policies that minimise the inevitable social disruption of that change, protect the vulnerable, and positively manage the change become obvious choices.