The Actual Consideration Of What Fascism Is Is Rather Something Of General Import. A Number Of Folks

The actual consideration of what fascism is is rather something of general import. A number of folks here have deferred to Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, and while I wouldn't discourage it, it is a text from the perspective of semiotics; that is to say, from the perspective of what signifies fascism, not what it is per se. Hence also why Eco emphasizes that none of the fourteen ways he describes are strictly necessary or sufficient for fascism, just that fascism as it has emerges coalesces around such signifiers. The aesthetics and rhetoric of fascists is rather succinctly summed up in Ur-Fascism, but what fascism is in a more direct, structural sense is a somewhat different consideration.

The governing structure of fascist Italy, as an example, retained many of the facets of the liberal democratic system from which it emerged, with a legislature, a judiciary, and an executive. Mussolini was legally the prime minister- though he adopted the title of Duce, literally "leader"- and was appointed by a legislative council- though a new one created by the fascist party called the Grand Council of Fascism that by and large excluded the previous legislature- and the prime minister could legally be dismissed by the head of state, the king, after a sustained vote of no confidence similar to the UK's formulation. Fascist Italy also redoubled- rather than invented- Italian colonial policy, promoting the settlement of Italians into Libya and other African colonial projects and the genocide of local populations. The domestic economic policy of fascist Italy was also much more explicitly in the interests of private business: in 1939, the whole of Italy was explicitly proposed to be legally divided into 22 corporations which appointed members to parliament; labour organization outside of the appointed corporate structures and striking as a practice were banned. The interests of fascist Italy's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois, and their economic policy is often referred to as specifically corporatist.

Nazi Germany was similar in structure, though while the German parliament- called the Reichstag- was maintained, a series of laws were passed which enabled the Chancellor- Hitler, who was appointed such by President Hindenburg- and the cabinet to implement laws without parliamentary or presidential approval. The Hitler cabinet is generally considered to have been the defacto ruling body of Nazi Germany, though members of the Reichstag obviously still convened and drafted laws and ran elections and generally supported Nazi rule and the judiciary remained a distinct body. The Nazis also wanted to redouble their colonial policy in specifically Africa- a theatre in which they were snubbed compared to other European powers- but were by and large unable to secure resources there for continued expansion due to the British opposing them in protecting its own colonial projects. A rather infamous and demonstrative guiding principle of Nazi economic policy, Lebensraum- literally "living space"- sought specifically to appropriate land and other productive capital to give to Germans that they might be made petite bourgeois and small artisans; de-proletarianized and bourgeoisified, at the same time that the people such capital is expropriated from were made slaves to fuel further expansion or killed outright. This was imposed both within and, once the resources of social underclasses at home ran dry, without. The interests too of Germany's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois.

What all of this is to say is primarily that fascism as a governmental system is a legal permutation of liberal democracy, rather than a strict departure from it. The overriding interests of fascist states are also commensurately the interests of the bourgeoisie of those nations. It's an entirely logical progression of liberalism, to be frank, and a rather stark example of why liberal states should be opposed. The most violent fascist policy at home is often simply what liberal states have as their explicit foreign policy, for instance. As for whether this or the other politician in a liberal democracy is a fascist, I'd ask first and foremost that it be known that the Nazi policy of expansion was based first on the US policy of expansion; the cart isn't pulling the horse, as it were.