Defining fascism

One of my long-term projects is scholarly work on how gaming intersects with the history and politics of fascism and anti-fascism. For example, I have presented a paper interpreting the real-time strategy game Frostpunk in relation to fascism. This evolving page of my web garden collects various notes and excerpts I am collecting regarding the question of how fascism will be defined for the purposes of my scholarly work about it. For the moment, it is mostly notes from my reading of literature in comparative fascist studies, but I expect and hope to broaden these notes in the future to include other traditions of thinking about fascism and anti-fascism.

Reichardt, Sven. (2012). "Violence and Consensus in Fascism". Fascism 1:1, pp. 59-60.

"Violence and consensus were two faces of the same coin regarding fascist-populist regimes, which relied on a society of self-surveillance and denunciation. Culling, extermination, and violence presented themselves as complements to the racist intention to take the life of one’s “own” people in hand and improve it. Only by posing as the custodians of life and survival could the fascists formulate their claim to control, regulation and mass murder. The fascists’ radical nationalist, participatory violent terror had by no means only destructive elements, but also helped to create order. The fascists believed that they could create life and order only by killing people or letting them die."

Griffin, Roger. (2012). "Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?" Fascism 1:1, pp. 1-17.

(points to a divide between Marxist and non-Marxist camps of understanding fascism, and author's belief that there is much ground for collaboration between them)
"I argued that within the emerging consensus it was increasingly accepted that “like conservatism, anarchism, liberalism, or ecologism, fascism is definable as an ideology with a specific ‘positive’, utopian vision of the ideal state of society, a vision which can assume a number of distinctive forms determined by local circumstances while retaining a core matrix of axioms”.18"
"I claimed fascism could be broadly characterized as an ideology with: i) its own revolutionary (in my terms ‘palingenetic’)20 and modernizing agenda, one which not only sets it apart from authoritarian forms of both conservatism and capitalism, but also conditions what fascism is against (the famous fascist `anti-’ dimension), and what hence becomes the targets of its destructiveness and oppression; ii) a ‘populist’ drive towards mobilizing the energies of all those considered authentic members of the national community, something which distinguishes it from right-wing military regimes content to impose the new order from above without carrying out a genuine social revolution, whatever pseudo-populist façade they erect to legitimize themselves (my term for such a regime is ‘para-fascism’); iii) an organic concept of the nation which, certainly in the inter-war period, rejected dynastic tradition and liberal rationalism in favour of the charismatic energies seen in the leader cult and in the pervasive use of theatrical and ritual elements in politics."
"Fascism is a form of extreme right-wing ideology that celebrates the nation or the race as an organic community transcending all other loyalties. It emphasizes a myth of national or racial rebirth after a period of decline or destruction... Its vision of a “new order” clashes with the conservative attachment to tradition-based institutions and hierarchies, yet fascism often romanticizes the past as inspiration for national rebirth." (quoting from Matthew N. Lyons, "What is Fascism?" The Public Eye Magazine 12 Dec 2016, site itself says originally published 1997 but Griffin says it was published in 1995 https://politicalresearch.org/2016/12/12/what-is-fascism-2

Griffin, Roger. (2013). "What fascism is not and is. Thoughts on the re-inflation of a concept." Fascism 2:2, pp. 259-261.

Starts with discussion of various misuses of the term fascism, and lands in a pointed critique of the term Islamofascism, which also points to the public importance of sustaining a nuanced understanding of what fascism is.

Griffin, Roger. (2015). "Decentering Comparative Fascist Studies." Fascism 4:2, pp. 103-118.

Generally an argument about the danger of approaching fascism in a way that privileges the Italian Fascist and German Nazi histories as "core", relegating other phenomenon to the "periphery' - an argument about the need to treat fascism as a rather generic ideology that takes concrete manifestations in particular circumstances.
For example: "The term ‘fascism’ was able to gain currency as the term for a new generic ideology on a par with communism only because Mussolini’s movement was (correctly) seen as the first ‘successful’ manifestation of a non-communist, indeed anti-communist and national revolutionary bid to create a ‘new state’ and political culture that was not unique to Italy."

Kallis, Aristotle. (2015). "When Fascism Became Mainstream: The Challenge of Extremism in Times of Crisis: Second Lecture on Fascism – Amsterdam – April 9 2015." Fascism 4:1, pp. 1-24.

"To put it simply, there is structural crisis (in or of a system) and there is a ‘crisis mindset’, based more on subjective perception and ‘interpreted social reality’ than on objective awareness of reality itself."
"Crisis – or rather a pervasive, acute perception thereof – confronted European societies with a historic moment of judgement, forcing them to choose from a severely restricted menu of harsh binary options and ‘unavoidable, harsh, non-negotiable alternatives.’" (citing Koselleck, 'Crisis', pgs. 358 * 399.
Main focus of the argument is on depicting both inter-war and contemporary fascism as far more connected to the evolution of the "mainstream" rather than representing simply an "extremism" outside of that mainstream.

Griffin, Roger. (2016). "Fascism’s Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of Right-wing Dictatorships." Fascism 5:2, pp. 105-129.

particular strong focus on the relationship between artistic and architectural modernism and political modernism (including fascism as modernism) "...the mythic core of modernism as a drive towards innovation and renewal which can manifest itself in any sphere of intellectual, artistic, social, economic, scientific, political, or cultural production, in the extreme left, extreme right or reformist centre."
"Modernism, then, can be conceptualized as a rebellion against modernity, the palingenetic attempt to create a new nomos. It is not anti-modern, but an assault on existing modernity, and postulates a new vision of life, an alternative modernity. 57 It can take the form of a private, highly personal, but still artistically communicable revelation of deeper, unexplored realms of meaning and revelatory facets of existence, with no bid to change society or ‘the world’ as such, which I term ‘epiphanic modernism’. Alternatively, it can be experienced as a mission to transform one segment of society, a nation, or even create a whole new civilization, an ambition typically expressed in manifestos or programmes, and which can thus be called ‘programmatic modernism’."
"[Osborne] expresses succinctly the expansion of the semantic remit of the term ‘modernism’ that follows when it is approached as a historical, and temporal rather than an aesthetic one. Its hallmark is that ‘it breaks with the past, manufactures its own historical traditions, and imagines alternative futures’."
"Our argument also has profound implications for the way Fascism and Nazism should be treated as cultural phenomena by scholars who have seemingly not progressed beyond Bobbio’s puerile reduction of Fascist culture to ‘rhetorical extravagance, literary bombast and hastily improvised doctrines’, or still uncritically parrot Walter Benjamin’s specious judgments on the fate of art under fascist dictatorship. It suggests that the Fascist and Nazi states succeeded far more than has been realized in carrying out the politicization of art with more genuine revolutionary intent and more radical aesthetic consequences than Bolshevism and Maoism could ever aspire to do. If anything it is Bolshevism that ended up in practice aestheticizing the politics of repression, the systemic exploitation of the masses, and revolutionary self-deception. The Romanized rationalism of Fascism and the ‘Aryanized’ architecture of Nazism were more faithful statement of Nazi biopolitics than the projects born of constructivist, social realist theory and Stalin’s megalomania were reflections of the State Socialist ideals under Bolshevism." footnote within this says "The concept is introduced in Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Schocken/Random House, 1936) at the height of Stalinism." [a bit unclear what concept is being referred to]

Griffin, Roger. (2019). "Mussolini Predicted a Fascist Century: How Wrong Was He?: Third Lecture on Fascism – Amsterdam – 22 March 2019." Fascism 8:1, pp. 1-8.

focus on dangers of right-wing resurgence in the new millenium, and some of its continuity with the fascism of the twentieth century

Jackson, P. N. (2021). "Debate: Donald Trump and Fascism Studies." Fascism 10:1, pp. 1-15.

note: while this is the official citation above, the article is actually a collection of short position pieces by a panel of scholars, generally unified by questions like whether "Trump is a fascist (etc)" and tending towards (a) caution in that regard and secondarily (b) pointing to the complexities raised by the popular everyday use of the word "fascism" versus the more nuanced way it is understood in comparative fascist studies.
Nigel Copsey self describes as "a historian drawn to researching anti-fascism (as well as fascism)"
Raul Cârstocea: "Yet fascism as a political ideology covered a wide spectrum of individual actors and organisations, lacked an internationally unitary doctrine, and, due to its ultra-nationalism and insistence on its home-grown character, was always more context-specific than either socialism or liberalism. Its character also changed over time, was dependent on the position of the actors and their respective goals, which varied based on whether they were marginal organisations facing state opposition, large-scale movements with a serious bid to political power, or established regimes."
from concluding panel statement by Griffin: "The digital pundits obsessed with Trump’s putative fascism would be advised to devote more time to threats to liberal humanism emanating from within the parliamentary spectrum of politics, and perhaps spare a moment to check out the present state of fascist studies before irresponsibly raising spectres of interwar totalitarianism."

Griffin, Roger. (2022). "Ghostbusting Fascism?: The Spectral Aspects of the Era of Fascism and Its Shape-Shifting Relationship to the Radical Right." Fascism 11:1, pp. 59-86.

"Nazism and fascism lurk in the collective postwar subconscious, and it is little wonder that well over fifty horror films and scores of violent video games such as Ghosts of War and Wolfenstein have been set against the background of the Third Reich and the Second World War, overtly exploiting Nazism as a universal trope for horror, ruthlessness and sadistic cruelty."
"When such information is placed alongside the continued colloquial use of ‘fascist’ as an insult for anyone displaying even mild authoritarian or megalomaniacal tendencies (as in ‘health fascist’, ‘fashion fascist’, ‘climate fascist’) it is clear that as a psychodynamic force interwar fascism did not die in 1945 but instead became ‘undead’."
"in 2020 Pluto Press (London) published Spectres of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives, edited by Samir Gandesha, a collection of essays reflecting on the ‘return of fascism’ understood in a traditional Marxist sense as a permanent potential of capitalism now being brought to the fore internationally because of its deepening structural problems."
This line is a pretty good summary of the overall point of the article: "...the application of the distinction between a revolutionary fascist right and a radical but not anti-systemic one is still to be recommended as a working principle for those engaged with this topic."
From final paragraph: "Finally, this approach might encourage concerned humanists or militant defenders of basic civil rights to stop being fixated with fascism, and to look beyond labels in their struggle for a more just society. Since 1945 fascism has withered as a political force to become just one of the many enemies to the establishment of an ecologically sustainable and socially just world, and not the gravest danger to it."