This is not a scholarly diagnostic. It is a 2003 magazine list that escaped containment.
Laurence W. Britt was a retired businessman and novelist, not a political scientist who “studied the fascist regimes.” Free Inquiry published an opinion piece called “Fascism Anyone?” He looked at Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, the Greek colonels, Pinochet, and Suharto and extracted fourteen overlapping habits. The internet then promoted him to “Dr.” and treated the bullet points as if they were the DSM for governments.
The regimes themselves are a grab bag. Mussolini and Hitler are the actual fascists. Franco was a Catholic-military traditionalist who won a civil war and then lasted four decades by being boring and repressive rather than revolutionary. Pinochet and Suharto were anti-communist military dictators who ran market-oriented authoritarian states; calling them fascist mainly tells you the author wanted more names on the list. Mixing them together produces traits that describe
authoritarianism, not a specific interwar ideology with blackshirts, corporatist syndicates, and a myth of national rebirth.
The list is mostly generic
- Powerful nationalism, flags, slogans: every nation-state that survived the 20th century.
- Scapegoats and enemies: every mass-mobilizing regime and most election campaigns.
- Military spending and soldier-glorification: the United States, Israel, France, China, Russia, and half the UN.
- Sexism and traditional gender roles: the majority of human history plus a large share of current electorates.
- Media influence or regulation: every government that has ever existed.
- National-security rhetoric: every country that has enemies or pretends it does.
- Religion used by politicians: the United States, India, Poland, Iran, Israel, and most of Latin America.
- Corporate-government closeness: every mixed economy.
- Weak labor: every developing-country dictatorship and quite a few democracies.
- Suspicion of intellectuals: every populist movement and every revolutionary one.
- Tough-on-crime politics: voters like it.
- Cronyism and corruption: the human default.
- Messy or manipulated elections: too many countries to count.
You can score high on this checklist and still be a social democracy, a developmental authoritarian state, a wartime republic, or just a normal country having a bad decade. That is why the same list has been waved at Bush, Obama, Trump, Modi, Orbán, Netanyahu, and whoever is currently inconvenient. It is a Rorschach test with footnotes.
Serious work on fascism (Paxton, Griffin, Mosse, Payne, Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” essay) treats it as a specific revolutionary, anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, palingenetic nationalist movement that tried to create a new man and a new order, not “any government that likes flags and dislikes its opponents.” Britt’s list flattens that into “things I dislike about power.”
The page itself even notes it was based on an earlier internet article. It is folk taxonomy that got a magazine byline, then a second life as a meme. Useful as a conversation-starter about authoritarianism. Useless as a definition of fascism.
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