A while back I got an email, the same email I get regularly, telling me to be alert for a new fascist on the streets. These are reasonably common given what I usually write about, and sometimes prove useful in figuring out how the white nationalist movement is shifting and evolving, threatening violence into communities already at siege. This was not one of those.

Instead, it was telling me that an editor of Gods & Radicals had gone over the edge into the “fascist creep” and that I should join in outing them as such, not to mention I should refuse to write for them. The reason for this email seems to be a recent social media post by that editor in which they disagree, in strong terms, with the doxing of far-right people as an antifascist tactic. This angered many and, given some of the rumbling whispers about Gods & Radicals, it seems that the perception of the institution reached a tipping point. Now there was some fascism.

For some, this wasn’t the first transgression. Posts about radical environmentalism, esotericism, anti-modernity, and the like seems to give pause to people on the outside, all in a flurry of looking for signs of something sinister.

Social media itself has played a curious role in the development of modern antifascism, as, really, in organizing and the radical left more broadly. Much faster than antifascist publications in the past, new information about neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Alt Right can appear, quickly spreading and informing communities targeted by their violence and in support of antifascist organizers in creating counter-responses. This has been incredibly true with Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts where quick photos and screen grabs are able to disseminate much more quickly than article links because they are native to the platform, and therefore the algorithm gives them more sway in news feeds. This creates an ultra-quick cycle, but it also requires a reference point to decode them. What is the difference between a racist post and a white nationalist post? Is there really a difference?

At the same time, we have entered a period when the U.S. far-right (perhaps just the far-right in general) has completely disconnected from many of its previous incarnations into a space that often employs leftist critiques, strategies, aesthetics, and even allies, as well as highlighting meta-political strategies of art, culture, and spirituality as a method for social entryism. This is to say that swastikas, though still frequent, are less what people are looking for, and instead there is an entire generation looking through social media posts trying to decode fairly esoteric and antiquated semiotics in an effort to figure out if someone is a fascist or just strange.

In this world of syncretism, and especially Red-Brown alliances, how are we even to know the difference? If a person has on their profile a series of European pagan references, attacks on liberal democracy, and, now, rhetoric antifascists (including myself) find offensive, what does that make them?

There has to be a reliable base point when we are looking at something we think to be fascist, especially when it runs a certain level of subtlety that isn’t apparent on its own terms. I have defined fascism using two key primary points: inequality and essentialized identity.

Inequality: The belief that human beings are not equal for immutable reasons, such as intelligence, capacity, spiritual caste, etc. This inequality is not just fact, but it is a sacrament, meaning that society should be constructed with cleanly defined hierarchies, which are natural, and that society would then be healthier when those hierarchies are made explicit and enforced. This also lends itself to the importance of elitism, that there must be an elite ruler caste, even though they usually reject the existing ruling class.

Essential identity: Our identities are fixed and define us, they are not socially constructed or chosen. The most common of these is racial given white nationalism as the dominant form of Western fascism, but it could also include gender (male tribalism), specific ethnicities (inter-European nationalism), sexual orientation (extreme queer-phobia), or religion (Hindutva). And when I say essentializing identities I mean that it is not just an identity that is true (like being of African heritage), but that the identity defines you in some way as incidence.

There are several points that I consider very important in the definition of fascism, but often put just secondary to the two critical points. This would include a mythology about its tribal group, the sanctity of violence, revolutionary strategy (in some degree), authoritarianism, populism, and the appropriation of the Left. While these almost always exist in relationship to fascism, they are not defining of fascism because they may exist outside of fascism. It is not uncommon to interact with revolutionary left movements that are authoritarian or fetishize violence, and while that may be abhorrent, it does not make them fascist.

Other people define fascism slightly different, but there is still a pretty common core that unites most definitions or understandings that think about fascism as a specific ideological tract.

Robert O. Paxton, who is often thought of as the progenitor of Comparative Fascist Studies, defines fascism more as a process rather than just an idea. In his famous study, The Anatomy of Fascism, he looks at what a fascist movement is in the context of its formation rather than a concept separate from its existing politics.

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

The opening part relates to that point of mythology, but also looks at the motivations of a mass fascist movement that is rooted in feelings of victimhood. The mass-based party refers to the populism, a popular political movement that requires common participation not just controlled by elite powers, aristocracy, or a capitalist class. It then discusses the way in which it could come to power, through collaboration with existing structures of dominations, in an effort to explode outward and begin further colonization. This, again, says less about its ideology, but it is still concrete: it sees itself as a conscious movement that is heading towards explicit goals defined by its popularity, nationalism, and violent expansion.

Much of my own definition of fascism comes in the wake of academic Roger Griffin’s popular definition, which comes in contrast to Paxon’s in that it tries to look at the essential core of fascism’s ideas to understand it. With this he looks at common ideological components to different fascist movements in different parts of the world at different times, trying to sum it up as best as possible. With this he uses the phrase, “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of ultranationalism.”

This is, again, a mythological sense of group (essentialized) identity, that then becomes a driving tribalist force. He sees it both as autonomous, meaning not just a tool of the ruling class, and revolutionary, in that it must unseat the current power structures to instate a counter-institution. This is a process to find what Michael Freeden tried to nail down as the “fascist minimum,” which is what the base factors that would have to get involved across different times, places, types of communities, and conditions. This “ineliminable core” would be constant even if the specific myths and drive would be different. It is often this factor, the search for a how fascism might look in a context disconnected from a European past, that gets people beating the drum to analyze every possible subculture looking for palingenesis. Griffin would argue that there is a vast family of ideas, all with different characters and permutations, all of which would look very different while hailing back to an “ideal type” based on “ultra-nationalist” tribalism and a utopian vision that drives it as a social movement. That ideal type would then be not utopian as such, but a particular type characterized by hierarchy, essentialized identity, done together by rebirth.

Antifascist writer Matthew N. Lyons builds on Griffin while also considering the Marxist critiques that point out the contradictory nature of capitalism to fascism.

“Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist political and cultural power while promoting economic and social hierarchy.”

Lyons emphasizes the point that fascism’s form of hierarchical domination is in contrast to existing structures of which the same could be said in a broad sense, but this movement is meant to unseat the current make-up in favor of something much more profoundly hierarchical. This is line with the concept of “three-way fight,” with which Lyons contributes, that outlines the idea that in revolutionary struggles there are often three, not two, actors. This could be the revolutionary force of the marginalized classes (the Left), the forces of capital, and then a reactionary element of the broad working class that may find allegiance with parts of capital.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other definitions, but there is a reference point here. Fascism is not just the extraneous pieces that are often attached to it, no matter how persistent they are. In the end, there are key aspects of it that are reasonably constant, and there is a way of differentiating them that doesn’t just look at specific signals but is able to understand what underlies them. The two factors, for me, are then the belief in an innate inequality of humans mixed with an essentialized identity that defines them, all wrapped together in a mythology of the past that validates those two tent poles and a fear that drives a populist mass movement.