The spectrum
“Is it fascism?” invites a yes or no. The historical record does not come in yes or no. It comes in movements that never took power, regimes that borrowed fascist forms without fascist content, democracies damaged but functioning, and, rarely, the full catastrophe. A binary flattens all of that into one bit, and most public argument about fascism is people shouting opposite values of that bit at each other.
This site uses two models instead, and they answer different questions.
Model A: the intensity gradient
The intensity gradient sorts political formations by what they are: from the democratic right, through the populist radical right and competitive authoritarianism, to para-fascism and fascist movements, and finally fascist regimes and their radicalized end state. Every category on it is a real scholarly category with its own literature, not an invented gradation.
One warning governs the whole model, and it appears again on the page itself: the gradient is not a slide. Movement runs in both directions, and most modern episodes of democratic erosion have ended in reversal, not collapse.claim type: fact
Model B: the Paxton stages
The five stages sort fascism by where it is in a process: creation, rooting, seizure of power, exercise of power, and radicalization or entropy. This is Paxton’s model, and its central finding is that fascists have never taken power alone: the decisive step arrives through alliance with conservative elites, not through revolution.claim type: fact
The two models are orthogonal. The gradient asks which shelf a case sits on. The stages ask which direction it is moving and by what mechanism. A movement can be unambiguously fascist (gradient) and permanently stuck at stage one (process). A country can slide into competitive authoritarianism (gradient) through mechanisms that have nothing to do with fascism at all.
Model C: the dimensions
For advanced readers, the multi-axis view drops the single ladder entirely and scores cases on nine independent dimensions. This is the most honest representation and the least portable, which is why it is the third model rather than the first.
A companion map: regime types
The regime types page is not a fourth model of fascism. It is the map of dictatorship’s kinds: Linz’s authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, the Geddes, Wright, and Frantz dominant-party, military, personalist, and monarchic types, and Levitsky and Way’s competitive authoritarianism. The gradient asks how intense, the stages ask how it moves, and the typologies ask what kind. Fascism’s place on that map is a live scholarly dispute, and the page presents it as one rather than resolving it.
Using the models
When this site classifies anything, it says which model it is using. When you read anyone else’s classification, the first question worth asking is which model they are using, because most disagreement about the word dissolves into disagreement about that.