fascism-101

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The assessment

Pick a case, any case: historical, contemporary, or the one you arrived here arguing about. Work through each framework below against the evidence you have. The tool tallies your own scoring; it draws no conclusion, because the conclusion is the part that is yours. The frameworks are the same canonical data rendered at the checklists and sourced at the definitions page; remember throughout that they answer different questions, so divergent results are information, not error.

Check each element you judge to be present, based on the evidence you have examined. The tally shows where your own scoring lands against what each framework requires. There is no preset answer, no grading, and nothing you enter leaves your browser or persists after you close the page.

Robert O. Paxton: the behavioral definition What does the formation do?

Paxton's stage model asks a further, separate question of any case, which is where in the process it sits, rooting, arrival, exercise, or radicalization.

Roger Griffin: the palingenetic core What does the formation believe?

All four elements are required on Griffin's test. Restorationist nostalgia, however authoritarian, sorts as para-fascism or reaction, not fascism.

Stanley G. Payne: the typological description How does the case sort?

Weighting all items equally and announcing a score. The negations alone are common to many non-fascist formations.

Michael Mann: cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism What is the mechanism?

Applying it where organized political violence is absent and calling near misses close enough. Absent paramilitarism, the case is outside Mann's category.

Umberto Eco: the fourteen features of Ur-Fascism What does it feel like?

Eco's own caveat is the tool's, since several features can coagulate into fascism, and several features also appear in politics that is not fascism.

Jason Stanley: the ten pillars of fascist politics What do the politics look like inside a non-fascist state?

Classifying a regime with it, a misuse its author disavows. A high tally is a claim about tactics in use, and nothing else.

When you finish, the useful question is not which tallies are high. It is which frameworks diverged on your case and why, because that divergence is where every serious debate on this site, from Japan to Russia to the United States, actually lives.