Glossary
Each definition below is the short form of a treatment given, with full sourcing, on the linked page. The glossary is a map, not a substitute.
Palingenetic ultranationalism. Griffin’s fascist minimum: the myth of national rebirth from decadence through a revolutionary new order. The one-sentence test for the fascist core. See the definitions.
Para-fascism. Griffin’s term for regimes that adopt fascism’s aesthetics and organizations while pursuing conservative restoration, typically suppressing their own fascist movements. Tier 3 of the gradient, a branch, not a rung. See the intensity gradient.
Fascist minimum. The smallest set of features a case must have to count as fascist at all, and the sixty-year argument over whether one exists. See the fascist minimum.
The negations. Payne’s entry test: anti-liberalism, anti-communism, anti-conservatism. Necessary, never sufficient. See the definitions.
Authoritarianism. Linz’s category: limited pluralism, no mobilizing ideology, a demobilized population. Distinguished from totalitarian and fascist rule by what it wants from you: passivity. See what fascism is not.
Totalitarianism. Rule demanding active mass mobilization behind an official ideology through a single party. Contains fascist and communist cases, which is both its use and its limitation. See what fascism is not.
Populism. The claim that politics is a moral struggle between a pure people and a corrupt elite. A thin ideology that attaches to hosts left and right. See what fascism is not.
Populist radical right. Mudde’s party family: nativism, authoritarianism, populism, inside electoral democracy. Tier 1 of the gradient. See the contemporary landscape.
Competitive authoritarianism. Levitsky and Way’s hybrid regime type: real elections on a field tilted by incumbent abuse of state power. Tier 2, and the category where most contemporary erosion lives. See the intensity gradient.
Clerical fascism. Fascism fused with institutional religion, as in the Slovak State and the Iron Guard’s Orthodox mysticism. See Tier A.
Squadrismo. The organized paramilitary violence of early Italian fascism, the movement’s founding service to its elite patrons. See Italy.
March on Rome. The October 1922 theater surrounding Mussolini’s constitutional appointment as prime minister. The founding case of stage-three arrival by invitation. See the five stages.
Stage three. In Paxton’s process model, the arrival in power: historically always through alliance with conservative elites, never by fascist strength alone. See the five stages.
Radicalization. Paxton’s fifth stage: the abandonment of remaining restraints toward cleansing and war. One fully realized case. See the five stages.
Political religion. Gentile’s framework: the sacralization of politics, with the nation as deity and the party as church. See the fascist minimum.
Ur-Fascism. Eco’s family-resemblance list of fourteen recurring features. Intuitive, popular, and loose, which is both why it circulates and why specialists warn about it. See the definitions.
Accelerationism. The militant doctrine that the system cannot be won and must be collapsed through violence. The post-organizational form of the militant far right. See the online ecosystem.
Autocratization. The measured erosion of democratic institutions, as tracked in episodes by the V-Dem project. See measurement.
U-turn. An autocratization episode halted and reversed. The majority outcome of modern episodes, which is why inevitability language is banned on this site. See the intensity gradient.
Concept creep. The failure mode in which fascism expands to mean everything bad, and therefore nothing. The definitional pages exist to prevent it. See why the word matters.