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for what it's worth, i've spent a lot of the past 15 years working on the history of the french left. anyone, anywhere who was not liked by group or party x was fascist. so yes, i know about that.
there are a core of ideas that enable people to use the word fascism to refer to a range of political ideologies...without that the idea would have no content at all--there are obvious variations--in your second paragraph, you introduced anti-semitism knowing that it was a feature of german fascism in ways that were particular to it--had you wanted to argue the point in another way, you might have isolated the tendency to eliminate all political opposition from the left--*that* is a constant--like the notion of national destiny, the united volk, the military Mission blah blah blah.
what seems to be the real problem for you is that fascism is actually quite difficult to render entirely Other than capitalist nationalism. this was a *real* political problem for the americans by the end of world war ii--how to enframe fascism as outside the purview of a nationalism that they themselves were fully invested in. it is a variant of nationalism in the straight capitalist mode. there is no way around that.
the fact that this is the case might lead you or anyone else to want a CLEAR idea of what fascism is in order to be able to react coherently when the line that separates ordinary capiralist nationalism from it started to blur. it does not come from Elsewhere, it is not an Import, it is not Alien--it is the intensification of tendencies that are central to the ideology of nation. period. this is the "political problem" that seems to bother you.
but instead of thinking about that, you seem to prefer to play this silly game of wanting to dissolve the category fascism, as if by doing that you can wish away the fact that nationalist ideology can be dangerous.
or worse, you'd prefer to make some separation between fascism and the capitalist ideology of nation. but you can't do that, and i suspect you know as much.
......
btw: i dont agree with how host uses the term "corporatism"---i think it's a mistake. the ideology of corporatism has to do with a notion of an organic division of labor, which gets grafted onto a rightwing reading of aristotle on the one hand, and onto a basically fascist notion of nation as organic community on the other. so it's not the same thing as oligarchy (you've pointed that out before as well) nor is it the same thing as domination by trans-nationals....
but if it is a tendency that is constantly available because it is a versioning of nationalism itself,
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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