While on the road I read The Anatomy of Fascism, a broad cross-cultural survey of the political movement by that name that crashed & burned during World War II. I will post more detailed thoughts later, but one thing that struck me, and always strikes me when I read about fascism, the various affinal movements seem to metastasize so quickly over time to the point where the term "fascist" is more appropriately an emotive appellation than a precise definition. Fascism seems to be a classic case of a social movement that is difficult to model memetically, its tendrils whip and snake throughout the ideological topography to such a great extent that even linguistic characterization is ludicrous.

I mean, we know what a "communist" believes in, but what about a fascist?

Related note: Fascism seems different from authoritarian conservatism in that in many ways it is revolutionary. For example, the Nazis seem to have clearly transgressed the most generous bounds of the Christian morality that had been a part of German national life for over 1,000 years. Though not as confrontational as the Communists, it seems clear that National Socialism would eventually have strangled Christian life. I did some research on the SS in college and found out that 90% of the officer corp gave their religious affiliation as "God believer," a sort of general theist pagan. This, at a time when 90% of the German population was affiliated with the Protestant or Roman Catholic churches.