Yet another one of my threads about fascism fails because no one can agree on just what exactly fascism means.
Wasn't Salazar pretty popular? As were all of the "American fascist" types people love to throw into dystopias- Lindbergh, Coughlin, Long, etc.
Still, fascism today brings images of jackboots, death camps, and totalitarian police states, not the popular authoritarianism of the Latin/Catholic regimes. I wonder what would be the political epithet of choice if the Nazis and WWII never happened.
Is that Tradition, and all of the weird occult stuff?
I think you might be thinking of just regular liberal democratic capitalism, not state capitalism.
To the first bolded sentence: I think you can hardly say that Stalin's USSR or Mao's PRC are examplses of sympathy and egalitarianism, can you? To the second bolded sentence: condescent power and disgust pretty much define Mao's China and Stalin's SU, don't they?
But yet for fascism to go along, the people must support it and participate in it.
Nah, but the majority of it. Fact is, nobody truly objected to the war crimes, even when they knew they were comitted. In the Soviet Union, however, anyone who pulled the trigger did it only out of fear, not passion.
Sure, maybe Hitler and Mussolini looked like good guys when the Germans and Italians (respectively) voted them in, but the reason that the people didn't object to what their fascist regimes were doing is because the regimes in question had the guns.
In Italy it would probably be seen, today, as Peronism in Argentina. Considering how fragmented is the 2,5% of italian neofascists, we would probsbly have at least 3 or 4 parties claiming to be the true heirs of Mussolini's policies.