Robert O. Paxton

“The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“...fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At the bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations:

-a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

-the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

-the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

-dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

-the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

-the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the groups' destiny;

-the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;

-the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;

-the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

...Fascism was an affair of the gut more than the brain, and a study of the roots of fascism that treats only the thinkers and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism