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As something of an unlicensed historian the thing that frustrates me about these conversations is that they almost always neglect or gloss-over what the fascists and their opponents actually believed and were fighting over.
If you asked an Italian or German fascist to describe the sine qua non of "Fascism" in the 1930s they would've had a ready answer for you. A belief in The State as the ultimate sovereign, the final arbiter all authority, legitimacy, morality, etc... Everything within the State, nothing outside of the State, nothing against the State. Everything else is downstream of this core idea.
A distinction between "public" and "private" interests is completely nonsensical in a world were the only interests that exist in any meaningful sense are those of the state.
The idea that any individual human life might have value outside of their current and future contributions to the state is equally nonsensical, as is the idea that a meaningful distinction can be drawn between the "personal" and the "political", or the "moral" and the "political". Anything political is, by definition, about state power/authority, and with the State as the ultimate sovereign there can be no legitimate authority outside of State authority. Again, everything within the State, nothing outside of the State.
I believe that if we are going to have a meaningful conversation about whether MAGA (or any other movement for that matter) is or isn't "Fascist" it needs to be framed in something resembling the above terms. Otherwise I am going echo the point raised by @sodiummuffin downthread, that is that if your model ends up tagging Truman, Churchill, and DeGaulle, as "fascists" alongside Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, it needs to be revised.
This is the best definition by far, and also readily points out what's actually bad about the ideology. (Crushing decent with violence, destroying any opposition, everyone forcibly conformed to the state, etc.) A lot of people who call trump fascist are focused on the way he behaves and how he talks about things. Its almost never about a specific policy he is pushing to achieve this particular goal. (And of course there are probably few of these policies, if any at all, since he doesn't have the authority to pass anything to begin with, congress must.)
The best i think could be argued is that he was heavy handed in his use of the feds from time to time with general protesting, deportation, etc., and that this is dangerously authoritarian. But that's a far cry from removing all opponents from politics and elections, or revamping the whole education system to be beholden to praising and loving trump and the administration. Things that these viscous fascist dictators actually did.
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