They say, you know when you know
So let’s face it, you had me at hello
Hesitation never helps
How could this be anything, anything else?
–Elvis, in a slightly different context

Are we living under fascism? Are we on our way to it? It’s natural to ask these questions, but hard to answer them, mostly because it’s hard to know what they’re asking. To know whether we’re living under or en route to fascism, we need a workable definition of “fascism,” but strangely enough, decades after the defeat of the worst of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century, that’s what we seem to lack. We know that fascism was defeated, but still don’t know what it was.  In what follows, I simply want to canvass some of the problems involved in answering my opening question, not so much to provide a conclusive answer to it, as to figure out why it’s so hard to come up with one.  Continue reading →