On the other hand, it’s nice to see all that white space between America and fascism. Were our nation’s circumstances very different than they are today, I might support a pacifistic fascist regime, but as a member of the richest, most powerful country in the world, I enjoy my freedom.

The model of fascism that I worked off of was based on an amalgam of sources–not any one historical state or party. I tried to reconcile the positions of different historical and contemporary fascist states/parties and find common broad ideological threads, and not just a snapshot of one state at one time.

I’m aware of the weakness of applying the politics match questions to fascist ideology–we simply have no contemporary mainstream American party to work off of. The politics match quiz also doesn’t account for fascist ideas about an “in group” (usually race-based). Nonetheless, using the modeling of general ideological threads that fascist parties have had in common, we can come to a fairly decent understanding of where they fall within a broad spectrum.

I used the profiles of the Democrat and Republic platforms to give a sense of perspective and scale to the results. It was in no way an attempt to declare an equivilence between them or to tar one or the other as being closer ideology. This was an honest (if amature) attempt to understand fascism’s “place” in a spectrum. I was somewhat surprised by the result–it came out further to the right than I expected (Disclaimer: I’m a libertarian-leaning conservative/Republican).

FreeRepublican’s comment about the Nazi stance to abortion is true enough. Yet one must realize that in the fascist ideology, abortion among the “in group/race” is strongly opposed–other minorities not being considered as citizens and thus not worthy of the same legal consideration. This is a broad feature of the fascist ideology that is present not only in one state/party/historical context, but in many.

I think the bottom line is that attempting to discuss fascism on a policy level is an execise in futility. Once an autocratic state is established, the policies it pursues are secondary.

I think that’s a good point. I could see a facists dictator supplying things like “free health care” and “right to an abortion” to the public if they thought it solidified their position.

Where are you getting your defination of facism from: Nazi Germany? Pre-war Italy? Some Tin-Pot Third world country?

The Republican Party of the 1930′s believed in a lot of different things than the party does in the 21st century. Same thing for the Democrat party. A third world party cannot be compared with either the Democrats or the Republicans.

The only defination of a facism that ever really made sense was that it’s an economic/political system of central planning while leaving industry in the hands of private owners. Basically it’s a model where big government, big labor and big business supposedly work together. You can make up your own mind what party this is near to.

I can hardly believe it but I’m agreeing with MI on something.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I think Seth is aware of the limitations of his exercise, but it was interesting nonetheless.

The model I used is too limited, that’s clearer to me now (I knew it was from the start, but I probably didn’t appreceate that as fully as I should have).