Thom Hartmann, Frank Gaffney and the definition of fascism

This week, Thom Hartmann had the slimy Frank Gaffney on his local show here in Portland. Gaffney is one of the primary promoters of the term "Islamofascism," part of Bush's efforts to suggest that his nasty little war is the equivalent of World War II. (By the way, which is it, Bush - is this a new kind of war, unlike any other, or is this exactly like the biggest war that has ever been fought?} But Gaffney is perhaps applying the inflammatory term to the wrong party.

Hartmann pointed out that a chief characteristic of fascism is, as Mussolini made clear, corporatism.  As distinguished from communism, corporate elites maintain a separate identity from the state, but they work hand and hand with it, and it with them (though Mussolini did sometimes dream of an all-encompassing state, he never achieved it). This hand-in-glove fit between the state and corporations is also characteristic of Hitler's brand of fascism. Hartmann argued that what OBL wants to achieve is more appropriately termed theocracy. Gaffney contended that Islamism is fascism because it wants to subsume all aspects of social organization. So what Gaffney and Co. should be talking about, presuming they won't just do us a favor and shut up, is "Islamototalitarianism," a more general, but more accurate, term. But, of course, that would not serve to directly identify OBL with Hitler and therefore Bush with Roosevelt and Churchill (and Stalin?).

One great value of Hartmann's program is that he will have these rightwing crackpots on occasionally and will engage them in debate, instead of, as the MSM are wont to do, just letting them spout their nonsense unchallenged. He permits them expose themselves in all their ignominy, as Gaffney, one of the best, or worst, examples of the lot, obligingly did. He was as arrogant and condescending as he was willfully ignorant and shifty.

Hearing this discussion hied me to Wikipedia to do some quick research on fascism, and I found this intriguing definition by Robert O. Paxton , from Anatomy of Fascism :

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood 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.

He writes that the essence of fascism is:

1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one's group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign contamination.

In a week in which Dear Leader declares a great Third Wave of Christianity is sweeping over the nation, paints the Islamist terrorist threat as the worst this nation has faced, demonstrates that no new facts on the ground will dissuade him from following his instincts, insists he is above the law, and once again declares that the occupation of Iraq will continue until "the job is done" (never yet having been straightforward about what the job is), the term "fascism" does indeed seem as apropos for this era as it was in the 1920s and '30s, but perhaps not in the way that Frank Gaffney intends it. If I were of his ilk, and thank God and a liberal education I'm not, I'd leave the term "fascism" alone. You might not want to get folks thinking about what it actually means.