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1. I don't know a ton about 20th century European History, so I'm reading this book (published in 2004, so very pre-Trump) on the recommendation of a few people. In this thread I'll record passages and insights that stand out to me. 
2. "Fascists often cursed faceless cities and materialist secularism and exalted an agrarian utopia free from the rootlessness, conflict, & immorality of urban life. Yet fascist leaders adored their fast cars & planes, & spread their message by dazzlingly up-to-date techniques."
3. "Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites--heads of state, party leaders, high gov't officials..."
4. "...many of whom felt a fastidious distaste for the crudities of fascist militants. The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment: magistrates, police officials, army officers, businessmen..."
5. "...To understand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily routines. Making such choices meant accepting an apparent lesser evil..."
6. "... or averting the eyes from some excesses that seemed not too damaging in the short term, even acceptable piecemeal, but which cumulatively added up to monstrous end results."
7. The first Fascist party was formed in Italy in 1919. One of the first actions carried out by the party was to invade the offices of Milan's Socialist Paper and destroy its presses. They attacked the Leftist media which they considered to be the enemy of the people.
8. One important constituency in the earliest Fascist parties were Futurists who had little interest in history, custom, or tradition, but instead celebrated the speed, violence, and exciting newness of modern technology.
9. "Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples."
10. "Fascism is 'true' insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason."
11. "The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph. Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader's mystical union with the historic destiny of his people."
12. "A few months after [Mussolini] became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: 'The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. & the sooner the better."
13. "Fascism's radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to [write logical justifications] when they changed their program...Das Blut or la razza [the pro-fascist media outlets] would determine who [and what] was right."
14. "Intellectuals...helped create a space for fascist movements by weakening the elite's attachment to Enlightenment values, until then widely accepted & applied in concrete form in constitutional government & liberal society. Intellectuals made it possible to imagine fascism."
15. "Fascists hated liberals [in 21st century American terms, that's like a Paul Ryan conservative] as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies' accomplices."
16. "As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them...they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate w/ fascists."
17. "The fascisms we have known have come into power with the help of frightened ex-liberals and opportunist technocrats and ex-conservatives, and governed in more or less awkward tandem with them."
