Thread by @ConceptualJames

There's a lot of confusion around Fascism partly because it refers to two different systems, one economic and one sociocultural/political (they obviously can overlap). Economic Fascism is union of state and corporation. The other is a narrowly defined, high-purity "nationalism."

Most of the bugbear of Fascism as a fundamentally evil way to organize and run society refers to the puritanical doctrine of "nationalism," not the economic program that often gets linked to and defined by it, but Economic Fascism is a model of married state-corporate power.

Economic Fascism need not be (ethno)nationalist in the sense of explicitly rewarding only those businesses that support the puritanical doctrine of "nation," but it is broader, including any alignment of corporations to state interests through state mechanisms.

A proper example of Economic Fascism of this sort is the CCP Marxist–Dengist model currently being overseen by Xi Jinping, although that's murky because of a distinct Chinese ethnonationalism. The collusion in the West of state and tech is another example. ESG is as well.

The puritanical doctrine of "nationalism" understanding of (component of) Fascism is also extremely important but ultimately is different and can even resist the Marxist concepts at the heart of the above examples. The political and economic system ends up roughly the same, tho.

Typical, puritanical nationalist doctrines at least flirt with, if they don't fully embrace, the dark spirit of Ethnos, thus tending toward ethnonationalism and it's terrors. Regardless, the puritanical doctrine devolves into purity spirals about who is a legitimate "person."

This definition of "nationalism" views nations quite explicitly as a particular people and put puritanical emphasis on who qualifies as a part of that people, thus in a practical sense who is actually a "person." The fundamental dehumanization cannot be escaped.

Communism doctrine defines "people" as those who support Communism. Fascist doctrines define as "people" those who support the "nation" and, to lesser degree, fit the prevailing understanding of a "national person." They're not terribly different except in focus.

Obviously, what makes puritanical doctrines puritanical is the purity spiral dynamic they operate upon, so that's unavoidable. In practice, they always turn into purges, which are at-scale campaigns to root out and identify the Other who isn't part of the "pure" group.