"At one end of our hypothetical spectrum can be found Austrian clerical fascism, the Spanish Falange, and perhaps the conservative Catholic regime of Antonio de Oliviera Salazar in Portugal [...] At the other end of the spectrum stood the German Nazis and their vicious collaborators"

"The antagonism between Italy and Germany, for as long as it lasted, served to heighten a distinction between a civilized Latin fascism and a barbaric fascist movement that had reared itself north of the Alps."

Gottfried lists some additional factors that could back Gregor's ideological read after earlier mentioning an anti-clergy component to some Italian fascist theorists.

Gregor contrasted with Nolte again

"The interpretations of fascism proposed by James Burnham, Ernst Nolte, and Rudolf Hilferding were all shaped to some extent by the Marxist or Marxist-Leninist world view that these thinkers had adopted earlier."

"But efficiency is not what Gregor is looking at. Despite their economic ineptitude, fascists, wherever they arose, offered a workable, dirigiste alternative to communism."

Nolte takes the politics of post-colonial movements literally, and perhaps Gregor takes them seriously.

"Nolte suggests that the only Western country still capable of practicing “racial, continental fascism” after the fall of the Soviets is the American empire not only because of its periodic racial tensions but also because of the extent of American power."

"Gregor thought that fascism endangered liberal institutions precisely because it offered persuasive arguments about human nature, the economy, international relations, and the corruptness of parliamentary institutions."

Nolte's understanding overlaps quite a bit with the early Marxist theorizing of fascism as a strictly counterrevolutionary strategy.

The author is a fan of Ernst "Historikerstreit" Nolte's scholarship on fascism in particular.

Gottfried is unimpressed by then-mainstream GOP pundit Jonah Goldberg's 2009 book "Liberal Fascism" which he describes as "far from convincing" and notes that any sinister allusions to corporatism are ridiculous in light of the modern welfare state's bipartisan standing. (This book is from 2016.)

The author begins by thanking some early readers, including Stanley Payne, and explains he wrote the book out of a frustration with "fascist" being used on TV in a way he disagrees with.

I will start a reading notes thread. The book is Paul Gottfried's Fascism: The Career of a Concept.

Anyone interested in the full text can access it for free courtesy of Internet Archive here: archive.org/details/paul...

Interesting thesis, but men and women are not increasingly politically polarized.

cawp.rutgers.edu/blog/gender-...