"Back in the late 1980s, I published an article entitled “What Is Fascism—And Why Do Women Need to Know?” in Lesbian Contradiction, a paper I used to edit with three other women. It was at the height of the presidency of Ronald Reagan and I was already worried about dangerous currents in the Republican Party, ones that today have swelled into a full-scale riptide to the right. There’s a lot that’s dated in the piece, but the definition I offered for that much-used (and misused) bit of political terminology still stands: The term it­self was invented by Benito Mussolini, the premier of Italy from 1922 to 1945, and refers to the ‘,’ the bundle of rods which symbolized the power of the Roman emperors. Today, I would define fascism as an ideology, movement, or government with several identifying characteristics: • Authoritarianism and a fanatical respect for leaders. Fas­cism is explicitly anti-democratic. It emerges in times of social flux or instability and of chaotic and worsening economic situations. • Subordination of the individual to the state or to the “race.” This subordination often has a spiritual im­plication: people are offered an opportunity to transcend their own sense of insignificance through participation in a powerful movement of the chosen. • Appeal to a mythical imperial glory of the past. That past may be quite ancient, as in Mussolini’s evoca­tions of the Roman Empire. Or it might be as recent as the United States of the 1950s. • Biological determinism. Fascism involves a belief in absolute biological differences between the sexes and among different races. • Genuine popularity. The scariest thing to me about real fascism is that it has always been a truly pop­ular movement. Even when it is a relatively minor force, fascism can be a mass movement without being a majority movement. “Having laid out these basic elements,” I added, one “real strength of fascism lies in its ex­traordinary ideological elasticity,” which allows it to embrace a wide variety of economic positions from libertarian to socialist and approaches to foreign policy that range from isolationism to imperialism. I think this, too, remains true today."