In 2003, a writer named Lawrence Britt — he’s a novelist, not an academic historian — published a widely circulated list after studying six fascist regimes: Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Suharto’s Indonesia, and the regimes of Pinochet and Salazar. His goal was to find common threads. The result was 14 characteristics he argued these regimes shared. It’s worth knowing upfront: this is one writer’s framework, not a peer-reviewed scholarly consensus. But it’s been discussed seriously enough in civic education circles that it’s worth understanding — just with that context in mind.
Here’s what Britt identified, in plain language:
1. **Powerful and continuing nationalism.** Fascist regimes wrap themselves in national symbols constantly — flags, slogans, national identity front and center all the time.
2. **Disdain for the importance of human rights.** The idea is that security and order matter more than individual rights. People are often convinced to look the other way.
3. **Identification of enemies as a unifying cause.** There’s always a scapegoat — a group blamed for the nation’s problems, used to unite people through shared fear or hatred.
4. **Supremacy of the military.** Military spending gets prioritized even when other public needs go unmet. The military is glamorized.
5. **Rampant sexism.** Fascist governments tend to be strongly male-dominated, with traditional gender roles enforced and women’s rights rolled back.
6. **Controlled mass media.** Either the government controls the press directly, or it works to discredit any media that challenges it — reducing factual truth to just another opinion.
7. **Obsession with national security.** Fear is used as a tool. The population is kept feeling like they’re under threat, which makes people more willing to give up freedoms.
8. **Religion and government intertwined.** Fascist leaders use religious rhetoric even when their actions don’t match the religion’s teachings. Religious institutions get used for political legitimacy.
9. **Corporate power protected.** Business elites and government become tightly connected. The interests of major corporations get protected by the state.
10. **Labor power suppressed.** Britt noted that organized labor — unions — represent a real check on government power, so fascist regimes typically weaken or eliminate them.
11. **Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.** Universities, scientists, and artists are seen as threats. Free thinking is dangerous to authoritarian control.
12. **Obsession with crime and punishment.** Police are given enormous power. Civil liberties get sacrificed in the name of law and order.
13. **Rampant cronyism and corruption.** Friends and loyalists get appointed to positions of power. Government contracts go to supporters.
14. **Fraudulent elections.** This one’s important. Britt described how fascist governments manipulate elections — smearing opponents, suppressing votes, using courts and bureaucracy to tilt results — all while calling the process rigged by others.
Keene State College’s civic education materials offer a similar but distinct framework for understanding fascism’s characteristics and appeal — including things like glorifying violence as “redemptive” and using collaboration with traditional elites to gain power. These two lists overlap in places but aren’t identical, and neither one should be treated as the definitive scholarly definition of fascism. Historians and political scientists continue to debate exactly how to define and identify it.
What both frameworks agree on: fascism doesn’t usually show up overnight. It creeps in. Institutions get weakened slowly. Press freedom gets chipped away. A scapegoated group starts to lose rights while most people still feel safe. That’s the point — by the time it’s obvious to everyone, a lot of the damage is already done.
The most useful thing you can do with this list isn’t to use it as a checklist to label any politician you dislike. That’s not how it works, and doing that would actually cheapen the real history. The useful thing is to understand what the warning signs look like, so you can recognize patterns when they appear — in your own country, in history class, in news you read.
Knowing this stuff is genuinely one of the most civic things a young person can do. Not because it makes you political, but because it makes you harder to fool.
What do you think? Drop a comment below.