The issue with right & left is that they are subjective and depend on perspective. A right-wing in France wants to conserve the current institution which is very collective in nature.
Fascism is extreme nationalism used to create military citizens usually for the purpose of war. Previously a cult of personality has been used to guide the us vs them mentality and remove the need for mercenaries.
I believe Doog was right at a point in the past, and that’s certainly how I learned the term. I now refer to these as “classical liberalism/conservatism” because it does not represent current political parties. Both sides are equally as chaotic and as authoritarian.
Your definition of fascism is also a more historical one, and I believe more accurate. In Stalin’s own words:
“The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State – a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values – interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.
Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.”
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to ride with my boy George Orwell on how the word is used now:
“...the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else ... Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathisers, almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.”
To be clear, I also subscribe to Orwell's definition when it comes to the word fascist as it is currently used.
I was just saying when trying to conceptualize the fundamental struggle between right vs left, I found the definitions I stated to be the most helpful to me. As a tangent to your larger point.
