Fascism
The interwar movement that promised national rebirth through a single party, a leader, and violence, and defined itself by what it hated.
The name comes from the fasces, the bundle of rods carried by Roman magistrates as a symbol of authority, and the image is the argument: sticks that snap individually are unbreakable when bound together. Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan on 23 March 1919, and for the next two decades fascism was the most dynamic political force in Europe, admired by respectable people who thought it had solved problems liberal democracy could not.
What it was for
Fascism is genuinely hard to define, and that is a feature rather than a failure of scholarship. Communism had Marx and a body of doctrine you could argue about. Fascism had no equivalent text, and its leaders treated ideological consistency as weakness. Mussolini had been a leading socialist, edited the party newspaper, and switched to fervent nationalism during the First World War.
What the movements shared was a diagnosis and a promise. The diagnosis was decadence: the nation had grown soft, divided by class conflict and party politics, humiliated abroad, and infiltrated from within. The promise was rebirth through unity, discipline, and struggle, delivered by a leader who embodies the national will directly rather than representing it through the compromised machinery of parliaments. Violence was not a regrettable means. It was presented as regenerative, a way of proving seriousness in a world of talkers.
Around that core sat a recognizable kit: a single party, a paramilitary wing in colored shirts, a cult of the leader, control of the press, a corporatist economy in which employers and unions were folded into state-supervised bodies, hostility to liberalism and to Marxism at once, and a myth of a glorious past to be restored. Not every fascist regime was racially exterminationist. Italian fascism only adopted antisemitic legislation in 1938, under German influence. German National Socialism made racial theory the center of everything, which is why the two are related but not identical.
How they took power
Neither Mussolini nor Hitler seized power in a coup, and this is the part most worth remembering. The March on Rome in October 1922 was a theatrical mobilization of blackshirts, and the decisive act was King Victor Emmanuel III inviting Mussolini to form a government rather than declaring martial law. Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 by a conservative establishment that believed it could use and control him. In both cases conservatives who feared the left handed the state to men they considered vulgar but useful.
The dismantling then went fast and legally. Mussolini used the murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, which nearly finished him, to abandon the pretense of parliamentary rule instead. Hitler had an enabling act within two months.
The end and the afterlife
Fascism as a governing system was destroyed by the war it required. Mussolini was deposed by his own Grand Council in 1943, and shot by partisans in April 1945. The ideology's defeat was total enough that almost nobody claims the label today, which is precisely what makes the word difficult now. It functions as an insult rather than a description, applied to any authoritarian or nationalist politics, which drains it of the specificity that would let you recognize the real thing.
The useful test is not rhetoric but structure: is there a single party fused with the state, an organized capacity for street violence, a leader claimed to embody the nation directly, and a program of national rebirth through the elimination of internal enemies? Those four together are rare. They were not rare in 1935.