That definition can cover quite a few autocratic or authorian systems like monarchy as an example. Facism isn’t super hard to define if you know what to look for it’s just the rubric always seems over the top and hyperbolic when applied contemporarily until whatever regime is being painted with the brush starts emulating Nazis on a 1:1 basis. The people who saw it coming from 10 years ago and ringing alarm bells were seeing fascist rhetoric back then and they weren’t wrong it’s just people don’t veiw facism as being anything but it’s worst fully realized iteration.
The easiest guage is to see how much Nationalist sentiment there is paired with calls to return to a mythical golden age, populist rhetoric surrounding a figure with authoritarian sentiments, scapegoating of groups of “outsiders” vs a “rightful inheritor” narrative and active erosion of democratic structures.
That definition can cover quite a few autocratic or authorian systems like monarchy as an example. Facism isn’t super hard to define if you know what to look for it’s just the rubric always seems over the top and hyperbolic when applied contemporarily until whatever regime is being painted with the brush starts emulating Nazis on a 1:1 basis. The people who saw it coming from 10 years ago and ringing alarm bells were seeing fascist rhetoric back then and they weren’t wrong it’s just people don’t veiw facism as being anything but it’s worst fully realized iteration.
The easiest guage is to see how much Nationalist sentiment there is paired with calls to return to a mythical golden age, populist rhetoric surrounding a figure with authoritarian sentiments, scapegoating of groups of “outsiders” vs a “rightful inheritor” narrative and active erosion of democratic structures.