The people calling Trump a fascist are actually accusing him of racism.

Fascism is about power and control, and the rule of central authority over everything. What that power chooses to do with it varies with the regime, but the power is unquestioned, and opposition to it is attacked and destroyed.

Hitler's Germany would have still been fascist even if nobody had ever touched the Jews. Stalin's regime destroyed millions of people largely in disregard of their religion (Stalin became more anti-Semitic during the short term of the Molotov–Ribbentrop deal). Still fascist.

People spend a great deal of time carefully walling off the most obvious features of fascist and totalitarian states, and concentrating on how each one decorates their parlors. In some countries gulags are just called prisons.

Eco wrote a good article, and having grown up under fascism, knows something about it. But he seems to gloss over the fundamental power aspects of fascism, although many of his points would assume a power structure capable of impressing them on a society.

He talks about how some fascist states were and are totalitarian, while others (like Italy) really weren't. Look, he says, here are some artists and such that were permitted in Italy. The key word overlooked is "permitted." A "tolerant" totalitarianism is just one that says "we're not going to destroy you. Today."

The idea that that government should be forbidden from interfering in most human activities, and permitted to engage in only a few, is a unique idea. It's what this country was founded on, and it's gone into the crapper.

As far as the elections in the U.S. go, voters have been electing Republicans not to create a Republican regime, but to try and dismantle excesses of power already in place.

To people who can't conceive of any form of society other than a pyramid of control, the fear of Republicans in office is expressed as a fear of the wrong people as the Ruling Party. Of "fascism" controlling everyone instead of "progressivism" doing it. The idea of "no Ruling Party" doesn't really register, but the Constitution and Bill of Rights were constructed specifically to create this. It's still a good idea.

Sidebar: You know, one could easily write another article pointing out "progressive" symptoms on that list.

#2: The rejection of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. (I don't think I would mash the Spirit of 1789 and 1776 into the same category.)

#4: A violent allergy to disagreement. The Left radiates this from every fiber. Ideas that don't match theirs need not apply, or be allowed in universities. Free speech has boundaries, and "safe zones." Those who disagree are not opponents, but enemies.

#8: "humiliated by ostentatious wealth." Continuous anger at "the rich." The foundation of a great deal of the anti-Jewish rhetoric in Germany (and elsewhere) was that these were supposedly the people who controlled the banks and the wealth. Strip ethnicity off that, and you have "the 1 percent."

#10, "elitism." The superiority of those inside the movement is contrasted constantly with the trogs outside it.

#13: "selective populism." The leadership as "interpreter" of the will of the people. Watch what happens when "progressives" lose a vote. The "will of the people" gets thrown out the window pretty quickly.

#14: "Newspeak" (mentioned elsewhere). The limitation of language "to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning." Fuck dictionaries.

Those are just the ones that require no real stretching.