"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it"

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes"

and so many more. It's as if humans, collectively, know we know better, as evidenced by the aphorisms; but we just can't help ourselves.

What's so depressing about the modern era is that it's not unique, we're just blindly repeating a classic historical arc, and it's hard not to wonder why the hell we didn't see it coming this time. But we never do.

I'm generalizing. I'm sure some people have seen where we're headed. I'm intrigued by Elon Musk's plans to build a gateddomed community on Mars at half a $billion per mansion. It's as if the hyperwealthy are starting to realize that they've just about sucked this planet dry, and it's time to move on to greenerredder pastures. I thought the movie "Elysium" was prescient, but I was thinking too small.

(Could the hyperwealthy actually be alien locusts, who migrate from planet to planet stripping them dry? Alternatively, are we witnessing the birth of a new offshoot species from humanity, leaving the nest to pillage the galaxy? Are the rich really not like you and me?)

As for defining "fascism", sorry, ER, your attempt is as puerile as all of them; it's not personal, there's a basic flawed premise. I think the difficulty is that "fascism" is a very specific thing, sprung from the brow of Mussolini designed for Italy, and adapted for this neighbor Germany. Literal fascism will never recur, but we're doomed to witness an endless parades of rhyming -isms.

Today it's Trumpism, deftly analyzed in a HuffPost blog post Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He Is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path. Recommended reading in our occasional seminars on polital science, because for context it surveys several conventional definitions of fascism. Trump, in this view, is a "pre-fascist", the one who softens up the country to accept real "fascism" at the next election after his.

I'm starting to develop a definition of "fascism" that may be more universal, in terms of the substitution of the ancient form of personal power (feudalism, kings and chieftains...alpha male power hierarchies) for an existing structure of formal institutions. I call it the "Natural State", and it's something we recognize when we see it, because it relies on our instinctive primate knowledge of how to live within that kind of social structure.

In the historical examples of Italy and Germany, both alpha males took over existing first-world societies, with existing infrastructures and governmental machinery, and we wise enough to change very little of the nuts and bolts of their civil societies. Instead, they stripped away one tiny little bit at the head, the component of democracy, and handed the institutions over to trusted lieutenants of Hitler and Mussolini. We make much of the supposed "corporatism" only because a large part of the infrastructure of a civil society is business, and cronies were given control of entire industries. But it's all the same: Personal power relationships killing off democracy and funneling power upward to a single apex alpha male.

That's the Natural State, how we organize ourselves when every artifice of the Enlightenment is stripped away and we're a primate tribe once more.