I'm not sure I was the one who rejected the "know it when I see it" definition of this thing (sounds more like Tom), but I definitely recall that when I came up with the idea of the "Natural State" as being essentially our instinctive primate social pattern, I said to myself "...and therefore we'd recognize it when we see it! Eureka! There's a scientific basis for that feeling!"

But if I did scoff at your instincts, Rob, then allow me to apologize. I now believe that you, and most of us, can correctly identify what in the mid-20th was called "fascism", in whatever new form it takes. Because whatever new form it takes, it's still something very old indeed.

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 were 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.