>>18119281
I'm reading "A History of Fascism, 1914-1945" by Stanley Payne, and I'm still early on where he's going into new right movements in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. There were actually a bunch of new parties and groups and tendencies, and while the fascists emerged out of that, it was actually quite varied. Also the fascists were very radical in comparison to other currents on the right who were either monarchists, or conservative authoritarians who wanted to work within a parliamentary framework, or national-conservative monarchists who wanted to combine monarchism and nationalism (which was not what monarchism was like in 1810, it was far more built around dynasties and royal bloodlines without the nationalism). The legitimist groups like Action Française were way more influential in France, and Payne made the point that there was a sort of general reaction going on to 19th-century liberalism and materialism, and they could look back to something like legitimism and make it seem fresh again, even though they were doing something different and new as well.

I think something like that is probably going on today. You have more energy on the right, and the right has been reinventing itself, and you see the right rummaging through the past to find old stuff which seems fresh again. And one of those sources is fascism, but it's not really the same thing as fascism. In fact they're a bunch of national conservatives, but the youth wing plays with fascist memes or something. Simply the fact that there's a lot of women in leading positions is totally 21st century. There are open gays and lesbians (Alice Wiedel).