(ELI5) what actually is a facist
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It’s hard to say because the meaning of words changes through time and through use. Barbie made a good joke on this. “She called me a fascist! I don’t even control the railways or the flow of commerce”. It’s a good joke, that points out the disparity between the common, if overeager use of the word today and the strict encyclopedic definition that Barbie knows.
Fascism as a movement and ideology developed and bloomed in a different period, and while the word today persists few people actually use it to describe what would actually be considered fascist if we’re going to be pedantic. It’s a catch all for conservative or authoritarian people that someone doesn’t like.
A fascist in the modern sense is generally someone who believes they know how to fix the world by installing a government that has complete control and follows certain specific, and strict, values, which goes against the principle of personal freedom. Fascists don’t mind having no freedom because in their ideal world people don’t need freedom, they need to conform to their own moral and societal guidelines, and that a world like that would be ideal for them. So basically it’s someone who wants to enforce their belief system by force with no regard to different points of view or personal freedom.
The word had lost its more specific meaning related to particular intricacies of how it was implemented and defined in the past.
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