Orcinus includes this chilling passage which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

After ruthlessly suppressing communist and socialist opposition, the NSDAP began to "coordinate" German society through steady infiltration of institutions. Wehrmacht officers, for example, were "Nazified" through oaths to Hitler, and schools and universities given "Aryan principles in every discipline." Workplaces and professional associations underwent similar upheavals. Griffin argues that none of this 'coordination' was "an end in itself," as he suggests the reorganization of Italian society was between 1925 and 1936. It was rather "the prelude to an unbroken sequence of dynamic events set in train by the new state that fully merit the concept of 'permanent revolution' with all its ultimately self defeating and unsustainable connotations."

He goes on to point out that the fascist regime, both in Italy and in Germany, was forced to confront not just the pre-nationalist regions of the 19th century third world (as did the rest of Europe) but fully nationalist countries like Poland, Greece, Yugosalvia, and of course the USSR.

I am not sure that we stand on the brink of an era of American Fascism, but I think that we ARE sowing the seeds of one. It may take ten years for the seeds to flower, and the lucky gardeners to reap their crop. It may take 50. I don't think we can yet say. But I do agree with Paxton, and his complete refutation of the 'anti-modern' thesis that fascism can only flourish in place in which democracy and political participation are shallowly rooted. This argument has been used many times, particularly by right wing historians...to inoculate right-wing elements in 'real' democracies (the U.S., England) against the charge that they have fascist tendencies, or to pooh-pooh the notion of the rise of fascism in one of their 'favored' or 'privileged' countries.

UPDATE (October 26, 2005): In addition to these, Orcinus has written the following posts on fascism:

"Fascism: Two hoary myths," October 2005:

The first is a supposed quote that I keep seeing pop up in e-mails sent to me:

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
[Benito Mussolini]

The fact is that, as far as anyone can ascertain, Mussolini never said or wrote this. Indeed, it contradicts much of what he did say about corporatism…

The other recurring myth is actually a great deal more popular -- namely, that because Mussolini was at one time an ardent socialist, and because Hitler's party called itself the National Socialists, then fascism itself was a form of socialism, and thus a left-wing phenomenon.

The reasons for its popularity are obvious: It's a convenient way of smearing the left for conservatives, as well as shedding their own well-established baggage from the far right....Both Hitler and Mussolini pretended to have socialist aspirations as part of their propaganda efforts during their rise to power, largely as a way of encouraging working-class support. But they were unquestionably right wing politically by the time they obtained power, and in fact were viciously anti-left-wing as well.

"The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism" (PDF), September 2004:

The "conservative movement," in the course of this mutation, has become something entirely new, a fresh political entity quite unlike we've ever seen before in our history, but one that at the same time seems somehow familiar, as though we have seen something like it...Call it Pseudo Fascism... Its architecture, its entire structure, has morphed into a not-so-faint hologram of 20th-century fascism.

It is not genuine fascism, even though it bears many of the basic traits of that movement. It lacks certain key elements that would make it genuinely so:

• Its agenda, under the guise of representing mainstream conservatism, is not openly revolutionary.
• It is not yet a dictatorship.
• It does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition.
• American democracy has not yet reached the genuine stage of crisis required for full-blown fascism to take root.

Without these facets, the current phenomenon cannot properly be labeled "fascism." But what is so deeply disturbing about the current state of the conservative movement is that it has otherwise plainly adopted not only many of the cosmetic traits of fascism, its larger architecture -- derived from its core impulses -- now almost exactly replicates that by which fascists came to power in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s.

"Jingoes and the fascist impulse," May 2004:

This is a peculiar blind spot, because in fact fascism is only possible as an outgrowth -- a metastasis, if you will -- of democracy. Historically, fascism has only taken root in democracies when they stumble. It seems not to occur to Americans that if their democracy stumbles, the dark face of fascism awaits to take its place.

In March 2003, a teenage girl named Courtney presented one of her poems before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel.

A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being "un-American" because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its "No child left behind" education policy.

The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job.