Henry Giroux, in an article in Salon.com writes:
The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe. They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.
Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.
Now, neo-liberal fascism is a very broad term - what I'm interested in is a more precise identification what is meant by this term. Fascism, after all was a specific polity identified with Mussolinis Italy. To use this term for every outbreak of fascist-like behaviour is to do words and political analysis a disfavour. How then to identify specifically who and what means by this?
