John Dean has an article in which he argues that the term Islamofascism is inaccurate and inappropriate to describe Islamic extremism.  He even quotes Pat Buchanan to make his point:

Pat Buchanan, who addresses the term from the opposite end of the political spectrum, notes that "there is no consensus as to what ‘fascism’ even means," and observes that Arnold Beichman of the Hoover Institution asserts that "fascism … has no intellectual basis; its founders did not even pretend to have any."

Buchanan says that using this term "represents the same lazy, shallow thinking that got us into Iraq, where Americans were persuaded that by dumping over Saddam, we were avenging 9/11." Buchanan believes that unless the Bush folks actually want a war of civilizations, he should drop this term, because it is deeply offensive to peaceful Muslims.

I agree and disagree.  I agree with the drift of Buchanan’s comments or with Dean’s larger point that the trotting out of the term in speeches made by Rumsfeld and Bush last week was to exaggerate the threat posed by regimes like Iran to incite fear about the forces of evil mustering to destroy everything that is good and true–and to accuse the Dems of weakness in the face of it. But while it’s true that fascism, especially when compared to communism, can be said to have no intellectual basis, it’s not hard to define it as a socio-political phenomenon.  Here are its chief characteristics:

1. It is an anti-liberal backlash.  Fascists usually come into power by vilifying the failures, ineffectiveness, and weakness of liberal democratic regimes they seek to replace.  Fascism celebrates the need for strong, decisive action and mocks the weaknesses of the democratic process that require collaboration, compromise, debate.
2. It has a macho personality cult.  Best examples: Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet.  It celebrates the bold, strong, decisive leader and his aggressiveness.  Such a man has no need to develop a consensus and cannot be bothered to work collaboratively.  The charisma of will  and particularly the will to power are his defining characteristics.
3. It sees brute power as the only absolute, and has little regard for the rule of law.  The law is dictated by the leader. It’s an expression of his will and the tool by which he sets the rules for how everyone else must act.  In a fascist regime there is no dissent.  Dissent whenever it arises is brutally repressed.
4. The spirit of fascism is soaked in a nostalgia for the premodern. It seeks legitimacy from an appeal to a premodern heroic past and to the traditional religious values.  The premodern traditionalism and mystique of the Catholic Church in Italy, Spain, and Latin America played an important role in supporting the legitimacy of the fascist regimes there. In Germany where the religious traditions were more complex, the premodern mystique derived from all the mythology surrounding Germanic origins and the Aryan race.

I think these criteria are robust enought to distinguish between left and right-wing dictatorships. The key is that all of these criteria must be present.  In the case of someone like Fidel Castro, the first and the last don’t fit, even if the middle two do. Castroism is clearly a strong man personality cult, but it differs from other Latin American fascist dicatatorships in that he rejected the premodern traditionalist ideological mythos of the Church and embraced of the modernist Marxist mythos of dialectical materialism.  But is Castroism  really communism, at least not anything that Marx would recognize as such?  Was Stalinism?  But it’s a technical point we can debate another time. Dictatorship is dictatorship no matter whether the justifying rationale lies in promising a return to the utopia of the past or to a promise to move toward the utopia of the future.

Can it be said that the Iran of Ahmadinejad is Islamofascist?  I think that he fits most of the criteria outline above.  The theocratic dimension has been stronger for Iranians than it was for Western forms of fascism, but religion performs essentially the same function in both–to legitimate a violent, anti-modern, anti-liberal, authoritarian rule.  I don’t know enough to judge whether the cult of personality really applies to Ahmadinejad and whether his personal power rises to the the same level as it did for the classic Western fascists.  And it seems that the he wants to liberalize a little with regard to women.  I’d be interested to know what others think, but to my mind Ahmadinejad fits the definition more than he doesn’t. 

Another qualifier here is that fascism usually arises as a backlash against liberalism and modernism, and neither ever established itself in Iran as something to lash back against. Fascism is a function of modernism, and I don’t know that premodern societies can really be fascist. I suppose you could make the argument that Islamic fascism is a reaction against the liberalising Western tendencies in Iranian society, but again I don’t know enough to say to what degree those tendencies have established themselves in Iran, and certainly liberal democrats never had much political power there.  Iran flirted with Democracy in the fifties, but it was subverted not by fascist elements within Iranian society but by the U.S. and British who had their own reasons for installing an authoritarian regime in Tehran. So the situation there is complicated by the fact that the current regime is less animated by the failures of their own experiment with liberal democracy than with an intense nationalistic rage incited by the historical meddling and exploitation of the two oldest liberal democracies toward Iran.   

But rather than worry about whether Iran is fascist or not, should we be not more concerned with the degree to which the criteria outlined above have come to describe the m.o. of the Bush administration?  That’s far scarier than whatever the trends might be in some weak,  premodern backwater in the Middle East.