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The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted that fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with [[Bush regime|belligerent nationalism]]." [http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm]
Fascism's approach to politics is both populist--in that it seeks to activate "the people" as a whole against perceived oppressors or enemies--and elitist--in that it treats the people's will as embodied in a select group, or often one supreme leader, from whom authority proceeds downward. Fascism seeks to organize a cadre-led mass movement in a drive to seize state power. It seeks to forcibly subordinate all spheres of society to its ideological vision of organic community, usually through a totalitarian state. Both as a movement and a regime, fascism uses mass organizations as a system of integration and control, and uses organized violence to suppress opposition, although the scale of violence varies widely.
>Matthew N. Lyons
<br>>from draft excerpts of "Right-Wing Populism in America" [http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/whatfasc.html]
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"The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
--Vice President of the United States Henry A. Wallace, 1944 [http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm]
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Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt... calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. [http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm]
