For starters, we have too many conservatives in this country who think Obama is a socialist, when he's still right of center, and can't really even be considered liberal.
I have to apologize because I am quoting your post without actually responding to it, merely using it for my own selfish purposes ("oh the humanity!" and so forth). However, "though this be madness, yet there is method in it". First, given the potential of my previous post to offend just about everybody, your post is useful in that it highlights distinctions between the application or use of some political term, and whether it is accurate. When I say that fascist regimes were much akin to (and shared ideological & intellectual origins with) the roots of communism and socialism, I do not mean to equate either Stalin's Russia with communism or Hitler's Germany with socialism. Obama has been called may things (usually Barack, Mr. President, but also "socialist", "savior", "Satanist", etc.), but we must distinguish between what labels are applied AND those that are adopted, and what the labels actually
mean.
Which brings me to my next reason for hijacking your post. Concepts are inherently "fuzzy". So much so that an entire system of logical now ubiquitous within computer science, AI, machine learning, etc., was created because of this vagueness. Not only is it hard to nail down exactly what "socialism" is relative to "Marxism", "communism", etc., but the political spectrum we treat as 1-dimensional and ordered (left to right) is a rather extreme simplification of actual political positions. A conservative in Massachusetts might be seen as a liberal elsewhere, while a left-winger from West Virginia might appear to be far to the right in the Netherlands.
The history of liberalism is mostly one of a view that has more in common with today's libertarianism than today's liberals. The shared etymology of both attest to this, but more importantly so does history. Conservatism, on the other hand, is defined by change as it (like the more extreme "reactionary") in general garners meaning only in relation to change. As things inevitably do change, what the "good ol' days" were, and what the
status quo that must be defended lest [insert diabolical person, party, ideology, etc. here] ruin everything, necessarily also change.
That said, most political labels are those that people use to identify themselves or their views at least as much as any such labels are bestowed upon them. This is not so of fascism. That this is not so has posed significant problems for historians and political theorists alike, as there is no "fascist" ideology, manifesto, common creed, etc. It is identified as being right-wing, but extreme right-wing would either consist of monarchy (per Hobbes) or something approaching libertarianism (per Lord Acton and sundry) depending upon how one classifies "right-wing". With few exceptions, fascist regimes have placed too much emphasis on "people as nation" (or "party as people as nation") to be "right-wing". The problem, however, in identifying fascism can be seen merely by comparing the two most prototypical exemplars: Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Mussolini despised Hitler, had not only identified himself as Marxist but had (in his earlier days) published on the subject in ways that allow us to classify him as being as Marxist as it gets, was an intellectual rather than a starving (and bad) artist-turned fascist dictator, and his nationalism was not race based but cultural. Mussolini had more in common with Lenin than Hitler, while Hitler's fascist Germany was far more akin to Stalin's communist Russia. There exists a tendency to think of fascism as the right-wing extremist parallel to totalitarian communism, but in reality these are both usually corruptions of left-wing ideals, beliefs, and ideologies. What differs are the ways in which these are corrupted as well as how other elements (such as eugenics and racial purity) define specific examples.
Of course, fascism is not left-wing. It is not
an ideology or even really a set of ideologies and should probably be equated simply with totalitarianism or some other term that describes not a political system, belief, or position but a government that systematically oppresses, suppresses, controls, and rules as absolutely as possible its citizenry.
As such, it makes a particularly poor concept for historical or contemporary comparisons.
