As summarised by Open Culture, Umberto Eco documented in his relatively famous essay what he sees as fourteen signs of fascist regimes in general, even whilst in the details fascism may manifest in a variety of different ways

…the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. … These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

As so many, many people have observed before now, it goes without saying that some of these seem very relevant today.

  1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers."
  2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
  3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection".
  4. Disagreement is treason.
  5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
  6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
  7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged.”
  8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
  9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.
  10. Contempt for the weak.
  11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. With a resulting embrace of a cult of death - fascist heroes should fight to the death, and send other people to their death.
  12. Machismo and weaponry.
  13. Selective populism. “…the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
  14. Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”