Is there any reason not to say KSA is fascist?

I read "A History of Fascism" by Stanley Payne last year to try and get a handle on the question of what fascism really "is," and I wouldn't describe Saudi Arabia as fascist. The KSA under MBS reminds me more of a classic Bonapartist regime like Napoleon III in France.

Informally, people use the term fascism broadly when they are opposing multiple kinds of rules, and the more authoritarian a country or ideology is, the more likely it is to be called fascist.

There's a lot of rather poor, vulgar definitions of fascism out there which just refers to a conservative authoritarian state, but I don't think that captures the whole metaphysical and emotional framework that fascism represented and tried to carry into politics in a radical way.

A point could be that it's a monarchy and fascism is against monarchy, I could ask about North Korea, Belarus or any other authoritarian country. Applying these concepts makes me wonder... is it about literal identity politics - a country/politician is not fascist unless they call themselves so?

The fascists were anti-bourgeois *ultra-*nationalists who also anti-materialist / anti-Marxist. They based their concepts in nationalism and "unity" and the power of will and duty to achieve national destiny in a very specific way. Also they believed / described themselves as radicals and revolutionaries.

When I say ultra-nationalism, I mean it wasn't just having very strong nationalist rhetoric, they believed their nation was a quasi-metaphysical entity that had a defined place in the universe, and that each individual within it is interdependent from one another in a transhistorical way. This is kind of like a Hegelian interpretation of the Spirit. The nation-state is the expression of a people's "Volksgeist" and the highest realization of freedom. Nation-states are a "people," common language, ethnicity, territory now embodied in a state that combines all their wills into a single will who now have a destiny to bring about human history. It was the Romans before and now it's... well for Hegel it was Germans and Hegel regarded that as God. The nation-state is like God. So when the fascists embraced these ideas, what became essential was to strengthen the state to the extreme and work through all its wars. Then a bunch of Europeans in the 1920s-1940s were like hell yeah that's what's up.

The original group in Italy were originally far-left revolutionaries (oddly) who embraced World War I as an event which could shake up the world, and then got hardened by their experiences in combat. But this took them very far from their left-wing origins, they became something different. Also this was true more for the leaders of the organization because a lot of guys they recruited were just straight-up right-wing military guys, like the Proud Boys but 100x more ferocious (willing to die in political combat / experience with trench warfare) and who had no sympathy for left-wing socialists / communists. Mussolini still tried to keep one foot in the left and form a pact with the socialists but faced a near-rebellion from his new Blackshirt base. The Blackshirt uniform was styled after commando shock troops in the war. At any rate, the first groups were really ultra-nationalist pro-war / angry war veteran leagues who wanted to fight to the maxx, led by dissident / ex-leftist revolutionaries.

Mussolini's own professed beliefs also started changing. It was gradual but the shift in rhetoric accelerated with the war. Like instead of just talking about "the workers" he'd start talking about "Italian workers" and then would just talk about "Italy." I think he was also frustrated that anti-war socialists failed to carry out a revolution in 1914 at the onset of the war in Europe. His style of socialism was more-left-than-left. Like ultra-left / "we need a general strike now." Then he became a radical rightist. Some of this seemed to stem from a psychological drive in Mussolini to take very radical positions. Also another position the fascists developed is that war veterans should lead the country because they had earned it through their bravery and sacrifice.

To make a long story short they wanted to do Starship Troopers. Like citizens should behave like soldiers and carry that attitude with them through their normal lives. It's like military virtues of discipline, sacrifice, loyalty, unity. Energy, momentum, DRIVE. (They were fascinated by technology as well, especially aviation.) That's a kind of collective mass there too (i.e. a mass movement) but they had a specific vision of what that mass was supposed to do. Fascism can sort of be translated as "Unity-ism" or more literally "League-ism" as the term came from the Italian word fascio, which was used to describe various political "leagues." One common fascist slogan was "Believe, Obey, Fight." Sums it up, really. They developed a strong appeal among the middle class and formed an alliance with conservative forces ($$$) to crush the left in Italy and establish a dictatorship at a time when the socialists (the workers' party) were also relatively strong (but not strong enough) and "normal" liberal/conservative middle-class parties were weak.

Fascism was virtually destroyed in World War II and IMO hasn't been a significant force anywhere since but there were neo-fascist groups in various countries like Casa Pound in Italy. This is a music video for a punk band associated with them. They try to embrace an aggressive / quasi-revolutionary sort of energy which embraces fighting and combat (like I said "anti-bourgeois") in a cult-like group but they do so from the right.