National Socialism and Italian Fascism were all about the strong taking responsibility for the nation, in a philosophical sense.

These were social welfare states that provided for the "people" far more than modern American liberalism (the standard operating produre for free economies of scale in the modern world), for example.

Now, obviously I'm not saying this was a good system, but you're so far off base that it's ridiculous.

The discourse around this complex historical movement is profoundly anti-intellectual. I know this because I grew up in the same society you did, the one where I also learned and used fascist as a pejorative without any further information.

Now, as someone interested in having sophisticated ideas about systems, I'm not really in a mental state where I'm going to take appeals or emotion or shortcuts that shut down thought seriously. Regardless of the context, I still want to try and reflect reality as closely as possible in my minds eye.

How many liberal, or even communist thinkers have you read? Personally, countless. As for fascists, almost none. It's a taboo, the works aren't translated, etc -- but it's there, and has intellectual underpinning that is more complex than mindlessly calling people you don't like "fascists".

This can't be conscionable to any earnest intellectual. Imagine sitting here and tolerating people pejoratively calling people "communists". It's so stupid.

Edit: I get in trouble here because there's something really interesting going on with controversial topics: all you need to do is make a choice and your model of reality is much more accurate than the presented model of reality. It's the easiest way to take Ws out of discourse, nobody has good ideas when the id has the reins.