Have any thoughts?
I’m just ruminating and would welcome perspectives to bounce off
In what context?
Who’d be doing the identifying, how would they be doing it, and what would they be using that information for?
‘Should’ is a question of desirability, so the above is really critically important.
Absolutely agree! I don’t have the answers to those questions
Do you have any contexts in mind?
Well, one context I’m already familiar with is the counter-terrorism duty in the UK. There is a program called Prevent that is designed to tackle radicalisation risk that could result in terrorism or non-violent extremism.
These programs basically work by placing a duty on certain types of organisation to report concerning behaviours that could result in radicalisation. An example would be a teacher or social worker overhearing a teenager espousing violent ideological positions that they’d been exposed to online.
This then results in a referral to the local counter-terrorism police unit, who carry out an assessment to determine the level of vulnerability and risk. Far-right ideologies including fascism can be accounted for here. Depending on the outcome, this may result in the referral being closed, or a multi-agency support plan being developed for the individual.
In that narrow band of circumstances, determining someone’s susceptibility to fascism as an extremist ideology is warranted. That’s in the context of a reactive specialist law enforcement assessment, when there is a justifiable national security interest in the prevention of terrorism.
That said, this is very different to indiscriminate profiling on a population level. If everyone in the UK was subject to mandatory fascism assessments, that would be massively intrusive and disproportionate, and an enormous infringement of civil liberties - even if the government attempted to justify it on the same national security basis described above.
