Was Spain Fascist under Franco?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've never had a ton of patience for these sorts of definitional quibbles. Franco was a bad dude who ran a bunch of bad boys; they defeated a coalition of some similarly-bad dudes and some much-less-bad dudes in the Spanish Civil War, then put in place a bad regime dominated by bad elements and unsavory characters. Arguing about what ideology he was exactly misses a key point about his regime, which is that he himself had no ideology and consciously deputized various flunkies to come up with one in real time to justify how he was running the country. Some stages of this ongoing process were distinctly fascist-adjacent, though, yes.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Historian Paul Preston considered Franco of that time to be much much worse than 'a Mussolini' even if you refrain from calling his regime fascist. He had the background as a colonialist officer and had an equally sociopathic disregard for human life.

I've always found it revealing that unideological pop culture use can be made of Mussolini without coming across as some sort of dog whistle (like how--I'm dating myself here!--in "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" he's part of the massive coalition of historical and fictional figures that takes down Chuck Norris), whereas using Franco in that way comes much closer to using Hitler in terms of what it implies about the views of the person doing it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Historian Paul Preston considered Franco of that time to be much much worse than 'a Mussolini' even if you refrain from calling his regime fascist. He had the background as a colonialist officer and had an equally sociopathic disregard for human life.

I've always found it revealing that unideological pop culture use can be made of Mussolini without coming across as some sort of dog whistle (like how--I'm dating myself here!--in "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" he's part of the massive coalition of historical and fictional figures that takes down Chuck Norris), whereas using Franco in that way comes much closer to using Hitler in terms of what it implies about the views of the person doing it.

Mussolini was the first modern politician with mass media presence and an image forged through it. There was a very real 'Benitomania' in Europe, America to almost Hollywood proportions.

While it waned, it became parody. Almost an art in line with other Italian fascist aesthetics.

Franco was more visceral maybe?

My grandfather, a North Africa campaign vet refused to set foot in Spain until Franco was dead and holidayed in Yugoslavia instead.

Yes, there's something almost camp about the image Mussolini ended up having (something he of course has in common with Trump, in spades!), whereas with Franco he was so personally boring and seems to have taken himself so seriously that the only way to find him entertaining was to actually approve of what he was doing.