Nobody is far right these days. Here is the checklist anyway.

Ask anyone. Go on. Find the most enthusiastic flag-flyer on your timeline, the one who wants the boats stopped and the statues left alone and the BBC sold for parts, and ask him whether he is far right. He will tell you he is not. He will be a bit hurt that you asked. He will explain that he is a normal bloke with normal worries, that his grandad fought them and that calling people fascists is precisely why nobody listens to your lot any more.

Watch the men who thought they could control Hitler. This drawn history shows how Germany's conservatives handed him power in 1933 and how long their leash lasted.

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He may well be telling the truth. That is the awkward part.

The trouble with the word is that it has stopped being something you can check and become something you accuse people of, which suits absolutely everybody who might qualify. So here is a way of checking that does not involve asking, because a man who grew up inside the real thing wrote it all down thirty years ago.

The boy who won a prize for it

Umberto Eco was ten years old in 1942 when he won a provincial award from the Italian government for an essay arguing that yes, we should die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy. He said later that he had not been lying. He was, in his own words, a smart boy, writing what everyone around him believed, because everyone around him believed it.

That detail is worth holding on to before you read any further. He was not a tiny resistance hero in short trousers. He was a normal child in a normal town. The thing had got into him the way weather gets into a house.

In 1995, by then one of the most famous novelists alive, he wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books called Ur-Fascism. His argument was that fascism never had a coherent philosophy, which is exactly why it never announces itself and never turns up wearing the outfit you are watching for. It is a mood with fourteen symptoms that will wear whatever costume the country hands it.

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One warning before you start

Eco was blunt that this is not a scorecard and it does not belong to one side of anything. His words: "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."

Read that last sentence twice, because it is the whole essay. You are not looking for fourteen out of fourteen. Nobody scores fourteen out of fourteen. You are looking for one. Then for whatever starts growing around it.

The fourteen

1. The cult of tradition. There was a golden age. It is always just outside living memory and nobody can quite put a date on it, somewhere between the Blitz and the last time you could leave your front door unlocked.

2. The rejection of modernity. Not the technology, obviously. The bit after the Enlightenment where people started asking awkward questions and would not stop.

3. Action for its own sake. Thinking about it first is weakness. Doing something, anything, immediately, is strength. Just get on with it, elevated into a system of government.

4. Disagreement is treason. Not wrong. Not mistaken. Treason. Time how long it takes for the word "enemy" to turn up.

5. Fear of difference. The first appeal is always against the intruder. This one needs no translating and never has.

6. An appeal to a frustrated middle. People who have something and are terrified of losing it, which is a far more combustible feeling than having nothing at all.

7. An obsession with the plot. This is being done to you, deliberately, by someone. There is always a plan and it is always somebody else's.

8. Enemies who are strong and weak at once. They control everything and they are pathetically feeble. Both. In the same sentence. Nobody blinks.

9. Life as permanent war. There is no version of the future in which the fight is over. Winning would be a catastrophe, because then what would you do on a Tuesday.

10. Contempt for the weak. Elitism from below. Everyone despises the rung underneath and seethes at the rung above, and the ladder never moves.

11. Everybody is a hero. And heroism means death, preferably somebody else's, preferably soon.

12. Machismo. Power gets shunted sideways into sex and weapons, which goes some way to explaining the merchandise.

13. Selective populism. There is a thing called The People. It has exactly one opinion. One man can tell you what it is. Actual voters, with their inconvenient variety, are surplus to requirements.

14. Newspeak. The vocabulary shrinks. Complicated thoughts become hard to say and then, quite quickly, hard to have.

What it is not for

It is not for winning arguments. You will not recite fourteen features at a man in a Wetherspoons and watch him revise his worldview over his second pint. It is not a diagnosis either. Eco would have loathed it being used as one, having spent the whole essay explaining that the defining trick of the thing is that it never looks like itself.

What it is for is noticing. Almost nobody who ends up somewhere ugly walked there on purpose. They were carried, one entirely reasonable-sounding step at a time, by people who kept assuring them this was all perfectly normal and that anyone saying otherwise was hysterical.

The only question worth asking

So stop asking people whether they are far right. That question has never once been answered honestly, including by the ten-year-old who won a prize for it.

Ask which of the fourteen they would defend. Then count.