I dislike the use of axes (that being the plural of axis, not the tool) personally since they tend to break things down in to a black and white issue and often leave certain aspects out. The 3-model ones is of course better than the political compass, or the god-awful political spectrum, but still fails to capture certain aspects. The most common "3 axis" I find is culture/economics/state but that one leaves out social aspects which themselves have a lot of overlap with culture and state (I would consider something like collectivism a social aspect not fitting in to any of those three). While the can serve a purpose for basic classification, I think people focus on them too much and end up missing the point of a subject, especially when the ideology in question is unorthodox in regards to political classification (i.e. something like theocracy, good luck placing that within defined axes, I suppose you could claim it's "right" on the cultural axis, but it could be literally anywhere on the other two, and it in and of itself could be it's own varied on religion). Trends most certainly exist (for example a state influenced/run economy is certainly more popular among the cultural "left"), but it's far from definitive. I think collectivism is a better term than socialism is personally. Socialism is usually associated with economics, and you can have collectivist societies that don't have socialist economic policies (such as Imperial Japan). Plus many of the earliest socialist supporters were not even collectivist, more just sick of the status-quo they were living in who wanted something different (which is why these political movements were able to snag them). If you look at the fascist nations there isn't a clear policy as each varied quite a bit. For example Mussolini actually received criticism from other fascists for "returning to his socialist roots" with some of the policies he enacted that drastically expanded nationalization of many industries to the point the private sector became a minority. In Germany things were handled very differently. The state and industries worked closely, but the industries were still privately owned, though the state had the ability to nationalize them if they deemed said industry was not working within the best interest of the people. Spain, Portugal, etc. had their own systems as well. Ethnicity is not a requirement of fascism either, merely nationalism. Mussolini was a civic nationalist, he was cool with any color of the race rainbow if they were an Italian nationalist, and while I think his "remaking the Roman Empire" was mostly political rhetoric, I can see him easily accepting non-Italians who were fanatic Italian nationalists. Franco was similar but more with a religious aspect, that being Catholicism of course. Contrast those to Hitler was quite obviously an ethno-nationalist, making any non-German a second class citizen, with non-Europeans being made third class citizens. Oswald Mosley, who never got in power, had his own takes on it as well, a more authoritarian take as opposed to totalitarian, and even retained the monarchy. I think fascism is harder to understand since the fascists themselves all differed on certain aspects where the communists had less divergence, the two big ones I can think of being Stalin rejecting the cultural aspect of communism (despite that douchebag's atrocities, I'll give him the credit that he probably saved Eastern Europe's culture with that choice), and the other big one being the Chinese reforms after the death of Mao. You must remember the communists were following instruction booklets created by Karl Marx (collage commies need to read his other work, they read the communist manifesto and think they are masters of the ideology). The fascists had no such guide. I know some who are ignorant on the subject like to cite Mein Kampf as the "Fascist-Bible" but the Germans were the only ones who cared about that book, Italians, Spanish, etc. didn't really give a shit. To be honest, I would bet it actually got more readers in democratic nations than in the other fascist ones, but that's personal speculation. The consistencies with fascism seem to be... Nationalism Collectivism At least authoritarianism, but usually totalitarianism Heavy state influence in economics Traditionalism