"7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the *obsession with a plot*, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s *The New World Order*, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others."
### Commentary
What Hofstadter called the *paranoid style 
has certainly been a fixture in the US for, well, forever. (I think I've read of crazy-ass conspiracy theories from around the time of the Revolutionary War.) I don't know whether the US is in any way an outlier amongst nations/peoples.
A weirdity of this American moment, though: there aren't both internal and external enemies, not really. We mostly have just internal.
I don't think the median American thinks of Russia as an enemy – rather an irrelevancy. China? Yeah, maybe an enemy – or is it "adversary"? – but few people seem all that excited about it. Something as trivial as pronouns in email signatures gets people way more riled up. Because China isn't seen as an actual *threat*, whereas the internal enemy can cancel people out of jobs, corrupt children, etc.
The Chinese are not coming after *you*. But what about the internal enemies? Aren't they more of a threat?
So fascist impulses are feeding on an ahistorically skewed blend between perception of internal enemies and perception of external enemies. Here's hoping that means that, should things go all the way, the killing will be directed inward. "Greatest good for the greatest number," and I don't only number people within the USA.
### Grumpy comment
Eco could have been better edited. A numbered list signals to the reader that each entry will be a new topic. **A** topic. Not topic**s**. Not a repeated topic. Not a combination of two topics.
*I* think Eco has taken an essay, with all the essay's conventions (like freely repeating an earlier assertion), identified key phrases and highlighted them, then broken the original text into as many parts as there were highlighted phrases – all without sufficient concern about whether the reader's expectations about one topic per number, etc. were being met.
### On the other hand
People write narrative texts because it's *engaging*. The very structure that makes a numbered list analytically useful makes it *much* harder to be engaging.
Humans have always been oriented toward narrative. We're a story-telling species.
So: Eco could have written a piece with 14 numbered paragraphs and 14 topics, where there was a nice one-to-one relationship between numbers and topics. And struggled to make it memorable.
Or he could do what he did, which was two distinct things via one piece of text. He could use natural narrative flow to gradually weave a story that would let people recognize Ur-Fascism. And he could use the impression-of-authority inherent in a numbered list to make his narrative more credible, purely because of its form.
By combining the two, he both provided a fascism-detection tool and made the recipient more likely to use it. *And* he made something that gazillions of people would point other people to.
That might have been more useful than adhering to a conventional structure.