One of the Defining Characteristics of Fascism Is Its Parallel Structures

One device used by fascist parties, but also by Marxist revolutionaries who have given serious thought to the conquest of power, was parallel structures. An outsider party that wants to claim power sets up organizations that replicate government agencies. The Nazi Party, for example, had its own foreign policy agency that, at first, soon after the party had achieved power, had to share power with the traditional Foreign Office.... The fascist parties’ parallel structures challenged the liberal state by claiming that they were capable of doing some things better (bashing communists, for instance).... We will encounter the parallel structures again in the course of observing the process of achieving power, and of exercising power. It is one of the defining characteristics of fascism. Leninist parties did the same during the conquest of power, but then in power the single party totally eclipsed the traditional state. Fascist regimes...retained both the parallel structures and the traditional state, in permanent tension, which made them function very differently from the Bolshevik regime once in power.

--Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 85.