By Nick Catoggio
Monday, September 29, 2025
I can imagine a good-faith case for avoiding the term
“fascist” in political criticism.
To begin with, the word has been mostly denuded of
meaning. For most of the past 80 years, it’s been a lazy left-wing synonym for
“domineering right-wing A-hole.” It’s an insult, not a diagnosis.
But it’s also more inflammatory than most political
insults, enough so that the Supreme Court once carved
out an exception to the First Amendment to allow for the prosecution of
someone who used it. American soldiers killed a lot of fascists in Europe in
the 1940s; a few weeks ago, a fanatic in Utah murdered Charlie Kirk after
carving “hey
fascist! CATCH!” on a shell casing. To call someone a fascist amounts to
saying that his or her ideology can’t peacefully be accommodated in a civil
society. It can only be defeated and discredited.
That’s the argument against using the word. All you need
now is to find a Republican who’s capable of acting in good faith to make it.
Good luck.
Last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the
conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as “authoritarian actions
by an authoritarian government.” That was too inflammatory for the president’s
right-hand man, the famously un-inflammatory Stephen Miller, who replied, “This
language incites violence and terrorism.” The governor’s office responded the
way you’d expect: “STEPHEN MILLER IS A FASCIST!”
Numerous Republicans in the days since have begun
accusing those who use the F-word of inciting violence, and not just the usual MAGA chuds on
Twitter. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin
told CNN, “There’s a thin line between free speech and when it crosses a line
and causes violence. And when you start calling someone ‘fascist’ … there is a
problem at some point.” On Saturday Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van
Orden one-upped him by claiming that Newsom’s tweet amounted to domestic
terrorism under federal law, never mind that the statute defines
terrorism explicitly as criminal acts that are “dangerous to human life.”
The problem (well, one problem) is that Van Orden himself
has used the term
“fascist”
in the past
to describe his political opponents. So has the president,
of course, as well as his highly
influential son. So have the chud brigades,
needless to say. But maybe no one on the right has used the term as liberally
as … Stephen Miller, who returned to it again and again
during the Biden years. And the word “authoritarian,” which so alarmed him in
Gavin Newsom’s remarks? Of course he used that too.
Gotchas are fun, especially when they involve
pearl-clutching by a party that otherwise relishes
intimidating its
opponents. But I don’t think it’s simple hypocrisy or earnest fear of
political violence following Kirk’s murder that’s led Miller and the rest to
newly abhor the word “fascist.” They abhor it because they know it fairly
describes their politics and they worry that, as more Americans come to
recognize that, the country might turn against the nationalist project.
As the saying goes: A hit dog will holler.
Words mean things.
Democrats didn’t do much hollering when Donald Trump and
Miller accused them of fascism, partly because the president and his movement
are forever catastrophizing about everything. From the beginning in 2016, the
right-wing rationale for electing him was that America
supposedly couldn’t survive another liberal presidency. Calling Democrats
“fascists” was just another way for the GOP to try to convince swing voters
that the country’s existence somehow depended upon avoiding the tedium of a
Kamala Harris administration. It didn’t mean anything. It was just MAGA being
MAGA.
Look no further than Trump calling Harris a “Marxist, communist,
fascist, socialist” on the trail last year. That’s incoherent to the point
of being meaningless, a textbook example of what I said earlier about “fascist”
having become an empty political insult. And in Trump’s case it may have been
emptier than usual: Given all the doomsaying Democrats had done about creeping
fascism if he were reelected, he may have tossed the word in for simple,
childish “I know you are but what am I?” reasons.
The other reason Democrats didn’t do much hollering about
being called fascists is because they knew the term wouldn’t stick. Americans
do have a vague, distant memory of what fascism looks like, and the neoliberal
program just ain’t it. There are many unflattering words we might use about a
party that prefers unchecked illegal immigration, takes a soft hand in fighting
crime, and condones sensitivity to trans rights to the point where it can’t
tell men from women, but “fascist” is not among them.
Fascists are scary and proudly so. No one was
scared of Harris, Joe Biden, or anyone else in the Democratic Party, as the
tough guys of the modern right are normally happy to remind you.
Defining what fascism isn’t is easy. Defining what it is
can be tricky. The Italian author Umberto Eco, who grew up under Benito
Mussolini’s regime, once tried to synthesize the essence of the ideology and
ended up with a list of
14 distinguishing characteristics. If you’ve never read his essay (fear
not, it’s short), I encourage you to find time today. Those who follow daily
political news in America will find the themes familiar.
Fascism, according to Eco, is a
cult of traditionalism that rejects modern Enlightenment
ideals in the belief that they encourage depravity. (“The official Fascist
intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal
intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.”) It dislikes disagreement
and diversity—ideological,
racial, and otherwise. It’s obsessed with “plots” and conspiracies,
especially involving outsiders,
and tends to treat the
perpetrators as both supremely powerful yet weak enough to be overcome.
It regards politics, if not life itself, as a
form of war in which pacifism toward the enemy amounts to betrayal of
one’s tribe. It encourages contempt
for weakness and uses that to justify an elitism of “strength” in its own
ranks. Strength, typically expressed as power and dominance, leads to a culture
of machismo within the movement. And that movement, although intensely
populist, is highly opportunistic in how it gauges majority opinion. To quote
Eco, writing in 1995, “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in
which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented
and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Finally, fascism speaks in what George Orwell famously
called “Newspeak,” a rhetoric of limited
vocabulary and syntax in which words lose meaning. “Strong,” “hoax,”
“huge,” “beautiful,” “scam,” etc.: Up is down, black is white, neoliberalism is
Marxist communist fascist socialism.
Eco was describing fascism as an intellectual project,
but its political trappings are familiar too. Fascists are authoritarians, and
so they clamor for autocracy, in which even economic policy is set
by the leader. They regard legal restraints on the autocrat as a
threat to public order and will look
for emergencies they can exploit to loosen them. They menace their critics
in hopes of intimidating
the wider public into complying with their agenda. And they pay lip service
to democracy as a sop to populism but will connive to remain in power if an
election goes against them, insisting the country won’t survive if they stand
down.
They glorify ruthlessness. Fascists are scary—and
proudly so.
A hit dog will holler. “Nobody is debating whether Scott
Bessent or Doug Burgum is a fascist,” writer Richard Hanania
pointed out. “The entire discussion centers around Stephen Miller for a
reason.” Miller knows what sort of politics he, his boss, and many other MAGA
Republicans are practicing, which I assume is why he reacted to Newsom’s
accusation not by indignantly denying that his program is fascist but by trying
to browbeat the governor over incitement. Ditto for Van Orden, whose nonsense
about domestic terrorism may presage some sort of federal attempt to equate
anti-fascist criticism with support
for Antifa.
Even in deflecting allegations of fascism, in other
words, they can’t help but stoop to fascist tactics. “Anyone who calls us
authoritarian is going to prison,” Matt Yglesias joked,
translating Miller’s demagoguery toward Newsom into plain English. Hanania made
the same point less archly: “If you can’t call fascists fascists, then the
fascists have won.”
I made
that point myself the day after Kirk’s assassination, when the effort to
mau-mau Trump’s detractors into not calling him a fascist was heating up: It’s
dangerous to shout “fire” in a crowded theater—until there really is a fire, in
which case it’s dangerous not to. When Bill Maher claims that, at the rate
we’re going, the president could be wearing
a general’s uniform by Christmas, it’s not because he’s a woke libtard
comic. It’s because the president’s agenda is unabashedly postliberal, intent
on governing by fear, and almost certainly prepared to blow through whatever
institutional constraints remain on its power as events unfold. It’s fascist.
Just the way Stephen Miller wanted it.
What’s curious to me is why Miller, Van Orden, and the
rest are so anxious about being called the F-word.
The puke test.
A theory has been kicking around for years that one
reason younger Americans don’t
recoil from the word “communism” the way their elders do is because
Republicans have overused it. Describing every Democratic policy initiative
since 2009 as communism or socialism has inadvertently convinced some younger
liberals with short historical memories that “socialism” isn’t out of the
American norm.
The GOP mainstreamed the word, and now fledgling lefties
no longer blink at it. Fast-forward a few years and actual socialists like
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani are suddenly major players in their
party.
In theory, something similar could happen on the right.
The more the word “fascist” is used to describe a Republican president who’s
still stratospherically popular in his party, the more comfortable with it
younger Republicans will get. Already there are members of Congress who
consider themselves “Christian
nationalists.” Why not lean in a little further and embrace the F-word too?
It’s not like the right would shudder in horror. Earlier
this month, for instance, Tucker Carlson happily paid tribute on his program to
the most notorious fascist on Earth. “If you think that Joe Biden was a better
leader or a better man than Vladimir Putin, like, I don’t even know what to say
to you,” he told
his viewers. “Putin has been the most effective leader in my lifetime. … Why is
he more evil than Joe Biden? I can’t even conceptualize that."
A few weeks later Carlson was an honored speaker at
Charlie Kirk’s funeral, sharing a stage with the president and vice president.
Being pro-fascist is no barrier to major influence on the modern right, in
short, so why would declaring oneself a fascist be? You can imagine the spin: If
the left wants to call me a fascist for supporting strong borders, low crime,
and two genders, I’m happy to wear that label.
Frankly, I’d be keen to see GOP voters answer a poll that
presented them with the binary choice Tucker imagined. Republicans still don’t
think much of Vladimir Putin, notwithstanding Carlson’s best efforts to the
contrary, but a baseline assumption of modern right-wing politics is that
government by any figure on the right is preferable to government by any figure
on the left. If it turned out that the GOP would rather be governed by Putin
than by Biden, that would tell us something about how toxic fascism truly is in
the party.
Still, I think I understand why Miller is reluctant to
lean into the F-word.
Eight decades later, “fascist” still carries enough of a
stench morally to ensure that some voters will puke if they’re stuck with it.
Even “communist” doesn’t smell as sickly thanks to its utopian aspirations
about freedom from want and equality for all. There is no utopian fascism by
contrast; the closest thing is the fascist tribe dominating its enemies and
establishing hegemony over them unto eternity.
Much of the right would be A-OK with a party like that, I
expect. (They already are!) But in a country where even Kamala Harris can get
within a point and a half of Trump on Election Day, Miller and the rest of the
MAGA brain trust can’t afford to alienate anyone. Reaganites have strained
mightily over the last decade to rationalize sticking with an increasingly
fascist movement, with plenty of encouragement from prominent “conservatives”
like Ted Cruz, but there are
signs that that era is ending. Embracing the F-word might cause it to end
prematurely. If even 5 percent of the GOP feels obliged to bolt from an overtly
fascist party, postliberalism has a problem.
Miller and the White House are better off continuing to
supply Reaganites with the fig leaf they need to support Trump by deflecting
allegations of “fascism” while the president goes about deploying the military
in American cities, indicting his political enemies, knocking liberal TV hosts
off the air, and harassing left-wing activist groups in the guise of fighting
“terrorism.” The illusion that all of this is still more or less recognizably
conservative is important to holding the GOP coalition together. For now.
Another way to put all of that is to return to my
favorite metaphor. The art of frog-boiling
is to turn the temperature up gradually, to give the frogs time to
adjust. If they wake up one day to find the president and his most trusted
lieutenant on TV suddenly admitting to being fascists, they might hop out. Why
not just keep doing and saying fascist
things without putting a label on them and assume that Americans won’t know—or
care—as the points on Eco’s checklist are ticked off one by one?
In our decadent country, you don’t need plausible
deniability about your party’s fascist agenda to justify your support.
Implausible deniability will do.
