The F-word certainly gets tossed around a lot these days:
“US under siege from 'far-left fascism', says Trump in Mount Rushmore speech” David Smith/The Guardian July 4, 2020
“American Right-wingers (Trump supporters) are Christian ethno-fascists” Reddit Thread Title July 28, 2020
“Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech Is the Closest He’s Come to Fascism” Federico Finchelstein/Foreign Policy July 8, 2020
“The Latent Fascism of Today’s Anti-Fascists” Aaron Kheriaty/Religion Unplugged July 22, 2020
“We’re All Fascists Now” Bari Weiss/New York Times March 7, 2018
Fascism is a popular slur largely because it’s versatile: a word with no agreed-upon meaning, so accusers can use whatever definition works to hit their intended target. Often, these definitions read like symptom checklists. For example:
The rejection of modernism.
The cult of action for action’s sake.
Disagreement is treason.
Fear of difference.
Appeal to social frustration. The obsession with a plot.
The enemy is both strong and weak.
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.
Contempt for the weak.
Machismo and weaponry.
Selective populism.
Newspeak that limits complex and critical reasoning.
A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions
The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it
The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external
Dread of a group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences
The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by violence if necessary
The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who is capable of incarnating the groups’ historical destiny
The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason
The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s successes
The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint
Obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood
Compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity
Mass-based party of committed nationalist militants
Works in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites
Abandons democratic liberties
Pursues goals with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints
Seeks internal cleansing and external expansion.
What’s wrong with this list-like approach to fascism? The historian Eliah Bures says it much better than I ever could:
The problem is that most of these traits exist on a sliding scale and are open to some degree of subjective interpretation. How much nationalism or manly bravado or fixation on enemies does it take? At what point does anti-intellectualism or a pitch to tradition cross over into demagoguery and irrationalist nostalgia? When does media-savvy political communication become propaganda? When does a politician impatient with critics become a soapbox tyrant contemptuous of opponents? Much is in the eye of the beholder.
Implicit in this symptom-spotting approach is that fascism is a disorder to be detected, like a psychiatrist consulting the diagnostic criteria for mental illness. But while the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is clear about the threshold of diagnosis for schizophrenia, fascism spotters who proceed with a welter of traits rarely tell us how many boxes need to be ticked before we can cry fascist.
Judging contemporary politics in terms of such lists is slippery business. The partisan-minded can always pick up the odor of fascism if they sniff hard enough. The exercise easily becomes a Rorschach test, prone to confirmation bias and other forms of “motivated reasoning”—social science lingo for all the ways humans are hardwired for tribalism and susceptible to emotion-driven thinking. As the political scientist Lilliana Mason observes of recent trends in U.S. politics, “members of both parties negatively stereotype members of the opposing party. … They view the other party as more extreme than their own, while they view their own party as not at all extreme.”
The ubiquity of the fascist label bears witness to this descent into polarization and fear-based politics.
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Reference:
“Don’t Call Donald Trump a Fascist: What it means to brand today’s right-wing leaders with the F-word—and why you probably shouldn’t.” Eliah Bures/Foreign Policy November 2, 2019