Yes, We Should Use the Fucking F-Word

We're facing a fascist movement. We need to say so to fight it.

You can find an index of all my substack posts on fascism here.

Is the GOP fascist? That’s a topic of much debate. But lurking behind it is another in some ways more urgent question. Even if the GOP is fascist, should we say so?

Obviously the two questions are intertwined. If the GOP is fascist, saying so is true, and there’s a moral and I think tactical value to saying the truth in politics. By the same token, if the GOP is empirically not fascist, saying so would be false, and we should generally avoid saying false things.

However, motivated reasoning being what it is, and political categories being as amorphous as they can be, whether you think the GOP is fascist often has a lot to do with whether you think using the term “fascist” to describe fellow Americans is politically helpful or not. The tactical question is logically secondary to the empirical one, but as far as motivations go, it often drives the factual discussion.

So I thought it was worth briefly surveying the main political/tactical arguments against the use of fascism, and explaining why I don’t think they’re very convincing.

The Centrist Argument For Not Saying the F-word

Centrists, leftists, and conservatives don’t want to say “fascist” for different reasons, depending on their particular political projects. I’ll take each in turn.

Shadi Hamid, who I discussed last week, is probably the leading “don’t say fascist” centrist. He provided a brief but fairly clear discussion of his objections to the term in a blog post last August.

Of course, he starts with some throat clearing about how “fascism” as a term means nothing. But the heart of the matter is this (quoting at some length):

My main objection is straightforward. When you say the sort of thing that Biden said, you are effectively saying that tens of millions of Trump supporters are fascists (or, more precisely, semi-fascists.) Sometimes, I know that something I'm about to say [ie, it’s bad to call Trump supporters fascists] will be controversial, but for whatever reason I decide that it’s worth saying.

But this time, that thought didn’t even occur to me. I thought what I was saying was relatively banal and innocuous, especially after the disaster of Hillary Clinton calling a big chunk of Trump supporters “deplorables” in the Before Trump Was President Era…

My issue is this, and it colors much of my work in ways that may not seem immediately obvious: If words are meant to have meaning, then to say that tens of millions of supporters of the other party—the only other party—are fascists, fascistic, or semi-fascistic is to use the language of national emergency. To believe that your opponents are an existential threat to everything you hold dear is to transform them from adversaries into enemies. Once you start employing the language of existential threat, it becomes all the more easy to justify taking extraordinary action to suppress the threat.

There are a few contradictory arguments tangled up there. First, Hamid is worried that calling Trump supporters fascists will lead to Republican victories. Second, he’s worried that calling Republicans fascists will lead Democrats to crush Republicans too harshly.

There’s little evidence that Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment had much effect on the election one way or the other. And in fact, as people have become more comfortable calling Trump’s movement fascist, the Republicans haven’t exactly capitalized on their 2016 victory. On the contrary, they lost in 2018, 2020, and 2022. If that’s the result of calling Republicans fascist, we should keep doing it, it seems like.

Similarly, Hamid’s argument that calling Republicans “fascist” will lead to some sort of sweeping restrictions on Republican liberty hasn’t been born out. US reaction to the January 6 insurrection has been slow and tepid in comparison to Brazil’s, for example. The Democrats have been very cautious about prosecuting Trump for his numerous egregious crimes; the first indictment for campaign violations in 2016 are only being handed down (maybe) this week, 7 years later. Red states are launching an unprecedented effort to disenfranchise whole communities who vote for Democrats; there’s no corresponding blue state effort to disenfranchise Republicans.   

Hamid’s warnings don’t seem to have any relationship to the political landscape as it actually exists. Republicans aren’t empowered by being called “fascist.” Democrats aren’t using the term as an excuse to target Republican voters or politicians, even though Republicans are in fact targeting them.

What’s left to Hamid’s argument is just vague bleating. How can millions of Americans be fascist?! Well, millions of Germans were fascist. Fascism is by most definitions a mass movement. “Fascism can’t be popular!” is an exceedingly confused position, to put it mildly.   

The Left Argument for Not Saying the F-word

Hamid’s centrist argument against saying “fascism” is based in the idea that you should never be mean to anyone. Left arguments in contrast usually suggest that the term “fascist” leads us to be mean to the wrong people, or at least mean to people in the wrong order.

Historian Daniel Bessner provides an example with a long review of Bruce Kucklick’s Fascism Comes to America in the New Republic. I plan to read and write about Kucklick’s book sometime in the future, but I think Bessner’s argument stands by itself. Certainly, it’s more considered and informed than Hamid’s.

I think the core of Bessner’s argument against using the term fascism is here:

[in the 1940s] American governance had begun to be defined by a novel approach to politics dubbed “welfare liberalism,” whose proponents positioned themselves against “fascism on the right and communism on the left.”

Bessner elaborates on that point later:

To my mind, the major reason fascism talk has lately reached a crescendo is that, for the first time in almost a century, liberalism finds itself in crisis. The utopian promises made in the 1990s and 2000s, when liberals averred that we were at “the end of history,” have not come true. The economy has collapsed multiple times. Inequality has increased. U.S. attempts to promote “democracy” abroad have failed as Eastern Europe, once the site of liberalism’s greatest triumph, has lurched to the right. Bernie Sanders has reinvigorated Americans’ interest in social democracy. And the loutish Trump’s victory indicated that many Americans are tired of adhering to liberal norms of engagement and exchange. Liberalism is weaker than it has been since the Great Depression.

Bessner argues at length about whether the term “fascism” can meaningfully be applied to the American context. But I think his objection pragmatically comes down to the worry that the term “fascism” distracts us from the crisis of neoliberalism. How, he asks, do images of “brown-shirted thugs beating down doors and black-shirted psychopaths running death camps” help us to confront our own problems of inequality and rampant capitalist exploitation? Trump, in his view, is a symptom of liberalism’s failure, rather than an example of a dangerous new (or old) ideological strand.

Bessner does acknowledge, a little nervously, that Angela Davis used the term “fascism” to describe American imperialism and the American prison system. But he implies that she was adopting the nomenclature tactically, rather than because she actually thought that the American prison system was fascist. He concludes, “There are manifold homegrown American phenomena that shaped the past for the worse. We hardly need to import a term with a foreign valence to explain (and thus implicitly detach ourselves from) that history.” American racism, and, especially, American liberal capitalism, are particularly American phenomenon; linking them to European fascism is a distraction which makes it harder to fight the real dangers of neoliberalism.

The Conservative Argument for Not Saying the F-word

Bessner is skeptical that the term “fascism” provides any real traction against the right. “It seems to me that there are likely more meaningful ways to rally one’s side against reaction that are centered less on abstract concepts and more on promising, and giving, people money and benefits,” he insists. He uses as an example John Fetterman’s Senate campaign in Pennsylvania—an odd choice since Fetterman’s campaign was undoubtedly boosted by the parallel governor’s contest, in which Republican Doug Mastriano was credibly and closely linked to white nationalists, and ran an openly antisemitic campaign against his Jewish opponent Josh Shapiro. In fact, Shapiro beat Mastriano 56.5% to 41.7%, while Fetterman only won by 51.2% to 46.3%. There’s no one reason for that (Shapiro’s incumbency probably helped). But it’s hard to look at Pennsylvania and argue that credibly labeling your opponent a fascist is bad strategy.

Right-wing commenters are fully aware of that. National Review has published multiple articles arguing with earnest desperation that the left should stop calling people on the right fascists already. The motivation here is clear enough: contra Bessner, the right is concerned that being associated with fascism delegitimizes them, and they don’t like it. For those on the left, in my view, that’s an argument to keep using the term when it applies.

The Academic Argument for Not Saying the F-Word

Academics are essentially paid to quibble, and when you ask academics about whether Trump is fascist…well, they quibble. Vox rounded up a number of experts for a 2020 article, most of whom were leery of calling Trump a fascist. Robert Paxton, the most respected scholar of fascism, said he didn’t think Trump qualified—though he changed his mind following the January 6 coup attempt. Sheri Berman argues that calling Trump a fascist gives him “too much credit.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat acknowledges that Trump used fascist tactics but argues the “political culture” that formed him was not fascist. And so forth.

I think it’s important to draw distinctions between Trump and the Nazis; strategically, you need to understand how this era is different than others as well as how it’s the same. I also think, though, that focusing only on differences prevents us from learning from the past, or from using it usefully to address contemporary arguments and problems.

Fascism is an important, much discussed, and much thought about term because fascist movements within the lifetime of many people led to the worst genocide, and the most destructive war, in history. People use “fascism” to mean “political evil” for the pretty straightforward reason that fascism was responsible for almost unimaginable political evil.

Why We Should Say “Fascism”

It’s certainly true that “fascism” has been used as an insult and is sometimes used in ridiculous and counterproductive ways—most notably by elaborately bad faith conservative writers like Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D’Souza. But just because a term has been misused doesn’t necessarily mean it should be abandoned.

Most definitions of fascism—like Paxton’s and Jason Stanley’s—include a lot of detail, but aren’t that complicated in essence. Fascism is an authoritarian political movement rooted in ethnonationlist purity which targets designated outgroups for extreme violence up to and including genocide. That’s an understanding of fascism which is both empirically sound (imo) and which is broadly understood. When most people hear “fascism” they think about authoritarianism, racism, and violence deployed in the name of racialized superiority.

When people say Trump is a fascist, they don’t lack nuance. They’re very reasonably reacting to his authoritarian actions which are frequently deployed in the name of ethnonationalist purity and violent attacks on out groups. The core of his campaign in 2016 was demonizing immigrants and promising to build a giant wall to keep them out. He then established concentration camps at the border.

Why call that fascist? Well, first of all, because it is. Contra Bessner, understanding US history as a long exercise in fascist logics helps to highlight the genocidal potential of America’s right wing rhetoric. It also underlines the link between authoritarian policies and racism, not just as a matter of scapegoating and distraction, but as an intertwined ethos and tactic. Disenfranchisement of marginalized people is both the means of authoritarianism and the goal. Dehumanization is the excuse and the point of violence. We’re used to thinking about that when we talk about Hitler. We should be much more accustomed to talking about it in terms of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, and our current law and order obsessions.

“Neither climate change, nor inequality, nor structural racism, nor the general hopelessness that has permeated American society will be defeated in ways that resemble the Allies’ defeat of fascism,” Bessner says. Okay. But what about, say, fascist street gangs terrorizing queer people? What about the fascist gangs we call the police shooting Black people? What about fascist propagandists like Tucker Carlson targeting people on the left for terrorist violence? Antifascist solidarity isn’t the solution to everything. But it’s an important tactic for rallying against and confronting fascist tactics and fascist violence.

Hamid dislikes the term fascism because it names enemies as evil; he would like a political landscape stripped of its moral connotations so as to enable less anger and more compromise. But if you are actually dealing with evil, refusing to name it as such is likely to leave you unprepared. More, it’s hugely demobilizing and disheartening for marginalized people watching fascists torch their health care, rob them of bodily autonomy, disenfranchise them, and in some cases outright murder them.

History is complicated; language is imperfect. But people have been using “fascism” to describe the threat we face because the threat we face is reasonably described as fascist. We should say so because it’s true, because doing so builds solidarity, and because truth and solidarity are two things that fascists loathe.

You can find an index of all my substack posts on fascism here.