Fascism all the way down
Published on 2025-01-20
Content warning: US politics
When I was a kid my parents were never explicitly against me swearing. As my father would say, the whole point of curse words was that they had a certain weight to them that other words don't—that's essentially why people feel uncomfortable using them, and why people feel uncomfortable when you use them. So the problem isn't people swearing at all; the problem was people swearing too much, or otherwise using swear words inappropriately. Inappropriate use of curse words devalued them, so when you really needed them they wouldn't carry the same weight as they otherwise would have.
I think that argument made sense to me when I was younger. I don't really agree with it anymore for a few reasons, but I do think it's a good argument.
Some people make the same argument for why we should be careful about calling things fascist—this is essentially Godwin's law:
"Godwin's law" (wikipedia.org)
And again, to an extent I think that's a good argument, but for a few reasons it doesn't do it for me anymore.
In 2016 a lot of people were talking about how Donald Trump is a bit like Hitler, and generally whether or not it's okay to compare Trump (or anyone) to Hitler was kind of in the liberal discourse. It seemed like the liberal consensus at the time was to be worried, but overall calling Trump Hitler was inappropriate, bad form, uncivil, or however they wanted to describe it. Needless to say, over the last few months those people were all vindicated when the liberal establishment flipped on its head and decided it was very much okay to call the American Republicans fascists, threats to democracy, and so on.
Obviously Trump is and always has fit squarely into the fascist narrative. More than anything it's just embarrassing that it took a lot of people so long to realize, let alone admit.
There was always a lot of fear around using the word fascist when I was a kid. Fear of diluting it, fear of using it inappropriately, being civil… To me, there's something very oppressive about that, because there's so much about our world that's fascist—that's to say, is an expression of fascism, or coming from a place of fascism—that's even further to say, obsessed with hierarchy, identity, "rebirth". It's genuinely kind of hard to talk about a lot of my experience without making reference to fascism in some way, and these days I can't help but notice things around me and think "that's fascist".
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason why most people don't recognize the things I recognize as being fascist is because it's not exactly a form of fascism that leaves them in the out group.
I guess that means I've become the feminazi your older brother warned you about. Once upon a time I would have found that humiliating. Not so much anymore. Nonetheless, I'm usually not at the top of the hill decrying the status quo as fascist, because I know that has a tendency to turn people's brains off. And, obviously, a lot of these things feature shared elements of but are not explicitly the same thing as the fascism of Nazi Germany—it's just that often times, fascism is the best word we have in our toolbox to describe the specific powers we're interacting with. You can find other ways to express it, but usually you're beating around the bush, because it's fascism all the way down.
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