“Fascism” isn’t a slur for politics we don’t like. It’s a precise word with precise meaning. And in the face of what’s happening in America today, it’s the most honest one we have.
If you know me, you know I care about words. Not as provocation or flourish, but as a matter of personal integrity. I use them to tell the truth, and it’s important to get them right. You’ll also know I’ve spent my professional life working on threats that seem unimaginable until the moment they define our world.
So I understand why people flinch when the word “fascism” enters our discourse. It feels impolite. Overheated. Maybe even a little unhinged. But that instinct to moderate, to sound sensibie and measured, is exactly the problem. It keeps us from seeing clearly what’s happening right in front of us.
For the past 18 months, I’ve been working alongside historians and scholars who’ve studied fascism across continents and generations – and with movement leaders who have lived through it and fought it in their own countries. Italy and Germany in the 1930s, yes. But also El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil. What’s striking is how consistent the pattern is.
Fascism is a right-wing authoritarian ideology with defining features academics widely agree on. The signs are depressingly familiar:
• The myth of a golden past. Fascist movements imagine the nation was once pure and powerful until outsiders weakened it. Redemption comes not through looking forward, but by turning backward.
• Hypernationalism and scapegoating. There is always an enemy within: immigrants, minorities, intellectuals, journalists, activists. The circle of blame expands until dissent itself is suspect.
• The cult of personality. Loyalty to the leader eclipses loyalty to nation or constitution. Civil servants are purged, and government becomes a tool of personal fealty. Careers rise and fall on proximity to a single figure.
• The cult of strength. Fascism worships power for its own sake. The leader promises order not through community or support, but through force. State violence is normalized, vigilantes are valorized, and brutality is recast as virtue rather than a last resort.
• Assault on the free press. Reporters are branded enemies. Propaganda floods the zone. Sometimes the state directly censors. More often it uses its unique leverage to pressure the private sector into silence dissenting voices.
• Erosion of democracy from within. Elections continue, but the field tilts. Courts are stacked. Voting rights restricted. Maps redrawn. Rules rewritten until losing is no longer a risk.
• Rigid gender roles and family hierarchies. Women’s autonomy is stripped away, LGBTQ people are criminalized or erased, and “traditional” family structures are enforced by law. Private life becomes political terrain, with gender and sexuality policed as matters of state power.
• Persecution of dissent. Opposition becomes treason. The state’s machinery – sham hearings, investigations, regulatory threats – is weaponized to intimidate and silence.
• Militarization of civic life. Civic space itself is infused with force: paramilitary cosplay as patriotism, secret police with sweeping powers, armed troops deployed into neighborhoods as a show of dominance against our own people.
• Collapse of shared reality. So much depends on splintering the information environment and shattering our shared sense of what’s happening. Public life is flooded with lies and conspiracies until people can’t agree on the most basic facts. Trapped in these pockets of unreality, even reasonable people can look straight at fascism and not see it – and conversation with them so often feels impossible.
What matters is the combination. Any democracy can show flashes of nationalism or polarization. Authoritarian states exist on the left as well as the right. But fascism is a distinct phenomenon of the far right: nationalism fused with social hierarchy, patriarchy fused with violence, democracy hollowed out while the rituals and veneer of legitimacy remain.
I get why people recoil from the word. It’s ugly, it sounds extreme. But you know what’s uglier? Pretending this isn’t happening until it’s too late to stop it. Orwell was right: sanitize the language and you sanitize the mind. Euphemism is how societies sleepwalk into tyranny.
That’s why historians tell us to be careful, and also to be clear. Avoiding the uncomfortable truth doesn’t make it less real. It just makes it harder to confront.
We cannot allow Charlie Kirk’s horrific shooting to be twisted into a reason for silence. Fascist movements seize on moments like this not to prevent violence, but to weaponize it – to twist it into political advantage, expand repression, punish dissent, tighten control. We already see the crackdowns on journalists, comedians, teachers. It’s an accelerating event that the regime knows exactly how to exploit, and believe me when I tell you that more accelerating events are coming.
This isn’t hysteria or alarmism, and it’s certainly not an incitement to violence. It’s clarity in the face of real and escalating danger.
James Baldwin, in his deep wisdom, said it best: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
It begins with the courage to call fascism by its name.
– Derek Johnson
via social media
September 19, 2025
via social media
September 19, 2025
See also the following chronologically-ordered Wild Reed posts:
• Marisa Kabas: “We’re Witnessing a Coup By an Unelected Billionaire Propped Up By a Felonious President”
• Timothy Snyder on Resisting the Oligarchs’ “Logic of Destruction”
• “This Is Essentially Viktor Orbán’s Playbook”
• “An Extremely Clever Ruse” by and for the Rich: Owen Jones on Elon Musk’s Coup
• “To Be a Rib in This Body of Our Country”
• Quote of the Day – February 21, 2025
• Ralph Nader: “We’re Heading Into the Most Serious Crisis in American History. There’s No Comparison”
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• “This Is How Democracy Unravels”
• Jason Stanley on How Fascism Works
• James Greenberg on Trumpism: “The Tactics Are Unmistakable”
• Tony Pentimalli on Trump’s “Death Warrant for Democracy”
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like”
• Peter Bloom: Quote of the Day – June 10, 2025
• “Protesting Is What Patriotism Looks Like in Public”: The “No Kings” Protests of June 14, 2025
• “No Kings”? Absolutely. But Also “No Oligarchy”
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 20, 2025
• Rep. Ro Khanna: Quote of the Day – June 24, 2025
• “This Is Fascism”
• The Declaration of Resistance
• The Choice Before Us
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2025
• How Democrats Can Start Winning Again
• Brent Molnar on the MAGA Cult and Its Intentions
• James Greenberg: “The Choices We Make Matter”
• Brent Molnar on the “Cold War in Our Own House”
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Donald Trump’s Militarization of Law Enforcement
• Jason Duchin: “It’s Here, and We Are Sleepwalking Through It”
• Marianne Williamson: “We’re Moving Into Totalitarianism”
• Garrett Graff: “America Tips Into Fascism”
• Bowing to an Idol
• Marianne Williamson on the Need for “Radical Love” in Responding to Trump’s Dismantling of Democracy
• Brent Molnar on the the Silencing of Jimmy Kimmel: “This Is What Fascism Looks Like in Practice”
• James Greenberg on the Identity Politics of MAGA
• Staying Strong in Trump’s Fascist America
• Memes of the Times – September 2025
• Jason Duchin: Quote of the Day – September 24, 2025
See also:
• Marianne Williamson on America’s “Cults of Madness”
• “The Republican Party Has Now Made It Official: They Are a Cult”
• Chauncey Devega on the Ongoing Danger of the Trump Cult
• Jeff Sharlet on the Fascist Ideology of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene
• The Republican Party in a Nutshell
• Robert Reich: Quote of the Day – April 11, 2023
• Republicans Don’t Care About American Democracy
No comments:
Post a Comment