The F-Word

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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.

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.

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.