In a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and political phenomena to which the label “Fascist” was being applied — to the point that he believed the word itself had become “almost entirely meaningless”. And while it conveyed little more than a term like “bully” would, “Fascist” nonetheless carried an emotional charge, a degree of opprobrium, that such an everyday word did not.

For this reason, Orwell concluded, the label should be used both precisely and sparingly: “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

During the first Trump administration, a debate broke out among historians and political philosophers as to whether what the United States was witnessing amounted to “fascism”. For some, the term was an accurate description of a political disposition and form of political expression which at once had deep roots in American history — reaching back even before the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the “America First” phenomenon in the 1930s — and enjoyed certain family resemblances with the European movements with which we ordinarily associate the word. For others, calling the Trump administration “fascist” was either premature, a form of rhetorical overreach or a misdiagnosis.

In many respects, that debate now seems quaint. For after the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol and the various forms of executive action taken by Donald Trump in his second administration — including the extortion of universities, law firms and media companies, the use of masked ICE agents to detain and “disappear” people without due process, the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of American cities, and the targeted prosecution of political adversaries — that which was merely feared has now come to pass.

But does this mean the description “fascist” should now be used freely as a way of characterising the Trump administration — the way “populism” was after 2016? Not only are there serious questions about the rhetorical efficacy of the term’s use (even if it is historically or politically accurate) or its ability to mobilise an electorate against a common democratic threat. There is also the prospect that the use of the term itself could provide a degree of licence, in the minds of some, to take matters into their own hands and engage in outright political violence.

This points to a kind of two-fold paradox involving “fascism”. On the one hand, fascism is itself a paradoxical political phenomenon in the way it holds together seemingly incommensurable impulses. As José Ortega y Gasset famously remarked in 1927:

“It asserts authoritarianism and organises rebellion … It seems to pose itself as the forge of a strong State, and uses means most conducive to its dissolution, as if it were a destructive faction or a secret society. Whichever way we approach fascism we find that it is simultaneously one thing and its contrary, it is A and not A …”

On the other hand, while the term “fascism” could accurately convey the gravity of the situation facing an advanced democracy, the very use of the term could deepen the democratic dysfunction and thereby exacerbate the political conflict. Would we be well-advised, then, to follow Orwell’s advice and use the term only ever circumspectly and not as a rhetorical weapon against our opponents?

Guest: Jason Stanley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He is the author of How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and, most recently, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.