Crying Fascism
How The F Word Lost Its Power, Even When It's Finally Relevant
The rise of Nick Fuentes following the assassination of Charlie Kirk should be a real wake-up call for progressives. College-educated urbanites in the liberal-leftist bubble had dismissed Kirk as a “fascist” when in reality he was just your typical Trump supporter. They have avoided confronting the issues on their own side for so long by dismissing their opposition as “fascist” to the point where they are utterly powerless to confront fascism when it actually arrives.
The murder of Charlie Kirk, who called race a “social construct,” and the meteoric rise of Nick Fuentes, an open white nationalist, mark a titanic zeitgeist shift that has been developing for a long time. A shift in the spirit of the age that leftists and liberals have been completely oblivious to—due to not understanding the various dynamics of far-right populism and due to being completely blind to the shifting sentiment that has been pushing people rightward in general.
They lazily dismissed Trumpism as “fascist” only to be smacked in the face with reality. What is replacing Trumpism is much closer to fascism, but people don’t care because the F-word has lost its condemnatory power. The people who lazily abused the term never bothered to understand this thing called “far right” to begin with, which they regarded as one big monolithic camp of deplorables beyond redemption.
In this article, I want to address the many issues I see in how people on the left and liberal side of things often talk about “fascism” and “right-wing” sentiments in general. In the second half, I discuss how these issues have contributed to the inability of leftists and liberals to comprehend, much less combat, the extreme political developments that have been long in the making.
To people outside of far-left circles, or those who don’t dabble in politics 24/7, some of the things I will criticize in this article might seem like absurd, terminally online tendencies that are too fringe to be relevant in the real world. Thus, it might seem like I am shadowboxing with a strawman of a type of leftist that mostly exists online. Yet, those who have paid attention to leftist spaces and dabble in political media will be familiar with the problems I am talking about, because they are very much real, and where people consume most political discourse is through online media, so there is no longer a neat separation between “the real world” and the virtual one when it comes to politics. While part of this article (the second half) is relevant for any reader interested in politics, part of it (the first half) is particularly aimed at certain sections of the political Left, which will be of special interest to the people who have been following my work.
There is a certain reflex that has become common in left-wing spaces, especially in ultra-progressive spaces. Any attempt to combine economic socialism with even modest forms of cultural conservatism, or cultural traditionalism, is instantly deemed to be “fascistic.” The word “conservative” is not scary enough. They have to jump straight to the F word, because in their limited imagination, Fascism is the only tendency that is economically left and culturally right, even though this would be a misleading oversimplification of fascism itself. This reflex is not just unfair. It is historically illiterate. It collapses distinct traditions into a single moral panic category. It ends up turning “fascism” into a vibe check rather than a serious political diagnosis.
If “socialism plus moderate cultural conservatism” is enough to trigger the fascism label, then vast portions of actually existing left politics across the world get swept into the accusation by default. Not just marginal fringe cases, but major movements, major governments, and major traditions that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Throughout history, there have been socially conservative anarchist movements, socially conservative social democrats, and socially conservative Marxist movements (if you count actually existing Marxism/Marxism-Leninism as “real Marxism”). If one’s definition of “fascistic” can casually implicate anyone who holds views they consider “reactionary”, then the definition is not doing analytic work. It is doing boundary work. It is functioning as a way of delegitimizing any left politics that refuses to subordinate itself entirely to contemporary progressive cultural sensibilities.
While the urban, educated, middle-class individuals who dominate the western left today insist on forcing everyone to conform to the latest ultra-progressive agenda, “the left” historically has never been culturally uniform, and what has been considered socially “progressive” has shifted in meaning over time. There have long been left currents that were economically egalitarian but culturally traditionalist, religious, and/or socially conservative, not just by radical-liberal standards in Western cities today, but sometimes even by the standards of their own contexts as well.
That is true of many Third World socialist projects, including the broad family of actually existing Marxism-Leninism (China, Vietnam, Korea, Soviet Union after Lenin), the liberation theology movements of Latin America. It is also true of many social democratic and socialist-nationalist experiments, from Allende to the Pink Tide governments of the 21st century (Chavismo, AMLO, Evo Morales, Lula, Rafael Correa, and more). There have also been libertarian socialist currents that were quite socially conservative, such as the rural Anarchist Puritans of the Spanish Civil War, the Tolstoyan-inspired Christian Anarchist Communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, and even the Zapatistas in Mexico that still run Chiapas to this day.
Even George Orwell resists the dogmatic categories of progressive leftism today. Orwell has been described as a kind of “Tory anarchist,” precisely because he combined strong commitments to democracy and socialism with a kind of patriotic seriousness and social traditionalism that does not fit the contemporary progressive template. This history does not prove that every fusion of socialism with cultural conservatism is good or wise. It proves something simpler: the fusion itself is not a coherent marker of fascism. It is not even close.
What Fascism Actually Is
The real problem here is definitional. Fascism is not “left economics plus social conservatism.” That is not the core of the phenomenon. Fascism is best understood as ultra-nationalism fused to an authoritarian or totalitarian state, with a political logic aimed at the centralization of power. Fascism does not merely value the nation. It treats the nation as a supreme project requiring the subordination of pluralism, civil society, and independent institutions to a unified state will. It tends to demand a party-state that claims to uniquely embody “the people,” and to justify coercion as a necessary act of national regeneration.
This is why the “socialist” component of fascism, when it exists, is deeply misleading if one hears it through the lens of democratic socialism. Fascist “socialism” is not about distributing power downward, not about workplace democracy, not about expanding popular sovereignty. It is far closer to statist collectivism, meaning that society is coordinated, directed, and disciplined by a centralized party-state that claims to act for the collective good.
In that sense, fascism has often had more in common with Marxism-Leninism in practice, minus the liquidation of capitalists, than it has in common with any democratic socialist project. That is not a claim about identical ideology, or identical moral status. It is a claim about regime logic. Centralization of power, suppression of pluralism, diminished civil liberties, and a party-state that claims the exclusive right to define and enact “the people’s interest.” And if “fascism” is to remain a meaningful category, this is where the focus must remain: on the structure of power, on regime type, and on the political logic of coercion.
Another major issue with casually throwing around the word “fascist” as an adjective for anything to the right of the latest progressive orthodoxy is that it functions to avoid actually reckoning with the ideas it opposes. “That sounds fashy” is not an argument. It becomes a shortcut that flatters one’s own righteousness while avoiding the harder task of persuasion. It does not explain why a conservative, traditionalist, or so-called “reactionary” idea is wrong. It just denounces the idea by association. Something is not a duck just because someone with a very broad idea of what a duck is thinks that it walks like a duck and quacks like one. The “walks like a duck quacks like a duck” approach to identifying Fascism is convincing to no one except those who have already bought into the dogmas at play. It’s the anti-Fascist equivalent of hysterical McCarthy-era anti-communist crusades, except that in this case, it doesn’t even work in actually stopping what it’s supposedly against. Rather, it functions more as a way for an in-group to gatekeep and police an ideological landscape.
The “Slippery Slope” Fallacy
There is another particular manifestation of the fascism accusation worth noting separately, one used by some Marxists. I’m talking about the Marxist-intellectual gatekeeper types who know a bit of the history of fascism’s emergence and myopically identify tendencies from the early 20th century and project them into the present, as if they are trying to cosplay the debates of the communist International. These particular Marxist types, compared to other lefties, have a paranoid tendency to falsely identify things as “fascistic” in a distinct way and for distinct reasons. These reasons are less common compared to the broader left-of-center space, but worth noting given that Marxists often add a veneer of sophistication to leftist attempts to dismiss any politics that don’t adhere to their rigid conceptions of the left-right distinction as something that is inherently a “slippery slope” toward fascism. They invoke historical patterns, identify a few vague characteristics that they find suspect, and then try to frame their target through guilt by association, usually on a nebulous basis.
Yet this intellectual veneer is largely a pseudo-intellectual guise for the real reasons they deploy the accusation so readily, which are to demonize and delegitimize ideological rivals within the socialist camp who have abandoned the dogmas of Marxist orthodoxy. For Marxists of this sort, the target is not simply right-wing figures. The target is other socialists, social democrats, reformists, and anyone who deviates from the main tenets of the doctrinaire Marxist worldview and threatens their claim to be the most authentic, consistent, and scientifically grounded socialist tradition. It is ideological policing within the socialist camp, exploiting the moral weight of an anti-fascist crusade to delegitimize anyone who challenges the ideological dogmas of left-right binaries. In particular, accusations of being a closeted fascist or wanting a “red-brown alliance” are used to delegitimize those who deviate from the left-liberal alliance and the unofficial unhappy marriage between communists and liberal-progressive politicians, which is rationalized in the name of a popular front against “fascism.”
The paranoid accusations rest on three specific litmus tests that have nothing to do with the actual structure of fascist regimes. First, any hint of nationalism is treated as proto-fascist, not because the person advocates ultra-nationalist dictatorship, but because Orthodox Marxists and Trotskyists reject nationalism in principle. Their goal is a stateless, classless, borderless society. They do not believe socialism is achievable within one country, and believe that “the worker has no homeland.” They view any socialist project that defines itself in national terms as a counter-revolutionary obstacle to their communist internationalist ideal of proletarian world revolution. While it may be hard to believe that these Marxists seriously believe in such a goal, they sure act as if they do when it comes to the way they use Marxist ideology to ruthlessly critique other socialists. This is the case for the “real Marxists,” of course, not the Marxist-Leninists (MLs), who often are essentially nationalist but for other countries with a red flag (nationalist “actually existing socialist” countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc) that they can fetishize at a distance.
Second, social conservatism, even moderate cultural conservatism, is assumed by many leftists to be an inherently “reactionary” tendency that is associated with fascism whenever it’s combined with socialist policies. If a socialist holds traditional views on family, religion, or culture, they are labeled a reactionary socialist or accused of harboring fascistic tendencies. But being socially conservative does not make one a fascist. It might reflect religious conviction, cultural attachment, or skepticism about certain forms of social change. None of that has anything to do with supporting dictatorship or suppressing pluralism.
Third is the charge of “class collaborationism.” Orthodox Marxists believe socialism requires liquidating the capitalist class entirely. Any project that seeks merely to reduce inequality or improve working-class conditions without abolishing the ruling class is considered betrayal. Social democrats and reformists are accused of class collaboration. And because Mussolini rejected class struggle in favor of class collaboration, the accusation slides into the language of fascism. Stalinists in the 1920s and 1930s famously called social democrats “social fascists,” particularly after the German social democratic government suppressed communist uprisings and allowed Rosa Luxemburg’s murder. That historical context mattered. The accusation today, directed at Bernie Sanders-style social democracy in stable liberal democracies, is absurd.
They will point out that Mussolini was once a Marxist and a member of the Socialist Party of Italy who broke from the Marxist camp before becoming a Fascist. He broke from the Socialist Party of Italy because he believed nationalism could mobilize people more effectively than class struggle, and because he supported Italy entering World War I. His rejection of class struggle in favor of corporatism is what distinguishes his trajectory. Yet those same features, nationalism and class collaboration, are now deployed as accusations against social democrats and moderate socialists, even though their projects bear no resemblance to the totalitarian dictatorship Mussolini eventually built.
The irony is that if one wants to identify regimes structurally resembling fascism, one should look at Marxist-Leninist states, not social democracies. The totalitarian one-party regimes established in the name of Marxism have far more in common with fascism in practice than anything represented by reformist democratic socialism. Yet this scrutiny is never applied by those wielding the fascism accusation against their rivals. This is not about identifying actual authoritarianism. It is about claiming the mantle of authentic Marxism and painting dissenters as ideologically contaminated.
The F-Word as a Substitute for Thinking
More commonly in broader left-of-center spaces in general, calling things fascist often functions as a lazy dismissal that allows people to turn off their brains and not make the effort to form a good critique of what they oppose. The structure of the move is simple: fascism is bad, therefore anything that resembles fascism, or can be framed as resembling it, must also be bad. But this is rhetorical laundering, not reasoning. It is a way of skipping the hard work of critique, persuasion, and explanation, and replacing it with a moral label that is supposed to do the thinking for you.
The problem is that this move depends on a couple of assumptions that increasingly do not hold. First, it assumes people are dumb enough to accept that “traditional” or “conservative” automatically equals “fascist.” Outside of a fairly specific left-wing bubble, most people do not believe this. They hear it and immediately recognize it as ideological language, not serious analysis.
Second, it assumes that “fascism” still functions as a universally agreed-upon political taboo. But that taboo has been weakened precisely because the term has been defined so vaguely and abused so routinely that many people no longer know what it actually means. When a word is used to describe everything, it eventually describes nothing. And when nobody can clearly define what fascism is, the moral force of the condemnation starts to decay.
This is one reason we now see a new generation that is increasingly willing to question the inherited assumption that fascism is obviously and uniquely evil. The concept has been stretched, blurred, and turned into a generic insult, and the result is predictable: opportunists and extremists can exploit the ambiguity. Emerging ideologists on the far right who espouse a politics that is actually a lot closer to fascism end up totally immune to the Fascism accusation because the F word has been so carelessly overused to a point where the punch just doesn’t land.
There is a broader pattern here that should worry anyone who actually wants to fight authoritarian politics. If you critique something lazily, you invite backlash and revisionism. We saw this with communism. If the critique is just “communism is bad,” without serious reasons, you eventually get the tankie revisionism that says: “but the Soviet Union industrialized into a superpower, people had many nice social guarantees, many old people in Eastern Europe are nostalgic for the communist period, and so on. A shallow critique creates the conditions for a shallow counter-critique. If you want an argument to penetrate, you need a sophisticated critique that people can’t shrug off as propaganda.
The same is true with fascism. If you want to persuade people that fascism is bad, you cannot rely on incantation. You have to explain why it was bad, how it functioned, what regime logic it embodied, and why its outcomes were historically catastrophic.
What Actually Makes Fascism Bad?
Most people do not condemn fascism because it had “traditional values.” They condemn it because it destroyed societies. Fascism is remembered as catastrophic because it killed millions, persecuted minorities, started wars, crushed freedoms, and drove countries to ruin. And it was able to do those things not because it held conservative cultural attitudes, but because it pursued a form of dictatorship that sought to control society at every level. So the serious questions are not cultural vibe checks. The serious questions are about the implicaitons of their political goals when taken to their logical conclusion. What regime type is being advocated? Does the movement accept democracy, pluralism, and institutional constraint, or does it treat these as decadent obstacles? Who is supposed to hold power, and through what limits? Is the national project based on race, or on civic identity? Is the program aimed at distributing power outward to people, or concentrating it upward in a new elite that claims to know what is best? That is where the diagnostic work is.
Historically, the ideologies that tried to go beyond both communism and liberal capitalism, the third position family, all ended badly due to similar reasons, even across different national contexts. Whether one is talking about forms of Fascism (Italian Fascism, Nazism, Falangism, Legionarism, etc.), or related offshoots of Third Positionism like Peronism and Ba’athism, they all shared a recurring tendency to treat democracy and liberty as illusions tied to decadent liberalism.
These movements often emerged in contexts with weak democratic traditions and fragile civil liberties, where intense instability made Bonapartist solutions plausible. That context does not excuse them. But it explains their viability. And it also helps explain why Marxism-Leninism became viable in many developing-world contexts while remaining far less viable in wealthy liberal-democratic societies. Material conditions and political traditions matter. Regime forms do not appear out of nowhere. They emerge as solutions, often catastrophic solutions, to crises in particular historical and geopolitical settings.
This brings us back to present conditions in places like the United States and Canada. There are renewed flirtations with authoritarian ideologies in the twenty-first century, on both the far left and far right. But the old one-party totalitarian projects are not likely to be viable or desirable in liberal-democratic societies that are deeply pluralistic.
Any serious socialist politics in this context would have to be democratic, not merely as a branding exercise, but because pluralism is not going away. It would have to accept coalition politics. It would have to accept institutional constraints. It would have to be contested and negotiated. If socialism ever became possible, it would be driven by contradictory coalitions, Christian or culturally conservative socialist blocs alongside progressive liberal socialist blocs, Marxists alongside social democrats, and so on. That is what politics looks like in pluralist democracies. It is messy. It is contradictory. It is coalition-driven. And it is constrained.
If You’re Worried About Authoritarianism, Look Elsewhere
If one cares about fascism, one should be looking at regime type, at centralization of power, at rejection of pluralism, at the weakening of civil liberties, at the romanticization of one-party rule, and at ideologies that justify coercion in the name of national destiny. If the concern is authoritarianism, that is where attention belongs. Because the axis is not “social conservatism versus social progressivism.” The axis is democracy versus dictatorship, pluralism versus coercion, and distributed power versus concentrated power. That is the difference between a serious political diagnosis and a moralistic label.
If you’re worried about “fascist tendencies” emerging on the left, you should be looking elsewhere. Look at the growing tendency on parts of both the far left and the far right to romanticize China as a model. I would not simply call China fascist, but it’s far closer to fascist regime logic than anything I have ever proposed: one-party dictatorship perminently integrated into virtually all aspects of the state and society, lack of checks on state power, non-existent civil liberties, crushing organized labor (prohibiting virtually all forms worker organizaiton not sponsored by the state) while disciplining capital in the name of “national interest,” plus an increasingly Han-nationalist and socially conservative civilizational story. Add the coercive treatment of ethnic minorities under “national security” pretexts, bans on gay marriage, and official or quasi-official pathologizing of transgender identity. In fact, for reasons like this, some Maoists literally call China a fascist state.
Ironically, to the surprise of many Western leftists who think the grass is greener on the other side, it’s harder to be a Maoist in communist China than it is in many Western liberal democracies. Yet some of the most famous “influencers” on the Western left unironically embrace China as a shining example of a country striving towards socialism that America should be more like. Not to mention that figures on the far right, such as Nick Fuentes, are increasingly starting to admire the same dictators that are often lionized by the Marxist-Leninist left, like Stalin, Kim Jong Un, Saddam Hussein, and Bashar al-Assad. Similarly, prominent white nationalist & third positionist figures such as Keith Woods have praised China for its ethnonationalist policies and (somewhat accurately) described it as a “textbook example of corporatism” (in the Fascist sense).
For many sensitive folks deep in the leftist bubble, any use of words like “motherland” or symbolism that plays with Christian or religious iconography is automatically registered as “fashy.” People who have advocated the use of patriotism and appropriating the American flag, Canadian Flag, or British flag for any left-wing cause have been accused of being fascist. Yet for many of these same myopic people who are so easily triggered by iconography, the hammer and sickle gets a pass despite it being a far more controversial (and outdated) symbol that is associated with regimes that killed millions of people.
So before leftists jump to dismiss any political tendencies that don’t adhere to their narrow conception of left and right as a flirtation with fascism, they should take a hard look at what’s happening on their side. You now have quite a few prominent voices on the left who will, with a straight face, call the Reform Party UK “fascist” while pointing to China as a positive example of building towards socialism in the 21st century. Leftists should also look at the loony ideas on parts of the left that have actively fed the rise of the far right reaction (not necessarily caused, but fuelled), and look at all the self-described “communists” who think a one-party nationalist dictatorship will solve all our problems.
The Boy Who Cried Fascism
There is another cost to the modern reflex of calling everything “fascist,” and it is not merely rhetorical. It is strategic, psychological, and political. When “fascism” becomes the label for any deviation from an ultra-progressive cultural template, it stops being a diagnosis and becomes a floating signifier. And like the boy who cried wolf, the more often the alarm is sounded without precision, the less seriously it is taken when something genuinely dangerous shows up. This is the first way the habit backfires: it dilutes the word. Fascism becomes a synonym for “bad person with opinions I dislike,” or “someone who is not culturally progressive enough,” rather than a term that names a specific political phenomenon: When people hear “fascist” applied to everything, they stop hearing it as a serious warning.
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
But there is a second, more corrosive effect. The abuse of the F-word becomes self-fulfilling. When people voice concerns about particular issues that many ordinary people consider quite important, but are deemed to be “right-coded’ concerns (due to those issues being ceded to the far-right as a result of leftist negligence), or espouse some right of center views that would be otherwise considered normal outside of an ultra-progressive bubble, dismissing their sentiments as “reactionary’ or “Fascistic” does not change their mind. It pushes them into oppositional identity and might make them more likely to be sympathetic to actual fascists.
If people are told they are entering fascist territory for wanting a rational immigration policy, for holding to a civic conception of citizenship, for believing in religious traditions, for being skeptical of the idea that all social change equals progress, then the accusation stops functioning as a deterrent. It becomes an invitation to stop caring about the label. People begin to say, sometimes half-jokingly and sometimes bitterly, “If I’m going to be called that anyway, why should I restrain myself? Why should I play by the rules? Why should I seek approval from people who despise me?”
This is one of the ways you end up creating the very forces you claim to fear. Constantly crying “fascism” can produce a political environment in which the term loses its stigma, its meaning, and its warning power. It also produces a politics where, instead of isolating extremists, you expand the pool of people willing to tolerate them, because they have learned to distrust the accusers more than the accused. The witch hunts might still work within the ingroup that still buys into their norms. But as the in-group shrinks and becomes more isolated from the rest of society, the accused heretic increasingly becomes seen as a courageous populist rather than a menace to society, while the accuser seems more like the conformist policeman rather than a brave anti-fascist partisan.
Meanwhile, truly authoritarian formations benefit from the confusion. When the word is smeared across everything, it becomes harder to focus public attention on real authoritarian developments: the romanticization of one-party rule, contempt for pluralism, the weakening of civil liberties, the merging of state power with a totalizing national mission, and the growth of coercive political technologies. When those things emerge, they are easier to ignore because the public has already been trained to associate “fascism” with exaggeration and hysterics. If you associate everything that sounds remotely conservative, traditionalist, patriotic, powerful, heteronormative, bold, or assertive as “fascistic”, then increasingly people who don’t know better will start to think “hmm.. Fascism doesn’t sound that bad, actually. Maybe what I was told about that Austrian painter was actually lies?” This is precisely what is currently happening with the rise of Nick Fuentes. He represents a giant rising group of people who simply don’t care anymore about any anti-Fascist taboos, because the word has lost all meaning to them. Just like how the long abuse of the “anti-semitism” charge no longer means anything to people, to the point where actual anti-semites aren’t even afraid to openly be anti-Semitic.
So if the goal is to prevent fascism, the answer is not to expand the category until it encompasses so many right-of-centre tendencies that it would essentially implicate half the population. The answer is to regain precision. To reserve the word for what it actually names. Otherwise, you end up with an impotent anti-fascist opposition that only cries but cannot warn, and a public that increasingly no longer believes the alarm, even when the wolf becomes a real threat.