When Everything Is Fascism, Nothing Is

If authoritarianism is the real concern, stop reading politicians’ minds and start measuring what they actually want government to do.

If I hear that America is sliding into fascism one more time, I’m going to puke.

Maybe I’m just hopelessly old-fashioned, but I still believe words are supposed to mean things. Fascism is a real thing. It has a history, an ideology, identifiable characteristics and some exceptionally ugly examples from the twentieth century. It does not simply mean that the president said something obnoxious, enforced a law you dislike, criticized a newspaper, deported someone, imposed a tariff, fired a bureaucrat or exercised an executive power differently than the last guy did.

Yet here we are.

“Fascism” has become less a political classification than a particularly nasty synonym for “authoritarian,” and authoritarian increasingly means “someone on the other political team using government power in a way I don’t like.”

When everything is fascism, nothing is.

That is not an argument that fascism is meaningless. Quite the opposite. It is an argument that a useful word has been abused to the point that its use in contemporary American politics often tells us more about the person saying it than the person being described.

The accusation against Donald Trump is particularly revealing because so much of the case rests not upon an objective description of a political system but upon interpretations of what Trump says and predictions about what he might eventually do. He attacks judges and newspapers. He calls people enemies. He talks incessantly about America and American interests. He wants immigration laws aggressively enforced. He pushes presidential authority as far as he thinks the law permits, just like his predecessors did.

From this collection of facts comes a remarkable progression of reasoning. Trump says things associated in someone’s mind with authoritarian leaders. Therefore Trump thinks like an authoritarian and he intends to become an authoritarian. So, America is becoming authoritarian. Somewhere along the way, “authoritarian” becomes “fascist,” and suddenly Mussolini is lurking behind the Resolute desk.

That is a lot of inference masquerading as evidence.

It becomes even more problematic when we remember that executive aggression did not begin on January 20, 2017. Barack Obama famously said he had a “pen and a phone” when Congress would not give him what he wanted. His administration used executive discretion to reshape immigration enforcement. Joe Biden attempted enormously consequential policy changes through executive authority, including student loan cancellation, only to have the Supreme Court tell him he lacked the authority he claimed. Both administrations were accused of weaponizing federal institutions against political opponents, fairly in some cases and unfairly in others.

Trump himself was investigated, surveilled, impeached twice, prosecuted by federal and state authorities, removed from a state presidential ballot until the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision, and subjected to legal theories that his supporters understandably regarded as politically motivated.

None of that proves Obama or Biden was a fascist. It proves something much less exciting and much more important: the American presidency has accumulated enormous power, and Americans have developed an astonishing ability to discover the dangers of executive authority approximately five minutes after the other party takes control of it.

If authoritarianism is what actually concerns us, perhaps we should stop looking for black shirts and start measuring something we can measure. Here’s an idea, how about we pay attention to what people say they are going to do and objectively judge what they have done? Sound good? That test produces a rather different picture from the one presented in most discussions of “fascism.”

Consider the Democratic Socialists of America.

There is no need to decipher secret hand signals, analyze dog whistles, read smoke signals, or hire a panel of cable-news psychologists to tell us what DSA members secretly believe. They have a website. They publish a program. They do interviews on FOX News.

The DSA openly advocates replacing capitalism with socialism and transferring substantial economic power from private ownership to collective control. Its political program calls for abolishing the United States Senate and Electoral College, replacing the presidency with an executive chosen by and subordinate to Congress, replacing the Supreme Court with a judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress, and bringing major corporations and important industries under public ownership.

I am not claiming that makes every DSA member a Stalinist or that the organization proposes loading political opponents onto trains. It explicitly describes its project as democratic socialism and rejects authoritarian socialism. Some of its proposed constitutional changes could even be accomplished legally through the amendment process.

But that misses the point.

I do not have to speculate about whether DSA wants to fundamentally remake the American constitutional order. They tell me they do and they have the Democrat Party by the short and curlies.

That is an important difference.

The Constitution is deliberately frustrating. That is one of its greatest virtues. It divides power precisely because the Founders understood something about human beings that utopians perpetually forget: people do not become wiser, kinder or less self-interested when handed political authority.

The Senate frustrates majorities. The Electoral College frustrates national majorities. The presidency frustrates Congress. Congress frustrates presidents. Courts frustrate both. States frustrate Washington. Individual rights frustrate everybody.

It is supposed to work that way, inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. It gives the nation time to take a breath before taking a leap.

Our constitutional system begins with distrust of concentrated power. Socialist political philosophy begins from a very different premise because achieving collective economic outcomes necessarily requires somebody to possess sufficient authority to produce those outcomes. You cannot collectively control resources, production and distribution without a mechanism capable of telling individuals what they may own, produce, sell, buy or retain.

That doesn’t automatically produce Stalin. It does create a question that deserves considerably more attention than whether Donald Trump used an adjective reminiscent of Mussolini.

Who controls the controllers?

This is why I find our national obsession with fascism increasingly unserious. We have turned political analysis into a game of psychological interpretation. Trump’s words are examined for evidence of what he secretly intends to do tomorrow while explicit proposals to dismantle or subordinate institutions limiting political power are treated as ordinary policy disagreements because the people proposing them use the word “democratic” before “socialist.”

Maybe we should reverse the process.

Stop telling me:

• What you think politicians secretly believe. Tell me what powers they claim and why that is different from prior presidents.

• Somebody “sounds authoritarian.” Show me what restraints on governmental power he wants removed.

• What Trump might someday do and apply the same scrutiny to what every political movement openly says it intends to do.

And for heaven’s sake, stop calling everything fascism.

There are perfectly adequate words for unconstitutional, abusive, illiberal, authoritarian, dishonest, corrupt, stupid and dangerous. They don’t all mean the same thing, which is precisely why we have different words for them.

The Constitution also gives us a remarkably simple test that requires none of these ideological labels. Just ask who has the power, where did it originate, what are its limits, and what happens if it is abused?

Those simple questions don’t care whether the president is Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Barack Obama. They don’t care whether the politician calls himself a Republican, Democrat, democratic socialist or something else entirely. They require neither mind-reading nor historical cosplay.

The questions require evidence and if the evidence someday demonstrates that the American right is attempting to dismantle constitutional government, I’ll call it what the evidence supports. If the evidence demonstrates that the American left is doing it, the standard cannot suddenly change because its intentions are supposedly benevolent.

That is the whole point of constitutional government.