Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to It's not. It needs a new name.

"fascism-19"?

The present-day movement rhymes with historical fascism, but I think it'd be wise to avoid using the term in any sense in which it could be taken as meant literally. That's because it's always vulnerable to the charge that the only fascists who ever lived were Mussolini's Fascists, and a (modern-day fascist) critic can pick away at all the minor differences to discredit the label. It doesn't matter that the critique is made in bad faith, it carries weight with those want to believe, and the weak-minded in general.

You, podrock and hank, devote many paragraphs to describing modern-day "fascism", and what you're describing is what political scientists and psychologists have been calling "authoritarian conservatism" since the first "WTF happened?" studies after WW2. The term has power to explain how we got here. People have expressed bafflement about how "respectable" conservatives mutated into Trumpists; but authoritarian conservatism explains how the authoritarianism was there all along (alongside the paranoia, as described in Hofstedters's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"), just waiting for a vicious demagogue to tease it out into the light. Trumpists are not an anomaly, they're an evolution. An inevitable evolution from the starting conditions of post-WW2 conservatism.

I don't know what short and catchy term describes the modern evil. It's perhaps best labelled "authoritarian ethno-nationalist conservatism", but that's unwieldy and not at all catchy (in German that's "autoritärer ethnonationalistischer Konservatismus", but I don't see how it reduces to something as catchy as "Nazi"). "Trumpist" does properly personalize it, much the way "Hitlerite" was a popular alternative to "Nazi". Maybe that's useful through the next election. Long term, well, that's for future historians to figure out. Labels are always obvious in hindsight.

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