F Is for Fascism

CBC called the other day for an interview about the apparent rise in swearing in politics. The pitch: Why are American politicians using more swear words than Canadian politicians?

The invite came as I was reading reports of nearly naked children being dragged out of their beds in Chicago and zip-tied on the pavement. I didn’t call the host back, although I did find it somewhat funny that they wanted me to opine about swearing.

The fact is, I have become persona non grata on the evening political shows since I started dropping f-bombs on a regular basis. The f-bomb I use is fascism. And that is something that still seems to make our journalists squeamish. It’s not a word that you’re supposed to use in polite company.

Remember back to the seemingly simple days of 1990, when Mike Godwin made the case that whenever a political debate on “bulletin boards” became acrimonious, one side would eventually accuse the other side of being fascist? Godwin’s Law states that whoever makes this overstep loses the debate. Calling someone a fascist is not something we do in polite company.

But what if one side is fascist? And what if the fascist doesn’t have a shaved head or a grey uniform? Would we recognize it? Would we know how to call it out?

Look at how quickly the Anti-Defamation League, the prominent Jewish advocacy group against antisemitism, jumped to the defence of Elon Musk’s fascist salute at the 2025 inauguration? The ADL said it wasn’t really a fascist salute, just an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.”

Modern fascists are strutting around in broad daylight because they know that the word is so historically explosive that well-meaning people are wary of making the connection to real-life modern examples.

From the earliest days of the new Trump regime, I have been using the word fascist. But this is not the fascism of Mussolini, Hitler or Pinochet. Instead, it’s a hybrid of authoritarianism and hucksterism mixed with the junk symbols of disposable culture.

It is deliberately ridiculous, which makes it more dangerous.

To make sense of the dangerous state of modern authoritarianism, it is necessary to look at some of the variants of fascist ideology. There is the traditional “Nazi” model. There is a 21st-century hybrid known as “Spin Dictators,” and there is the MAGA-type fascism that is dominant in the United States.

In their Book Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman write:

“Toward the end of the [20t] century something changed. Strongmen around the world started turning up to meetings in conservative suits instead of military uniforms. Most stopped executing their opponents in front of packed football stadiums… These new dictators hired pollsters and political consultants, staged call-in shows and sent their children to study at universities in the West… They did not loosen their grip over the population – far from it, they worked to design more effective instruments of control. But they did so while playing the part of democrats.”

Spin Dictators includes the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong. Vladimir Putin could be seen as part of this continuum, although he also fits the epitome of the new geopolitical gangster politics.

But let’s look at the similarities and differences between traditional fascism and MAGA.

The differences are obvious. The fascist economy was a command economy for the state with an overt military objective. MAGA economics is grift, kickbacks and excess. More like the Russian kleptocracy than the economy of Albert Speer.

Historian Richard Evans notes that an important but often overlooked feature of the Nazi economy was its focus on protecting the middle class with stable prices and providing some measure of luxury to the working class. It was all about ensuring loyalty to the war effort. MAGA offers nothing to its voters other than economic insecurity tempered with the promise to beat down on those who are lower on the economic rung.

Traditional fascism was the Leni Riefenstahl image of the people as a mass of uniforms, marching, saluting. The individual was nothing, and the party, the people, the race was where one obtained one’s sense of place. MAGA, on the other hand, succeeds by making people feel isolated, distracted, and overwhelmed.

Traditional fascism held to propaganda and the need for people to internalize the slogans of the party. MAGA runs on chaos, disorientation and rage.

Clearly, two different beasts. Right?

Now consider the similarities. The cult of leader. The need for scapegoats. The subservience of the rule of law to power that is arbitrary and abusive. The targeting of political enemies. The establishment of concentration camps and arbitrary detention. Cruelty as public spectacle.

I wrote in a previous Substack about how Trump has imitated Hitler’s use of the Big Lie. In an upcoming piece, I will dig deeper into the frightening rise of the surveillance state targeting enemies. Hitler relied on the gossip mill that fed the Gestapo. Trump has the power of Palantir on his side.

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Another key issue is the treatment of women.

The war against women’s rights was key to the Nazi rise to power. They launched a full-on culture war against the Weimar era, which had seen a significant increase in the independence of German women. The Nazis railed against the changing hairstyles, dance crazes and the growing economic independence of women.

In the book Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, Harald Jahner writes that some Germans believed that the changing status of European women was more disruptive to society than the wars and economic upheavals.

The Far right exploited the unease and insecurity of a shifting patriarchal culture, especially as economic hardship upended the security of young men. The Nazis moved quickly to enforce a new gender “balance” with women relegated to the role of maidens or hausfrau.

We see a similar trend today with open misogyny, young men “dropping out” of notions of relationships and shifting to online right-wing forums.

One of the key objectives of MAGA was overturning Roe v Wade, with Republican governors imposing increasingly restrictive laws against women’s reproductive rights. This came as they promote the false symbol of the “trad” wife — the ideal wife/mother in a restored patriarchal family image that has long since shifted.

But there are differences as well. Some of the more notorious and cruel faces of MAGA America are the Botox beauties spewing hate. Kristi Noem has taken on the enforcer role that, in a previous fascist incarnation, would have been a man in black military uniform.

Botox and baseball caps may be symbols of a modern fascist aesthetic, but the impact is the same as with previous jackboots and black hats.

I will continue to document the dangers and the shifting trends of the authoritarian playbook that we are witnessing. And I will also keep dropping the f-bomb.

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