Note to readers with an irony deficiency: No such vaccine exists.
My father grew up in Mussolini’s Italy of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and were he alive today, he’d tell you the reason we casually throw “fascism” around with abandon is twofold: thick heads and thin skin. The F-word as it dwells in the modern collective psyche has less to do with a formal ideology than a mythology woven from lazy stereotyping calibrated for our own therapeutic use.
A confused citizenry is a sad thing. We deliberately live our lives with the moral conviction of a weathervane, then manifest shock at having lost all sense of direction. We shake a clenched fist when we can’t get our house in order, all the while still holding the sledgehammer we took to the walls.
And as we passively allow the certitudes that anchored our reality to spiral away in ever widening circles, we tell ourselves it’s not our fault and meet any hint suggesting otherwise with venomous intolerance and bullying self-righteousness.
It’s a perfect storm for the formation of irrational beliefs and the rise of dominant narratives, no matter how epistemically inaccurate, we can twist into antidotes for our powerlessness over the chaos we helped shape.
“Fascist” is not a word to be used casually, irresponsibly, unthinkingly. Yet, our boundless negligence has turned it into a systemic prêt-à-porter for projecting haughty indignation when we’re at our most petulantly insecure. Its cursory use exploded like an algorithmic supernova during the Covid pandemic, when free vaccines and streaming Netflix while sheltering at home on a government stipend proved too authoritarian for some. Ever since, we’ve been rolling it off our tongues indiscriminately to shame and blame, hurl as a generic insult at anything or anyone standing in opposition to us, or simply shut down debate whenever we can’t summon anything better than “I know you are, but what am I?”
My, how far the river of history has bent from the days of Mussolini and Hitler, cause enough for pure-wool fascists to tear off their black and brown shirts in apoplectic stupefaction. Seriously, we’re giving honest-to-goodness fascism a bad name.
This practice of perfunctorily invoking fascism whenever we are challenged with an opposing view has to stop! Fascism can rear its head all on its own, without the helping hand of unwitting accomplices in need of emotional rescuing.
For if it is true, as Heraclitus posited, that “you cannot step into the same river twice,” it stands to reason that our memories having been wiped clean measurably increases the chances of history repeating itself.
So why are we actively trivializing a dictatorial ultranationalist system of government and social order into nothing more than an off-the-rack put-down? Why are we overusing “fascism” and “fascist” to the point of meaninglessness and engineering their normalization into our everyday vernacular? Is this not precisely the kind of self-effacement authoritarianism thrives on to emerge in plain sight, or “come back under the most innocent of disguises?”1
Few, of course, will bother Googling fascism to learn what it actually stands for. Hazily articulating the concept to cover for the lack of clarity, the confusion in our lives is a crutch too irresistible to let go of. But that’s a reality distortion conversation for another day.
In the meantime, just so you know, ignorance is literally what fascism preys on. That and hiding behind the safety of the mob to misuse language cluelessly and unaccountably.
So go ahead and keep parroting fascism ad nauseam. Hey, maybe you’ll piss off my father enough to bring him back from the dead, for which you’ll have my undying gratitude. We’ll hug, we’ll cry, we’ll have a glass of his homemade wine I’ve kept since he passed. We’ll wince as it will have turned (my father abhorred sulphites), and then pour ourselves some more to toast the miracle of this moment brought to us by benightedness now so uncontainable it is reversing the laws of nature.
Until finally, drawing from the transformative power of wine and the creative wisdom it has lubricated over the centuries, this inspired thought in our hour of reckless imbecility: for every blithe utterance of fascism without a care as to its implications, an authoritative backhand.
Cheers, Dad!
Footnotes
- Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism ↩︎