We’re going to have to be careful, in the short term, to actually be precise in our use of the word “fascist,” a word that describes specific approaches and aesthetics and is not coextensive with “conservative” or even “extreme conservative.” Trump absolutely was one.

But most of the GOP was only opportunistically so. Rubio, McConnell, Graham, and their ilk are not fascists. Cruz wasn’t before but might have become one. Hawley 100% is. The House GOP generally skews more fash than the Senate.

Obviously “opportunistically fascist” is still fucking terrible, and should hang around their necks forever. But fascism should remain a clear boundary that changes how leftist action unfolds—a marker of a specific kind of crisis that supercedes a lot of other concerns.

President Rubio would suck, but would suck in different ways that would demand different opposition than President Hawley or President Carlson, who would provide similar existential threats to Trump.

Do not let the word that denotes a special kind of crisis become devalued to simply refer to all conservatives. We need to still be able to sound the alarm when the next one comes.

To make a very obvious point, we have very good data on what Mitch McConnell does when he's at the functional head of his party and it's not actually fascism. He'll enable fascism as a means to that end, but absent a Trump figure, McConnell does not do fascism.

I think a lot of people are failing to appreciate the context of what I'm saying here, so let me be explicit about a premise: fascism presents an existential threat on a scale that demands setting other leftist agendas aside.

Other forms of conservatism are very bad and demand resistance, but they do not demand, for instance, the tabling of internal disagreements between socialists and anarchists until the threat is defeated. Fascism does demand that because it will exterminate both if left unchecked.

Or to put it more broadly, our consensus that it's good to punch nazis demands of us a degree of precision about what a nazi is.

Indeed many of our (entirely correct) arguments about why antifascist action has a moral right to cross lines on issues of violence and censorship depend on the fact that fascism constitutes a unique circumstance. Watering down the term in turn delegitimizes those vital arguments

Look, I agree there are a lot of circumstances where the distinction between "will sell you out to fascists" and "will proactively be a fascist" is unimportant. The last four years, for instance, it hasn't mattered. But sometimes it's a matter of literal life and death.