Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.

Maybe he's been in opposition of using the term because he's fucking fascist-lite himself. Fascist with half the calories.

I'm not sure if I've ever heard of Rauch before but this is Bari Weiss level of bullshit. Fuck opinion writers.

This is infuriating.

We’ve been calling it fascism for at least 10 years because that’s what it’s been.

We were trying to get you fucks to wake up and stop it before it was too late, and now that you’re finally willing to acknowledge it, it’s too fucking late.

Thanks for ignoring us and enabling it. You can fuck all the way off.

Serious answer:

From wiki: “Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”

I’m not a historian or anything, but I would say that until trump we haven’t really had anyone you could call a dictator. And saying we had a strong regimentation of society and the economy seems like a stretch with the exception of wartime. You could make a good argument for ww2 era USA under FDR though that also came on the back of the new deal and a relatively progressive thrust in US politics (of course many groups of people were still oppressed and marginalized though), and possibly some parts of US involvement in Vietnam. But I think realistically there are better descriptions of the US government during those times.

This comment is intended not to discount the historic atrocities and abject failings of the US government, but rather to maintain the power of the word fascism and to assert that things are in fact different at this moment, even if they’ve been bad for a lot if people for a long time.

Talk about it in the back of coffee shops, not publicly. That’s how you get the Feds on you.