How do you know if your politics are behind the times?

[Norgy]

Nein!!! 

[HVC]

Yelling out in German may not dissuade people from calling you a Nazi, just saying

[Neil]

I was recently called a fascist, so I am either doing my job or have become what I hate.

I wouldn't worry about that.  'Fascist' is the new 'racist', a blanket term used by stupid people to try and terminate any kind of thought.  And similarly, it creates a problem because there are actual fascists who are using the comfortableness with the term that the overuse has engendered. 

[Valmy]

I was recently called a fascist, so I am either doing my job or have become what I hate.

I wouldn't worry about that.  'Fascist' is the new 'racist', a blanket term used by stupid people to try and terminate any kind of thought.  And similarly, it creates a problem because there are actual fascists who are using the comfortableness with the term that the overuse has engendered. 

Yeah. I went from laughing at people calling Bush Hitler to seeing actual fascists coming into power. I don't know if it created the problem, but it couldn't have helped.

[Norgy]

I'd say we've, in media language, used all of the big type set, and when actual fascism, communism or any -ism rears its ugly head, we're a bit stuck.
Like one editor said on a course I was in, if a royal wedding can use that kind of type, what are we left with when war comes? We're simply diluting the language. Not every little incident is "shocking" and not every local is "fuming".

And I agree.
We do dilute the language.
If everyone to the right of me is a "fascist", I have an issue with finding the right label. Not them.
(And type in this context is the old-fashioned, soon to be retired paper version of the news. Dad was a typesetter, and the paper he worked for was the first in Norway to go for tabloid format. Cost them a ton of money, and they also rebranded their logo to SV. In Norway, SV is the left wing, far left in many instances, and dad's paper was the voice of the right in a county almost owned by Labour. It could've gone better)

[Josquius]

I really don't see this everyone I don't like is a fascist thing in the wild. Not this side of Bush-Hitler anyway. Very noughties edgy teen sort of language.

What I do see all the bloody time though is far right folks so eager to hear the word fascist they often jump the gun and scream you just call everyone you don't like a fascist before it has even been said.
We definitely are in a situation where it is hard to call a spade a spade.

[Norgy]

I am not saying there are not fascists around. There are plenty.
But the tag does not have any bite anymore.

Meh, so she's a fascist, let's make her prime minister, said Italy.

[grumbler]

Yelling out in German may not dissuade people from calling you a Nazi, just saying

I think that that was the joke.

[Sheilbh]

And I agree.
We do dilute the language.
If everyone to the right of me is a "fascist", I have an issue with finding the right label. Not them.
(And type in this context is the old-fashioned, soon to be retired paper version of the news. Dad was a typesetter, and the paper he worked for was the first in Norway to go for tabloid format. Cost them a ton of money, and they also rebranded their logo to SV. In Norway, SV is the left wing, far left in many instances, and dad's paper was the voice of the right in a county almost owned by Labour. It could've gone better)

I totally agree. I'd also slightly add that I think a non-trivial cost of the "fascism" discourse has been the amount of energy and time spent debating it by smart people. I'd add that I also think we have watered it down with not just the BusHitler but also the "Islamo-fascism". I also always think about Orwell including it in the "meaningless words" section of Politics and the English Language in part on these grounds.

I've not read his book on Christianity but I think there is something to Tom Holland's suggestion that in common discourse, when we talk about Hitler and Nazism and Fascism in part we are talking about the diabolical. I think at that level it is basically talking about evil. That's obviously really difficult and different for, say, scholars of fascism who have to talk about it as a practice and a reality. Or in terms of applying that analysis to now - and also this is where I do exactly what I think is a waste of time - I do think there is something specific and historically contingent about fascism and the inter-war period.

But the tag does not have any bite anymore.

In Europe, I think it's also the case that, generally, the radical and far right have become more disciplined. In Britain in the past leading National Front or BNP figures had a habit of dressing up in Nazi uniforms in their spare time, or approvingly quoting Hitler. But I think that's true across Europe - in part because there is more distance from the war so there is less temptation to "honour" fallen comrades or maintain links with those veterans and collaborators' associations. Or, as in Italy, that has shifted to militants who were killed in street violence in the post-war.

The far right tends to do that a little less nowadays. I think in Britain a really important part of Farage's success is exactly that he doesn't take a "no enemies to the right" approach. He refused to ever sit with Le PEn in the European Parliament because of how that would be interpreted in the UK, he refuses to allow Tommy Robinson into the party or associate with him (which cause Steve Bannon and Elon Musk to call him a "metropolitan elite liberal"). It would be easier if he was less canny on that side of things.

Meh, so she's a fascist, let's make her prime minister, said Italy.

Yeah I find Meloni extraordinary. Both how she's been normalised at a European and international level. In Europe because she doesn't challenge the Eurozone's fiscal order in the way, say, Syriza or a left-wing government (or Berlusconi) would - and internationally because she's a strong backer of Ukraine.

This despite the fact that she's from an explicitly post-fascist party founded by politicians who had served in the Salo Republic. A party that initially actually refused politicians membership if they hadn't served in Salo (theory being: any type of squishy non-Fascist could have worked with Mussolini pre-43; it's only the ones who stuck with him after 43 who were true to the fascist cause). And I'd add that she's from a working class district in Rome - at the age of 15 she walks into the local office of the Italian Social Movement and signs up to their youth wing of militants. In that world the post-fascists in Italy have split many times (largely over the various relationships with Berlusconi/accommodations with the centre for power) - at every split Meloni has stuck with the more radical element.

And now they've triumphed. In all honesty I think she's the most dangerous politician in Europe - in part precisely because the EU and rest of the West have been able to accommodate her. She's the model and I think we should be thinking now about what the EU especially looks like with a significant far-right presence (with France and Italy going to the polls in 2027 and, on current polling, likely to return a RN President and a stronger majority for Meloni) - in part because I think as long as you don't threaten the Euro/fiscal rules or make waves on Ukraine you will be at the table.

I think it also reflects a slight flattening of analysis. Some parties of the far-right in Europe have bee very susceptible to Russia - but often they are parties that have always been anti-American and it's simply a continuation of that aspect of their tradition. The Italian post-fascist parties were not anti-American. They were Atlanticist, anti-Bolshevik and very tied into the Operation Gladio and P2 networks. Being anti-Russia now is simply a continuation of that heritage.

[Norgy]

The MSI's history certainly is interesting. Rodolfo Graziani was made a figurehead, although he was more of an apolitical, albeit ardent nationalist than the typical fascist.

In Sweden, Per Engdahl's "New Swedish Movement" morphed into what today is the Sweden Democrats, a party I have a hard time placing anywhere on the political scale except "anti-immigration until we die".