Choose Your Words Carefully

Megan McArdle chastizes conservatives for throwing around the word “fascist” like it’s their last name:

Has clarifying the distinction between fascism and socialism really added to most peoples’ understanding of what the Obama administration is doing?  All this does is drag the specter of Hitler into the conversation.  And the problem with Hitler was not his industrial policy–I mean, okay, fine, Hitler’s industrial policy bad, right, but I could forgive him for that, you know?  The thing that really bothers me about Hitler was the genocide.  And I’m about as sure as I can be that Obama has no plans to round up millions of people, put them in camps, and find various creative ways to torture them to death.

You know, this is exactly why Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism was so problematic: in the course of trying to blame liberals for every bad thing that ever happened, Goldberg expanded the definition of fascism to the point of absurdity.  By Goldberg’s lights, anyone and anything could be accurately described as fascists.  Now, if Goldberg were some no-name hack toiling away in obscurity, this wouldn’t be a huge deal.  But the terrifying reality is that he’s a fairly prominent conservative commentator who has amassed enough intellectual credibility to be taken at least somewhat seriously.  As such, his loose definition of fascism has a significant amount of popular currency, which in turn means that more and more folks are throwing it around to describe a set of policies which – while not conservative – are certainly not fascist.  The problem is that this obscrues the extent to which there is a real fascist element in American life, and that it is something we should take seriously.  Casually using the word fascist does nothing more than make it more difficult to identify fascism if it ever rears its ugly head.

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