Commentary
President Joe Biden crossed a line of sorts last week when he characterized the philosophy of Donald Trump and his supporters as “semi-fascism.”
“Fascism,” of course, is the verbal f-bomb of politics. As it’s most commonly used today, it’s an inflammatory insult, a rhetorical flame-thrower’s delight. It’s a virtual knee to the groin, a condemnatory epithet, the ultimate slur, shorthand for “You are a subhuman cretin who is beneath contempt.”
The word “fascism” once had a reasonably objective definition (more on that below) but it has been used so often as an emotive vilification that few people have a clear sense of what fascism originally meant. In his comprehensive description of the sadistic labor camps in the USSR, “The Gulag Archipelago,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn explained the historical corruption of the word….