The Carrot, the Stick, and the Buggy Whip: New at Reason

Is it time to dust off the word fascist for Donald Trump?

Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in the March issue of Reason:

As 2016 came to a close, dictionary makers Merriam-Webster posted a pathetic little tweet—a cry for help, really—that quickly went viral: “‘Fascism’ is still our #1 lookup. # of lookups = how we choose our Word of the Year. There’s still time to look something else up.”

Why the sudden interest? As Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination and then the presidential election, political commentators and opinionated uncles at dinner parties started tossing around this vintage 20th century political terminology with abandon. Which caused a bunch of intrepid dictionary searchers to wonder: Here at the dawning of the Trump era, does fascism mean what we think it means?

In a technical sense, the word is a pretty good descriptor for what we’ve seen of Trump’s economic policy so far. That is to say, he seems to be embracing the notion, which blossomed in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, that the business of government is best conducted where an authoritarian state dominated by a powerful strongman and the leaders of large corporations meet and decide the fate of a nation.

But in its more common use, fascism is at once too generic—it’s frequently deployed to describe any old bossy jerk, and is formally defined as “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control”—and way too specific and extreme, with its grace notes of Blackshirts, one-party rule, nationalization of industry, and violence.

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