David Neiwert has an interesting piece from the New York Times that I felt I should comment on too. I owed you all a thesis update anyway.

Fascism seems to have become this template for everything far-right these days, and overuse (as the scholars cited in the NY Times article state) de-legitimizes the word. Indeed, the article's title is "The Latest Obsenity has Seven Letters." How many curse words do you take seriously, other than their shock value. The word Fascism, and all it implies, is going down that road quick and that's not good.

To be honest, I've followed the work of various writers with great interest, and I've gone back through history to study fascism and I'm finding that using 1919 fascism doesn't quite describe what we call fascism now. I think we need a new word. The article says that at its conclusion.

"The fact that people are using the term fascist to refer to such extremely different phenomena tells you that it has lost most of its descriptive power," she said. "I think the problem is that we are dealing with all sorts of new, strange political phenomena — Osama bin Laden, Hindu nationalism in India, the Le Pen phenomenon in France, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive force — and we don't have the right words to describe these things."

(They, of course, completely miss Chrisitian fundamentalism in North America, which is very much like those phenomena above.)

All those things are fascist-like, but they're not quite fascism. However, just because they're not fascism doesn't mean we can turn our backs on them. They are all still quite dangerous and deadly. Osama still hasn't been caught, India has the bomb which is a major part of BJP policy along with having (or explotining) anti-Muslim sentiment, Le Pen's movement hates immigrants, Berlusconi is a lunatic (in my mind) and the Bush Doctrine is making noise at Iran while center-right and right-wing commentators decry any dissent to the policy at home. Dangerous times we live in.


Arthur Silber comments as well. And he has been commenting.

Matthew Yglesias comments as well, and one of his commenters just can't fathom that fascism comes from the right, which it does. Poor, poor commentor....