Americans Have Lost Sight of What <em>Fascism</em> Means

Jeong went further than most in drawing an equivalency between China and Trump’s America. Still, the Chinese regime does tend to garner more respect and deference among a certain kind of American observer than the Trump administration does. China, if one puts human-rights abuses aside, can seem tantalizingly efficient—a technocrat’s dream paradise, where unelected leaders “get things done.” Some of this fascination with the Chinese miracle was on display in a 2018 Times article with the suggestive headline “The American Dream Is Alive. In China.” Its authors took at face value polling that the Chinese are now “among the most optimistic people in the world—much more so than Americans and Europeans.” Since then, China’s seemingly effective response to COVID-19 has only made American incompetence starker.

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These developments, some of them quite recent, conspire to China’s advantage. After all, Trump is a greater threat to the American self-conception than China is. The dislike and even hatred directed toward the Trump administration is partly born of the gap between expectation and reality, one that has widened perilously over the course of the past four years. Americans believe that they can, and should, be better. Few have any such expectations about China’s morality or inherent goodness. Many feel a sense of futility that nothing much can be done.

But this is no justification for twisting the meaning of words such as fascist beyond recognition. Doing so has been a long-standing practice. As George Orwell wrote in 1944, “I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” But as citizens of a country apart, across an ocean, Americans were spared at least some of this lexiconic plasticity—until now.

A world where a Republican senator in a democracy—even a flawed democracy—is deemed fascist and therefore beyond the bounds of respectable discussion, while actual authoritarians, or worse, are free to propagate their views with little public censure is a world that is upside down. Words should mean something, and if Americans insist on instrumentalizing them for political objectives, however just, then journalists and analysts will no longer have the language to describe the worst threats from the worst actors.

What the Chinese Communist Party is doing is not unspeakable. It can and should be spoken about, however difficult that may be. Moral clarity requires us to seek both accuracy and proportion. Anything less does a disservice to those who have actually struggled, fought, and died against fascism. If Americans, even for just a moment, could look beyond Trump, they might realize that another world—one where fascism is a living, breathing thing—awaits them.

Shadi Hamid is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a founding editor of Wisdom of Crowds. He is the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World and Temptations of Power.