https://www.frontpagemag.com/fascists-all-the-way-down/
In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”
Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”
As the word’s use by progressives and leftists––at this point synonyms for “Democrats”––have shown for decades, their understanding of conservatism’s principles and tenets is limited to the infinite regression of “fascists all the way down.” In this election season, they are binging 24/7 on “fascists” with plenty of “Hitlers” thrown in to ratchet up the evil quotient with evocations of genocide and the horrors of the death camps.
The problem is not just the blatant abuse of history, truth, and language, which since ancient Athens has been a habit typical of representative governments that give widely diverse citizens freedom of speech. The more pertinent and dangerous point about this misuse of “fascist” as a political smear is that it obscures how much American progressivism has in common with historical fascism––an oversight made worse by the left’s assumption that conservativism and capitalism are ideologically and organically fascist, and thus profoundly more unjust and dangerous than socialism and other forms of statism.
In reality, as Jonah Goldberg explained in his 2008 book Liberal Fascism, fascism is a phenomenon of the left, not the right––an “inconvenient truth,” Goldberg writes, “if ever there was one.”