Once again I’m typing to turn half thoughts (quarter? eighth?) into something closer to thoughts. I spent a while in the late 00s and early 2010s in left political milieus where there was a fair bit of energy spent thinking about fascism, what opposition to fascism meant, and how that opposition related to left projects. This means that when Trump became a serious political actor in the mid 2010s or so and lots of people started talking about fascism outside far left spaces it was an experience both energizing - in an ‘oh shit this is urgent’ way and in a ‘oh there are more of us now!’ way - and confusing, because the usage of the term changed as the usage generalized. I won’t get into the details but the three theoretical approaches to fascism that were familiar to me were the one associated with Dimitrov and the ComIntern in the 30s (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm), the Sojourner Truth Organization’s debates and discussions on the matter (http://www.sojournertruth.net/fascismintheus.html I think the piece in that collection by Noel Ignatin - later Ignatiev, of Race Traitor fame - is particularly good), and Three Way Fight (https://threewayfight.org/) I’ll add, because people sometimes point to a distinct usage of fascism among Black radicals as distinct from marxist or orthodox marxist/official Communist Party usages, that it’s my understanding that some important Black radical were themselves pretty orthodox marxists in their theoretical outlooks. The Black Panthers used Dimitrov’s understanding at least as of the late 1960s, quoting and recommending people read Dimitrov as part of their effort to build a front against fascism. As far as I can tell so did George Padmore and George Jackson.

There are important differences among these views - fascism is a term debated, so to speak, and likewise the ramifications (as in, ‘okay, it’s fascism, so the thing to do is...’) are debated. There are commonalities as well though, and my sense is that in all these understandings fascism was taken to be a politics practiced in distinct and time-specific social contexts. In this usage, there is an implied scale of analysis - fascism is a large scale phenomena that individuals participate in but it’s the larger phenomena that explain the individuals rather than the other way around. I’m agnostic about the present day usage of this theoretical approach, as I think it’s arguable that we’re not in a context like those theorized by this work, and I’m not advocating it. Mostly I’m just noting it exists, is worth knowing something about for the sake of deciding if it’s good to think with in the present (I think it is but mostly negatively, as in, according to that work, this isn’t a fascist moment, which I realize leaves a lot unanswered, a lot of work left to do and needs unaddressed). Partly I also note it just because it’s part of my own individual bewilderment - tower of babel kind of thing; we don’t speak the same language anymore.

There’s another usage of fascism which is as an analogy. There’s a somewhat flippant version of this in casual jokey usages - I remember housemates going “you fascist!” about stuff in shared housing when I was young and I’m sure I’ve said that too. There’s a classic bit in the old Young Ones comedy series where Rik calls a bank manager a fascist in a letter. In that case, he seems to have meant it but the usage was mostly a swear word.

There’s a more serious usage of the term as an analogy as well. The historian David Perry has written a column recently defending Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for calling ICE a gestapo - https://www.startribune.com/walz-anne-frank-comment-holocaust-museum-nazis/601575968. I’m inclined to say Walz was mostly using the term as a swear word too, though Perry makes the case for treating it more seriously than that, and I think Perry’s on to something important that isn’t captured by me going ‘it’s just a swear word.’ I’ll have more to say about this column in a bit. For now, I just want to note that I think fascism as theorized term and fascism as analogy are different usages of that word - probably differences along a continuum rather than a stark difference, though I’m probably going to emphasize the differences rather than the continuities along the continuum. (I also want to note that before reading Perry’s column, I’d written my little pamphlet using the 1850s and slavery and abolition in the US as analogy for the present, inspired by a conversation with a friend, but I was only passing it around to friends around town. Perry’s column inspired me to put it up online - here https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/against-the-border-power/ - because of his arguments about the value of historical analogies.)

There’s an additional usage of the term that I don’t know how to talk about in a way that I’m comfortable with. It goes like this: as I understand them, the theoretical usages I mentioned use the term to identify both a politics and a context in which that politics can meaningfully exist. I don’t mean this flippantly and I worry it may sound flippant. Say a fascist general was captured by the allies in the second world war and imprisoned for 30 years, and in that time they remained fully convinced of their views. That unrepentant individual can reasonably be called a fascist. Likewise armband-wearing skinhead types can be. But the meaning of that term, relative specifically to the theories of fascism I’m familiar with that is, is something more like ‘individual who desires fascism or aspires to bring about fascism’ than ‘fascist individual’ because - again, I stress that I’m speaking in regard to those theories and I understand not everyone agrees with those - fascist individuals only exist in specific contexts that aren’t defined only or primarily by beliefs.

I’m intensely aware that this can sound like hairsplitting or pedantry in the face of deeply urgent matters and I’m sympathetic with that assessment. On the other hand though, I also think some degree of precision on this is worthwhile too. Anyway, I want to stress that to my mind this thing of individuals with heinous beliefs gets at a limitation of the theoretical usages of fascism that I’ve mentioned. It’s good to have a term for fascist individuals, and fascist is a fine name for that. More simply, people just will make or find terms for that so whether or not I think it’s good is irrelevant. The more important matter, to my mind, is noticing when we move between different usages which imply different concepts: a fascist individual in 1930s/40s Germany is not the same as a fascist individual in the US in the 90s, because the contexts were quite different. Furthermore, the differences between those context was not simply in the quantity of fascist individuals - as I tried to say, in the theories I’m thinking of fascist individuals are of the context, they are partly products of structural/systemic dynamics. The degree to which fascist individuals in 1930s/40s Germany are different or the same as fascist individuals in the US today is not something there’s disagreement on, it seems to me (at least in insofar as I and some other people I respect in the left don’t think the US is in a situation that it makes sense to call fascism according to the theories of fascism that we have, and - and this is the more important part, I think - insofar as there doesn’t seem to be a shared theory of fascism on the far left at this point.)

My thoughts on this are influenced by the Raymond Williams I’ve been reading, not in the sense that Williams wrote about fascism (if he did, I’ve not read it) but in the sense that how he thinks through intellectual and cultural change over time is shaping how I think about these matters. Over and over again in his book Keywords he notes different and changing uses of terms and says something like ‘there is a whole social history bound up with this’ - the point being that people understandably use terms in different changing ways in the complex and novel contexts they’re in. In that spirit, that there are different and changing usages of the term fascism and so on is not surprising and objecting to it is a bit silly given how often usages generally differ and change. The problem is having conceptual clarity in such a context, individually and collectively/communicatively.

As I’ve mentioned before on here, having come up in marxist circles that use the term fascism in ways informed by the theories I mentioned above, I’ve found contemporary uses of the term around the Trump administration kind of confusing, as sometimes I can’t tell what the theoretical understanding of the term is that is connected to some usages. And sometimes to the degree I can tell, it’s a different theoretical account from the ones I’m familiar with and at least sometimes I disagree with that account, in a context where debating the theoretical understandings is not welcome/not a shared purpose at hand. I found reading the Perry op/ed helpful for drawing out that some uses of the term are using it as analogy, and I appreciate that.

As I tried to say, I suspect fascism as theorized term and fascism as analogy are as much a continuum as a stark difference. And to an important degree the analogy is only possible if there’s at least an implicit theory of fascism. I do suspect some of those implied theories and some explicit ones are pretty limited, to be frank, but for the moment I just want to underline that for me it was clarifying and gratifying to read the Perry and to have the point about analogies make some of the differences in usage make a little more sense to me - not every usage is theorized in the same way as the theoretical understandings I mentioned. That said, I do think the analogy to fascism and the gestapo has some pretty serious limits, which I want to talk about in a moment. In some respects, those limits have to do with the term having too much content to it - if the term was simply a swear word then it’d be fine, or good even, and it may well be that for some people that is the usage they’re, uh, making use of. I’m going to take a bit of a long run up to this.
I’m getting toward the end of Raymond Williams’s book The Country and the City. There’s a section where, if I recall correctly, he discusses literary works about the country houses and estates of very rich people, these work praising the beauty of those estates as if they are unmediated nature. That erases the work involved in creating and maintaining that beauty and the people who did and do that work. (Brecht’s poem “Questions From a Worker Who Reads” is on point here by the way. https://www.marxists.org/archive/brecht/works/1935/questions.htm.) Williams’s point is that those literary works are partly ways of perceiving some contexts and actively leaving other parts of those contexts not perceived: work and workers get blanked out, leaving the not blanked elements, some of which - the ‘natural’ beauty of the landscape - are in a sense spotlit and yet misunderstood by virtue of the blanking out of those other elements, since the spotlit elements can only really be understood via understanding their relationship to other elements of the context (that it, to really understand a landscaped country estate, one must understand the work it involves, the people doing that work, and their relationship with their employers and landlords who own those estates). I think the gestapo/fascism analogy applied to ICE/Trump is like that. The analogy, if taken seriously anyway and not just as a swear word, spotlights some elements of the current context and blanks out other elements that the spotlit elements have an important relationship with.

What I mean to say here is that in saying ICE are a gestapo and the Trump administration are fascist, it’s not at all clear what the Democrats are, where they stand in the analogy, so to speak. I mentioned this to my friend, the inimitable Rob Knox, and he said something to the effect that all the comparisons we could make - like Trump is the Nazis as the Dems are to German liberals in the 30s - are pretty damning really, which seems right to me as far as I know, but that’s not very far. I don’t think I know as much about German history as Rob does. And I’m not alone in that.

I think for a lot of Americans anyway, who, like me, don’t know all that much about German history, the Democrats either don’t appear in the analogy at all - there’s just us vs the fascists, no one else, no other actors anyway - or the Democrats appears as part of the we who opposes the fascists - there’s just us vs those fascists, one big popular front. In the latter case, it’s not that the Dems disappear, it’s that any political expectations on the Dems and/or any worthwhile political conflicts with the Dems disappear - again, one big popular front, all united against the fascists. (I want to be very clear here: I’m not suggesting that Perry doesn’t know much about German history. I’m suggesting that a lot of people in his audience, myself included, don’t know much about German history and it’s the meaning of the term to that audience that I’m talking about.)

If I’m right, and I think I am, this means that analogy is related to or at least easily lends itself to being pretty uncritical of the Democrats despite their own commitments to border enforcement (Harris ran on being tough on the border! the Obama and Biden administrations both increased funds for border enforcement and deported a lot of people!) as well as making it hard to address any structural matters involved in what’s going on. Again, the analogy serves to both spotlight and to shroud, playing important matters in shadows.

I hope it’s already clear that I don’t think any of this is particularly conscious and it’s certainly not a conspiracy. Rather, I’m partly just making the very basic point that the ways we make sense of these events have a politics, in two senses: the ways of making sense of what’s happening that people gravitate to will often make sense given their politics, and those ways of sense-making are partly ways of advocating or sharing or shoring up certain politics (which is part of why I think this is worth talking a bit about, and part of why I’ve come around to not only thinking the analogy with slavery and abolition is useful but furthermore that it’s a better political analogy in the present).
Looping back to where I started, I’ve basically suggetesd that the analogy usage of the word fascism has downsides when used in relatively large scale political analysis specifically. I think those downsides are in part contingent. What I mean is that a lot of the downside has to do with the political limits of the people using the analogy, as they’re generally liberals. One could use the analogy as a marxist, so the limits are not inherent to the analogy, but that’s irrelevant because I’m not making claims about all possible uses of the term, I’m making claims about its actual uses in the present. I think a lot of the actually existing usages of the analogy are by liberals, and those usages are putting forward liberal understandings of and response to the present - they encourage liberalism, and they make other positions harder to state, make certain kinds of questions - like, how should the left orient to the Dems? and to electoral politics more generally? - hard to pose and less likely to be posed.

I also think that there is in the United States a really existing set of conceptions of fascism and accounts of German history and the second world war. That set is intangible but it’s a genuine force influencing the world to an extent (Marx writes somewhere that theory becomes material when it grips masses in motion; we can add two corollaries, that people in motion always have at least implicit theories, and that people can also be gripped by theories that limit their motion or encourage it to go in worse directions). That set of understandings is what makes the analogy comprehensible: people know what fascism means, or rather, they understand the word and related terms in some way such that they can understand the analogy, with that understanding involving at least some degree of implied theory of fascism and how to oppose it. That set of understandings isn’t a matter of individual beliefs so much as it’s a cultural outlook, so to speak, into which people are continually socialized. And that baseline set of understandings generally skews liberal. This means that so unless people have some degree of serious historical knowledge and/or theoretical understanding of these matters, the content of the analogy will in this context have a liberal character because the background culture supplies people with a liberal concept of fascism, unless it’s a specific conversational context or written work where pains are taken to explicitly define all this stuff and get into the politics involved. Very simply, that analogy can easily create a set of things that have an ‘oh, well, of course...!’ sense of felt obviousness. Or maybe it’s that the production of obviousness about some matters is the basic purpose for which people are using the analogy. (What we take to be obvious is partly something informs and partly is informed by our political outlooks, and in a sense the stakes of political disagreement is what will or will not come to that sense of obviousness.)

I mentioned the other day that I really really like this article: "Misperceptions of the Border Migration, Race, and Class Today,” by Rafeef Ziadah and Adam Hanieh (https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/misperceptions-of-the-border/) two of the three co-authors of Resisting Erasure, along with Rob Knox (https://www.versobooks.com/products/3410-resisting-erasure the discussion of racialization in that book is superb in my opinion and very far reaching analytically, in addition to how illuminating the book is on the deeply urgent matter of Palestinian liberation.) In their article, Ziadah and Hanieh write that ”a further critical aspect to Marx’s perspective that must also be grasped: the ‘critique of immediate appearances’. Not only do the conceptual categories through which we perceive the world constitute the ‘forms of appearance’ of the ‘totality of social relations’, they simultaneously serve to misrepresent this social reality.” The way I would articulate this - and this relates to my essay over at the JHI Blog reflecting on my approach to intellectual history (https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/12/29/three-meanings-of-political-economy-reflections-on-intellectual-history-marxism-and-capitalisms-unthought/), to the Williams I’ve been reading and to some of Simon Clarke’s writings on what he calls institutionalized forms of class domination and class collaboration - is that capitalism tends to foster general kinds of (mis)perceiving social reality relative to relatively pro-systemic/system-conserving purposes. Those general kinds always exist in particular localized versions, time and place and institution and culture specific ways of organizing those general forms of (mis)perception. I think the fascism/gestapo analogy in its liberal usages is one of those particular versions.

Now, I want to be clear, it’s very possible - indeed, historically it’s pretty common - for struggle to occur via limited conceptions. One of the beautiful and inspiring things about the history of collective action over time is that people’s collective intelligence often surpasses the limited started points and resources they were supplied with, and that surpassing is an engine for intellectual development and as such leaves people who come after important new resources for understanding, living despite, and fighting the hellscape and its ideologues and defenders. (Those resources are hard won and can be lost, preserving them and spreading them is part of the value of the left and an important task.) So I’m not saying limited ideas strictly determine what people in struggle can do. What I am saying, though, is that limited ideas do serve to limit people in struggle, in a way that can be overcome and part of the point of left intellectuals is to help with that overcoming. In my view the liberal fascism/gestapo analogy, as something that I’ve suggested both spotlights and shrouds, is one such limiting idea or source of limiting ideas and one to overcome.

Getting back to that Ziadah and Hanieh quote, and perhaps putting too fine a point on it, I think the fascism/gestapo analogy is partly a matter of immediate appearances which need critique because misrepresenting. I think in the US there is a ready to hand set of ideas, images, stories, etc about the Nazis that serve to help perceive what’s going on and to articulate criticisms of what’s going on and opposition aspirations against what’s going on, but do so in limited ways. So, a somewhat more general point - struggle can occur within the immediate appearances. People in struggle can run up against the limits of those immediate appearances in ways that them to develop their own criticisms of those appearances, and simultaneously those immediate appearances exert a pull for the worse on people in struggle. Criticism of those immediate appearances by left intellectuals is an attempt to try to limit that pull for the worse.

The final thing I’ll say for now is that I suspect that the immediate appearances of the social world often exist as a sort of grab bag of representational forms - images, stories, stock phrases, common sense dispositions that ‘everybody knows’, myths, jokes, analogies etc - as well as somewhat more systematized forms via the work of uncritical academics, artists, writers, etc. There’s a wonderful bit in Simon Clarke’s article defending EP Thompson and the larger socialist humanist tradition of the early new left in the UK (https://www.jstor.org/stable/4288264), where Clarke writes:
"the valid critique of empiricism is not that it doesn't have a theory, but that it does not make its theory (its background assumptions and its central concepts) explicit and subject it to rigorous empirical and logical criticism. Every description, however singular the event described, subsumes particulars under general concepts, and these general concepts together imply theoretical connections that the empiricist takes for granted. The danger of empiricism for a Marxist is that the kinds of concepts and assumptions that are most easily taken for granted, that are felt to need critical examination the least, are those of the dominant intellectual tradition and the dominant ideology it expresses. The danger of empiricism, therefore, is not that it lets the facts speak for themselves, but that it risks letting the dominant ideology speak through the facts." I think this is another way to express the need for what Ziadah and Hanieh call the critique of immediate appearances, and is a reasonable statement of what happens when that critique isn’t conducted and specifically in a self-reflexive way: people end up letting the dominant ideology speak through the facts, even at the same time that they’re fighting within and over some of the realities tied to those facts.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I think the immediate appearances that become or just are facts through which the dominant ideology speaks, those take a very wide range of immediate concrete forms - myths, jokes, stories, etc as I said - and not just academic sorts of forms, let alone academic forms that are specific to one discipline. This means there is a bit of a difficulty for those of us who end up far down the pipeline of academic education and socialization, as we often become specialists in some particular representational forms at the expense of relative lack of fluency in other forms (I’m thinking again of how little I know about literature and film, to my ongoing regret).

So doing the critique of immediate appearances likely has to be something collective and that will look in academic settings (which are less important than movement settings, to be clear) like interdisciplinary inquiry. I also think, and I am of course very biased here, that historical scholarship is quite good on some of this at least to the degree that dominant, alternative, and oppositional understandings of the world often can (and often in a way that gives them greater efficacy) take the form of historical analogies. (I wrote a bit about EP Thompson’s discussion of past and present in this academic essay, by the way - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/article/labor-history-and-class-violence-a-meditation-on-the-anniversary-of-lochner-v-new-york/A732309F4B31770EA5706F0FD16AA708 - including Thompson’s argument that in the present occupy a position of values in search of a genealogy in the past.)