There are a few slightly precious linguistic taboos I have noticed people in older generations than mine are likely to maintain. Obviously, young people use the classic four-letter swear words more casually than the old, if not the identity slurs. And reserving the word “hate” for only very extreme cases because “hate is a strong word” is one of these almost grandmotherly things I have encountered over many years, a nice nod to the aspiration to not hate anyone at all. Then there is, almost certainly as a legacy of the Cold War that caused citizens of the English-speaking world to think about life in countries with other systems of government in a much more immediate way, a tendency to make a sharp distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian.” A lawyer friend recently told me he called a New Deal-era Supreme Court ruling totalitarian and was rebuked by the appalled professor for the hyperbole.
Relatedly, there is the constant bickering over the term “fascism,” something that has been roiling since President Donald Trump’s election. It has produced many book sales of titles such as Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, Madeline Albright’s Fascism: A Warning, and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, each of them intentionally or unintentionally styled after 1944’s classic pamphlet Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It by Leon Trotsky. The entire fascism discourse has also had no use and produced no understanding. This is because George Orwell was right 78 years ago to observe that “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” Italy’s Partito Nazionale Fascista was, in fact, deeply incoherent and hypocritical in the set of alliances and policies and rhetorical stances it pursued, so the system of government named after it is, well, hard to define systematically. Go figure.
According to Bruno Bongiovanni, the words “totalitarian” and “totalitarianism” first appeared in the context of Fascist rule in the Italian newspaper Il Mondo on May 12, 1923. The words, appearing as “totalitario” and “totalitarismo,” appeared in an article critical of the party by one Giovanni Amendola, writing after the town of Sanza held an election with only the illusion of choice, as the Fascists had stacked two slates of virtually identical candidates. Fascist dissident Alfredo Misuri, who probably heard it from Amendola’s article, used it to denounce the party in Parliament later that May and was beaten by thugs a few hours after doing so. Later, Fascist thinkers such as Carl Schmitt and Giovanni Gentile adopted the term approvingly. By contrast to totalitarianism, authoritarianism does not necessarily eliminate the private realm and orient every waking hour of every citizen’s life around the interests of the state — it just favors imposed collective order over individual freedom.
The problem with arguments over big words for systems of government is that they rely on knowing historical facts, and history is always in dispute, even from authoritative sources. (The Encyclopedia Britannica has the coinage of “totalitarismo” plainly wrong, attributing it to Benito Mussolini himself, for example.) By implicitly invoking a history most people have an, at best, Hollywoodized and foggy understanding of, many of these terms are emotive without being informative. Take the almost hilariously wordy New Republic headline and subheadline combo reading, “Why Elon Musk’s Idea of ‘Free Speech’ Will Ruin America: Twitter without content moderation — and with Donald Trump and others reinvited — means that the lies and disinformation will overwhelm the truth and the fascists will take over.” Not engaging in censorship of certain terms and political opponents is fascism now, apparently.
With so much discussion of systems of government so unmoored from the terms’ origins, people have gotten high on their own supply of high dudgeon. With tweets from New York Times columnists reading, “Under no circumstances can you call a state where winning half the vote nets you two-thirds of the seats a ‘republican form of government’” and the Washington Post “deploy[ing] Democracy Team,” it is time for everyone to take a second look at these terms and their actual etymological meanings, as well as to take a deep breath. Take a glance over at British politics or Israel’s as they each install their fourth leaders in a few years, and try to remember that different forms of democracies all have their upsides and downsides. This is an imperfect union, but it is not a looming fascism or totalitarianism, and you do discredit to history and language when you start screaming that it is.
