Does exist and should be labeled as such. But it's also always been a term that evil political movements use to label those who oppose their ideas.
Let the wise be discerning. Not all is as it appears on the surface or is reported to be.
Are you literally asking for a moral re-evaluaion of fascism?
<rolls eyes>
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-president-and-c...
Authoritarian Communism and its variants mostly fail by the same standard: lots of misery and death.
A good principle here I think is “a thing is what it does.” It effectively banishes all the sophistry that these kinds of ideologies deploy in their defense. No, a thing is what it does, and these ideologies murder and impoverish.
I find it really disheartening that so many people today seem to want to revisit one of these two ideologies. These are the failed death cults of the early 20th century. They should be forgotten.
If what we have is not working we need new ideas, not these.
The modern right wants to replace democratic rule of law with enlightened despotism focused on eliminating perceived racial, sexual, and ideological impurities.
The modern left wants universal healthcare and high taxes for billionaires, similar to the well-known death cult of Norway. /s
These things are not the same.
The president has given up pretending to obey the law. He's torn down the east wing of the White House (which does not belong to him), he's issued Executive Orders that contradict a plain reading of the Constitution (14th amendment, among others), he has gratuitously and repeatedly violated the Emoluments Clause, he has used the DOJ to attack political enemies on the thinnest of pretenses, he is continuing an illegal "armed conflict" in violation of the War Powers Resolution, etc, etc. This has all been documented thoroughly elsewhere: the president acts like a king and demonstrates contempt for his oath of office.
That, in combination with his civil rights abuses, are tantamount to fascism. Under the guise of "immigration enforcement," he's unleashed a horde of undertrained, overpaid henchmen who apparently act above the law, killing people, including US citizens, and denying medical care to detainees, without any fear of accountability. He's also sought to withdraw citizenship from and cancel visas to those people who are legally in the US but, for whatever reason, displease him. This kind of capricious, content-based discrimination, without Congressional oversight, is exactly what the Founding Fathers fought to prevent.
Any other really easy questions?
No we are not Nazi Germany. Yet. But the ideas are absolutely popular in certain places and it takes a lot of deliberate ignoring not to see it.
That being said, I see that kind of rhetoric and adjacent rhetoric around.
That makes me think first we will finish our current bad LARP of fascism with our tacky parody of Mussolini or Franco (Trump is more like them than Hitler) and then we will do some kind of bad LARP of communism in the 30s when youth unemployment and the total decimation of entry level jobs really starts to hurt bad. It will (like fascism is doing for the grievances it was marketed to) make everything worse, because these fascism and communism don’t work.
It’s probably waiting for a good populist (which means a charismatic malignant narcissist) like a tankie Trump. Imagine a more extreme Mamdani or Bernie Sanders with Trump’s narcissism.
Ultimately we are LARPing these bad ideas because there are no new ones. It’s a testament to intellectual bankruptcy that anyone takes fascism or Marxism seriously in 2026.
(Lack of anything entry level was already a problem before AI. Now we are looking at there being basically no entry level jobs in multiple fields other than “bot herder.”)