For years now, scholars at conferences have argued about whether or not we can talk about fascism in the 21st century. Some scholars stalwartly defended a belief that fascism was something left in the past, and not like every other “-ism” (liberalism, feminism, socialism, communism, anarchism, etc.)—which all have evolved and had different waves and iterations. Somehow, for them, fascism was exceptional. Some went as far to argue that Nazism was not fascist, and only Mussolini’s Italy could claim that title. Scholars warned that we can’t make the error of imposing the present onto the past—ignoring the fact that the past also affects the present and doesn’t simply disappear into a void.
To add to the confusion, popularly, some confused feminists as “feminazis” and the likes of Dinesh D'Souza propagated an alternative history which claimed the Nazis were leftist, rather than right-wingers, as I discuss in my book, Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories. Decades of bait and switch tactics left even people like the eminent former United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, to confuse fascism, authoritarianism and communism in her massively popular book, Fascism: A Warning.
Curiously, even as some non-academics started recognising US president Donald Trump’s fascism, many academics stuck to their spurious rejections of Trump as fascist—whilst simultaneously writing books and garnering lucrative commentator positions that promoted themselves as scholars explaining how fascism works, its anatomy and theorising about strongmen dictators, capitalizing on the Trump era, whilst still refusing to call a spade a spade.
