Fascism’s original meaning was never lost because Progressives live and breath it
Long before scholars rewrote the dictionary, fascism meant something very specific. It described a system where political leaders fused government power with cultural control, where dissent became a threat, and where citizens were pushed into obedience under the weight of state authority. It was a structural warning, not an emotional insult. It exposed the way governments behave when they believe their power is unquestionable.
For earlier generations the signs were obvious. Central planners who believed citizens could not be trusted. Institutions that demanded unity and treated disagreement as danger. Bureaucracies that insisted expert authority must outrank public will. Movements that silenced critics in the name of stability. These were the markers of authoritarian drift, and they were understood instinctively by Americans who had just witnessed it in real time overseas.
Now look at the last fifteen years of progressive politics. Look at the culture engineered by the Obama and Biden years. We watched federal agencies coordinate with social media companies to suppress stories and silence voices. We watched intelligence officials interfere in domestic politics with selective leaks and manufactured narratives. We watched the Department of Justice twist its mission into a political tool, punishing one side of the electorate while shielding the other. We watched a political movement claim it was protecting democracy while working to control the national conversation from behind closed doors.
And then came the speeches. President Biden went on national television more than once and labeled millions of Americans as extremists, Nazis, and domestic terrorists simply for disagreeing with his movement. He took the word fascism, flipped it upside down, and used it as a weapon against his political opponents. That was not the behavior of a unifying leader. That was the behavior the original definition of fascism warned about. A government accusing dissenters of being enemies of the state is following a script as old as authoritarianism itself.
Progressives spent years calling others fascists while adopting the very traits the word originally described. They managed speech. They controlled information. They pressured institutions to silence critics. They treated disagreement as danger and opposition as a threat to national stability. They created a world where expert authority outranked the voice of the people and where moral theater covered for institutional overreach.
The language may have been rewritten, but the behavior is unmistakable. The original meaning of fascism is not lost to me, and it is not lost to millions of Americans who saw exactly what happened. Once that truth becomes clear, it never fades.
