Empty Words?

Gavin Newsom knew exactly what he was doing when he called Stephen Miller a "fascist"

Before we get into the essay, a quick note. MAN’S WORLD Issue 16 is now available to buy, in physical form, from the magazine’s website (mansworldmag.online). This is the first physical issue to be published by me—no Passage Press—and you can order it in two different formats: full colour or grayscale. This issue contains the winning essays from the MAN’S WORLD Gonzo Prize, and a whole host of essays, interviews and much, much more. We’ll be releasing two a year, and we’ll also be printing issues 1-12 in physical format for the very first time. You don’t have to subscribe either: just buy the issue you want.

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“Fascist” is one of those words—like “Nazi,” “racist,” “imperialist,” “white supremacist,” “misogynist” and a whole bagful of other -ists and -isms—that mean anything and everything to anybody and everybody. In short, “fascist” means nothing. It’s empty. And that’s the danger.

There’s a general tendency, over time, for the meaning of words to shift. This can happen quickly, or it can happen across a much longer span of centuries or even millennia.

If I say “I navigated my way through the crowds” on a busy street, only the worst kind of pedant would correct me and say, “But you weren’t in a boat, surely?” The Latin navigo originally meant “I travel by boat”—hence nauta, “sailor,” and now, two thousand years later, “navy,” “nautical” etc.

Sometimes the meaning of a word can flip entirely. Another Latin example. A vir egregius was once an “exceptional man”: exceptional in virtue, deserving of praise, to be emulated. But to call something “egregious” now is to say that it’s exceptional only in its being awful, certainly not to be praised or copied. “An egregious mistake,” “an egregious foul,” “an egregious bit of incompetence.” A complete 180.

I’m not going to write some long piece of linguistic theory, by the way. I’m just pointing to a linguistic fact. Change happens.

The process of change appears to be greatly accelerated when it comes to words with a political meaning, and especially in the modern world under conditions of mass education, mass communication, especially the internet and social media, and mass propaganda.

It’s taken less than a century for the term “fascist” to lose virtually all of its meaning—but none of its power. In truth, it’s only gained in power by being stripped of any fixed reference.

I picked up a book of Roger Scruton’s essays from a second-hand bookshop the other day. One of the shorter essays in the volume is called, “Who is a fascist?” Scruton wrote the essay in 1983. He laments the use of the word “fascist” as a general term of abuse with little regard to the actual political system that emerged in 1920s Italy, or even its sister ideologies of National Socialism in Germany and Falangism in Spain. Scruton calls out the Labour MP and grandee Tony Benn by name, for his absurd claim that Margaret Thatcher—by championing the individual work ethic, family values and national sovereignty—was, in fact, a fascist.

Tony Benn was a diehard communist, the kind of boneheaded true believer you could plonk down in a famine-stricken village in the Ukraine circa 1933 and he’d still tell you Marx and Engels were right and the Dialectic will bring us the Worker’s Paradise—just a few more contradictions!—and none of this horror is Stalin’s fault. It’s probably those bloody kulaks, stealing grain again! Yes, another purge! That’ll do it!

Tony Benn, at least, was old enough to have experienced fascism firsthand, so he should have known better. The fact he didn’t is only further condemnation of his entire worldview.

Like I say, this has been going on for some time.

Today’s bonehead communists are even further removed from the realities of fascism. They couldn’t tell you anything about Mussolini or the corporate state, about how all economic activity in Fascist Italy was organised into corporations that were subordinate to the national state, nor indeed could they tell you how Fascist doctrine differed from National Socialist or Falangist doctrine either. They weren’t the same.

What matters, for present purposes, is that everybody now knows what a fascist is, at least in emotional and moral terms. It’s a bad person. A very bad person. The worst kind of person, in fact. Someone who is an enemy of everything that’s good and proper, meaning leftist values; an enemy of freedom who deserves the harshest treatment, maybe even death, and you shouldn’t feel bad about giving it to them.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom called White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller a “fascist” on X at the weekend, he wasn’t accusing Miller of being an adherent of the corporate state. He wasn’t even saying that, with his bald head, Miller looks a bit like Mussolini. No, Newsom was saying, “Look, this is one of the worst people in the world!”

But of course, Newsom was doing more than that.