The Democratic Party, mainstream media, leftist intelligentsia, and their activist supporters are in a full-on panic mode about the fate of “American democracy.” Not only are these self-anointed freedom warriors gravely “concerned” about the prospects of democracy under the leadership of their political opponents, disregarding that America is in fact a constitutional representative republic, they are also issuing stern warnings that our country is sliding into fascism.
On September 17th, the Nation ran an article with the provocative title “Trump’s Petty-Tyrant Brand of Fascism,” decrying Donald Trump as “both a dire threat to democratic governance and a clownish mob boss.” Likening “Trump’s America” to “Nazi Germany,” a Guardian essay argues that “historians who specialize in fascism” are leaving the country due to the federal government’s “unprecedented deportations of immigrants … intimidation of judges, law firms and universities; and assaults on the fundamental principles of liberal democracy.” The New Republic quoted Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who cried about the American government’s “rising fascism.” Lifelong anti-capitalist “economist” Robert Reich calls for “mass resistance” to take the power away from Trump, “the tyrant,” who “preys on people who feel unsafe and vulnerable.” “The Soviets defeated Nazism, but Western fascism lived on,” declared Black Agenda Report.
As Thomas Sowell once observed of the self-righteous intelligentsia:
One of the many signs of verbal virtuosity among intellectuals is the repackaging of words to mean things that are not only different from, but sometimes the direct opposite of, their original meanings.
One should not expect sensibility or credibility from those who can’t get straight historical facts, such as the one regarding the pivotal role of American involvement in ending World War II. Neither are they willing to contend with contemporary affairs, including the track record of cancel culture among prominent institutions concerning diverse opinions. More importantly, an accompanying presumption that people who don’t think like them are vulnerable, gullible, insecure, and otherwise in desperate need of being saved directly insults the intelligence of the 77 million fellow Americans who did not vote the politically righteous way in the last general election.
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Ideas have consequences. The unceasing rhetoric smearing political opponents as illegitimate agents for the American government has sufficiently inflamed public opinions, so much so that “49% of registered voters in [a] national survey say Trump is a fascist,” based on a 2024 ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Setting aside ABC’s apparent biases, let’s turn our attention to the definitions.
ABC News defines a fascist as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” Black Agenda Report equates U.S. and Western exceptionalism—a notion that the U.S. and Europe are culturally, socially, and morally superior—to Nazi ideology. The Nation, a “principled,” “progressive,” and “just” purveyor of truth, even invokes Plato’s definition of tyranny as “fundamental disorder and irrationality” to characterize what is called “the Trumpian brand of fascism.”
None of these rage-filled, fear-mongering, and emotionally loaded conceptions of a political regime so brutal that a mere mentioning of the word invites visceral disdain can survive any test of ontological rigor. According to Britannica,
Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.
A cursory review of U.S. military operations based on reports from the Congressional Research Service could quickly invalidate this claim of intensification or expansion under either the first or current Trump administration. In fact, both Barack Obama and Joe Biden oversaw more aggressive military actions overseas than Trump has. While the left would have its rank-and-file buy into the facetious narrative that deployment of federal troops to fight urban crimes and enforce immigration laws is a sign of militarism, it is just that—a narrative. Frankly, it is a false narrative easily debunked by the history of six U.S. presidents deploying the National Guard 11 times for various purposes, including enforcing civil rights, quelling urban violence, and settling riots and strikes.
Let us not forget that the Department of Justice during Biden’s years had unleashed the FBI on concerned parents who spoke against vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and woke indoctrination at school board meetings. The voluminous uptick in speech censorship on college campuses following the summer of “racial reckoning” was an inevitable outgrowth of intolerance against opposing viewpoints and dissidents. Was the moral blackmail in the slogan—“Stay home. Save lives”—indicative of subordinating individual interests to the collective good? Have “trust the experts,” “trust the science,” and similarly elitist messaging spinning controversial matters into black-and-white absolutes contributed to illiberal impulses in our culture and society?
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Neither end of the political spectrum owns a monopoly on political violence, a strong indicator of “fascism.” But a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right” and that “attacks from right-wing perpetrators have sharply declined in 2025.”
“Trumpian fascism” is a political smear of doomsday proportions. Logic and evidence readily take apart the argument. After all, Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett are not showing any signs of retreat from the public eye with their round-the-clock commentaries on the “big bad orange man,” as would have been the case if they were under suppression.
Considering that only one in three Americans could actually pass the U.S. Citizenship Test, weaponizing words like “fascism” accomplishes the intended goal of inciting hate, fear, and disdain toward conservatives and heterodox thinkers.
Perhaps, the true tyranny of our current sociocultural landscape is that of the arrogant left who spent the better part of a decade shutting down debate, deplatforming, and censoring the speech of their opponents. Progressives contend that their vision of America is the end-all be-all—turn off the lights, debate’s over. This vision exalts its adherents on a path of infallible “truths,” insulates itself from reality, and demonizes opponents as morally defective. Once again, Thomas Sowell delivers the fatal diagnosis in The Quest for Cosmic Justice:
It was the vision that mattered, not the flesh-and-blood human beings who were viewed as the incidental causalities of the vision. The crucial role of self-exaltation underlies the way that those with opposing opinions are viewed. It is not sufficient … to depict those … as mistaken, factually incorrect, illogical in their analysis, or dangerous in their conclusions … They must be depicted as calloused toward the less fortunate, biased against women and minorities, and otherwise morally unworthy.
Resist the true tyranny.
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Image: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” by nrkbeta on Wikimedia Commons
