Charlie Riedel/AP
The word “fascism” has been tossed around so much over the past four years that it’s hard to know what it even means anymore.
But after Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency, after the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 that has left a specter of violence hanging over American politics, the debate over the “F word” feels much more urgent.
Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale and the author of
(2018). It’s one of the most influential books on the topic in recent memory. And strange as it is, we don’t really have scholarly consensus on the meaning of fascism. It’s a slippery term, and trying to apply it in different contexts is tricky.