Tea at Trianon: When Everything Is Fascism, Nothing Is

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

When Everything Is Fascism, Nothing Is

From Unlicensed Punditry:

If I hear that America is sliding into fascism one more time, I’m going to puke.
Maybe I’m just hopelessly old-fashioned, but I still believe words are supposed to mean things. Fascism is a real thing. It has a history, an ideology, identifiable characteristics and some exceptionally ugly examples from the twentieth century. It does not simply mean that the president said something obnoxious, enforced a law you dislike, criticized a newspaper, deported someone, imposed a tariff, fired a bureaucrat or exercised an executive power differently than the last guy did.
Yet here we are.
“Fascism” has become less a political classification than a particularly nasty synonym for “authoritarian,” and authoritarian increasingly means “someone on the other political team using government power in a way I don’t like.”
When everything is fascism, nothing is.
That is not an argument that fascism is meaningless. Quite the opposite. It is an argument that a useful word has been abused to the point that its use in contemporary American politics often tells us more about the person saying it than the person being described. (Read more.)