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The scent of coffee curled through the kitchen like a peace offering. Brad stood zipped up by the window, arms folded, shoes still wet from the driveway. He hadn’t sat down yet, and that said enough.
“I want to know what you think,” he said, skipping hello. “About the Charlie Kirk shooting.”
I kept my voice level. “I think it’s murder. Horrific. Indefensible. Anyone justifying that is off the rails.”
He nodded once, barely. Then: “Still. This is what happens when you normalize that word.”
“What word?”
“Fascist.” His jaw clenched. “You throw tha on OK t around long enough, someone decides it’s open season. That’s the problem.”
We’ve known each other thirty years. Once, we were both “small c” conservatives. Balanced budgets. Personal liberty. Keep government lean, keep your nose out of my business. But over time, the Republican Party and conservatism changed. I worried about the cost, wealth inequality, the Citizens United decision, and privacy erosion. Brad started quoting Tucker Carlson.
Brad was former Navy, a lawyer, then FBI. He still believed in institutions. Me? I wasn’t so sure anymore. But I still listened when he spoke, which is why this conversation hurt. The tension wasn’t political. It was personal.
I said what I knew. “The shooter’s motives aren’t clear. No manifesto. No party affiliation. Some of those engravings were meme soup. It doesn’t add up to ideology.”
Brad didn’t listen. “You call someone a fascist, debate’s over. Next step is, do whatever it takes. That’s the danger.”
He wasn’t loud. Just certain. That’s what stuck with me after he left—maybe he was right. So I went looking. Not for arguments—I’ve had enough of those—but for history. For expertise. What did the people who’d studied fascism, not just feared it, have to say?
“Fascism doesn’t march. It reorganizes the org chart.”
Robert Paxton resisted the word for decades—until January 6, when he called it “necessary.”¹ Roger Griffin warned that it begins with the myth of national rebirth.² Jason Stanley noted it spreads by bureaucracy, not boots.³ Three scholars, three angles, circling the same alarm.
What struck me wasn’t their conclusion—it was their reluctance. These weren’t partisans. They had avoided the word precisely because it was radioactive. And yet, they were using it now—not to score points, but to warn.
They agreed on one thing: it isn’t a switch. It’s a drift. You see it in the small, qunremarkable edits of civic life. A parent who stops asking questions at a school board meeting. A clerk who suddenly needs three forms of ID for the same ballot.
And once the machinery adjusts—agencies renamed, missions reassigned—the sound isn’t thunder. It’s quieter: the shuffle of papers set aside, the microphone left unused, the moment a voice dies before it reaches the air.
“The danger arrives quietly—felt first in the pause before someone speaks.”
I saw it firsthand at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. Trump had just finished declaring that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”⁴ The crowd roared. Later, in the parking lot, a man leaned against his truck and told a local reporter, “He’s just saying what we all know. Nobody else is brave enough.” The line was ordinary, unshaken. That was the point. Suspicion had already become common sense.
A week later, a teacher in Concord told me about her fourth graders. She had a book in her hands—something ordinary, Charlotte’s Web. She caught herself before reading aloud, because it was on a list someone had flagged as “age-inappropriate.” She wasn’t sure if anyone in the room would complain. She wasn’t sure if anyone outside would. So she set the book down and picked another. That moment—hesitation, then silence—was the curriculum.⁵
That’s what I wanted to tell Brad when he came back. But he spoke first.
“Trump’s a narcissist, sure. A grifter. But fascism? That’s organized. Disciplined. The guy couldn’t run a sewing circle.”
“So you don’t think he’s a fascist?” I asked, sliding another cartridge into the Keurig.
“I think the steps matter more than the label. You walk enough of them, you don’t need to shout Heil.” He paused, then jabbed the air. “And don’t tell me it’s only him. The left—your side—they’ve got their tricks too. Slap Hitler on a guy, boom, you never have to listen.”
“You mean like calling journalists enemies of the people? Or telling crowds that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation?”
“See?” His voice rose, then flattened. “You’ve got your list, I’ve got mine. Same damn playbook.”
“The silence between us wasn’t awkward. It was historical.”
Two people raised in the same civic vocabulary were now speaking different dialects. What I’ve come to believe is this: Anti-fascism isn’t a leftist monopoly. Churchill wasn’t a socialist.⁶ The Catholic monks who defied Franco weren’t liberals. The German officers who tried to kill Hitler weren’t Democrats. Liz Cheney isn’t anyone’s progressive icon, and she warned her party that populist authoritarianism had crossed a line.⁷ You can believe in markets and still see the danger.
Fascism’s enemies aren’t left or right. They’re anyone who values liberty more than loyalty.
Brad looked up again. “So what do you think happens next?”
I didn’t answer right away. The coffee had gone cold. Outside, the puddles in the driveway were getting deeper.
Finally, I said: “History doesn’t wait for us to get the word right.”
He stood, zipped up again, nodded once. No handshake, no goodbye. He walked to the door.
⸻
Bibliography
1. Robert O. Paxton, “I’d called Trumpism an ‘incipient fascism.’ Now I believe it represents something more dangerous,” Newsweek, January 11, 2021. Paxton, a leading historian of fascism, shifted from resisting the term to endorsing its use after the January 6 attack.
2. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991). Griffin’s influential theory defines fascism as rooted in myths of national rebirth, or “palingenesis.”
3. Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018). Stanley argues that modern authoritarian movements rely on institutions and propaganda rather than overt violence.
4. “Trump repeats claim immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” Associated Press, December 16, 2023. Reporting on Trump’s rally remarks in New Hampshire where he used language echoing white nationalist tropes.
5. Sarah Mearhoff, “New Hampshire teachers navigate book bans, fear of backlash,” Concord Monitor, October 22, 2023. Local reporting on teachers hesitating to read aloud books flagged by parents and school boards.
6. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948). Churchill consistently defined his wartime fight against fascism from a conservative position, underscoring that anti-fascism was not limited to the left.
7. Liz Cheney, remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA, June 29, 2022. Cheney warned her party about Trump’s authoritarian turn, positioning herself as a conservative defender of democratic norms.