A Letter to the Reader

This essay uses the term authoritarian fascism deliberately.

Many people understandably recoil from the word fascism because they associate it with a specific historical image: uniforms, mass rallies, suspended elections, and overt dictatorship. When those markers are absent, the conclusion is often the same: this can’t be fascism.

That assumption is precisely the problem.

As I argued in This Isn’t the Fascism We Remember. That’s the Point., fascism does not survive by repeating its most recognizable form. It adapts. It modernizes. It embeds itself inside familiar institutions and legal frameworks, relying less on spectacle and more on normalization.

To be precise:

Authoritarianism is the method. It is how power is exercised—through coercion, intimidation, discretionary enforcement, and the erosion of accountability.

Fascism is the system. It is the political order that fuses state power with ideological permission to dehumanize, suppress dissent, and normalize violence against those deemed threatening—often while maintaining the appearance of legality.

What we are witnessing today is not authoritarian behavior in isolation. It is authoritarian methods being deployed in service of a fascist system logic. That is why the correct term is authoritarian fascism.

This essay does not argue that the United States has become a historical replica of 20th-century fascist regimes. It argues something more unsettling: that the mechanisms those regimes relied on—criminalizing oversight, redefining dissent as danger, and treating witnesses as enemies—are now being normalized here, in ways that look administrative rather than dramatic.

If this does not resemble the fascism we remember, that is not evidence against the diagnosis. It is evidence of evolution.

The purpose of this language is not provocation. It is clarity. History shows that authoritarian fascism advances not through sudden rupture, but through gradual acceptance of practices that would once have been unthinkable. Naming those patterns early is not exaggeration. It is civic responsibility.

The Opinionated Observer

Watching closely. Saying it plainly. 

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