I want to show you something.

It’s a quote about the word “fascism.” The author is complaining that the term has become meaningless through overuse. That it gets thrown at everything and everyone. That it’s become more tribal marker than meaningful descriptor.

Here’s what he wrote:

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting... Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

Farmers. Shopkeepers. Gandhi. Dogs.

When do you think this was written?

2024, during election season? 2016, when Trump descended the golden escalator? Sometime during the Bush years, when MoveOn.org was running contests for the best Hitler comparison?

It was George Orwell. Writing in March of 1944. In his regular column for Tribune.

The war wasn’t over. The camps were still operating. Fascism wasn’t a historical abstraction or a rhetorical weapon. It was a thing that existed, right there, that people were actively dying to defeat.

And already the word meant nothing.

The Quote That Could Run Tomorrow

Here’s what gets me. You could publish that quote, unchanged, in any major outlet tomorrow. It would fit perfectly. No one would guess it was 80 years old.

Farmers get called fascist now for opposing regulations. Shopkeepers get called fascist for enforcing mask policies, or for not enforcing them. Gandhi would probably still qualify somehow. Dogs are probably fine, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

Eighty years. We’ve had eighty years to learn something. To develop more precise language. To reserve our strongest words for our strongest warnings.

We haven’t.

If anything, it’s gotten worse. The rhetorical arms race has escalated. The nuclear option became standard ammunition. And now we’re standing in the ash, wondering why our warnings don’t land anymore.

What Orwell Saw

Orwell wasn’t just complaining. He was diagnosing something.

He noticed that “fascist” had stopped pointing at a specific political system with identifiable features. It had become, in his words, “almost entirely meaningless” except as a way to say “something not desirable.” A fancy way of calling someone a bully. A tribal flag, not a technical term.

The thing is, fascism in 1944 was very much a thing. It had specific characteristics. Racial hierarchy codified into law. A leadership principle that placed the Führer beyond question. State-directed capitalism. An industrial apparatus of terror. A mythology of national rebirth from humiliation.

You could study it. You could identify it. You could point at it and say “that, specifically, is what we’re fighting.”

But already, by 1944, the word had escaped its technical meaning and became a floating signifier for “bad.” Applied to everything. Therefore meaning nothing.

Orwell concluded his essay with a resigned shrug: “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

We did not take his advice.

The Math That Keeps Me Up

Here’s the other thing.

World War II ended 80 years ago. The youngest survivors who actually remember anything are in their late 80s now. In ten years, there will be almost no one left who can say “I was there.”

And already, according to surveys, 66% of millennials can’t identify what Auschwitz was. Twenty-two percent haven’t heard of the Holocaust at all. Two-thirds don’t know who won World War II.

We’re not just using the words carelessly. We’re forgetting what they referred to.

This creates a perverse situation. We’ve worn out our most serious language through overuse, just as the generation who witnessed what that language meant disappears. We’ve depleted the rhetorical stockpile right when we might need it most.

Meanwhile, 71% of the global population now lives under autocratic rule, according to V-Dem’s 2024 report. The highest since 1986. Freedom House has documented 18 consecutive years of democratic decline.

Something is happening. We can feel it. We reach for our strongest words to describe it.

And the words are empty.

Maybe the answer isn’t rehabilitating the old words. Maybe what’s emerging is different enough that it needs a name of its own.

What This Series Is About

I’ve been thinking about this problem for a while now. Not just the word “fascism,” but the broader pattern. How we hollowed out our most serious language. How memory fades on a predictable schedule. How new authoritarian movements emerge in forms that don’t match our mental images, so we struggle to name them.

Over the next few essays, I want to explore:

The Nuclear Option — How semantic dilution happened from all sides, how you’ve probably participated in it (I know I have), and what the research says about what happens when words lose their meaning through repetition.

The Three-Generation Countdown — How collective memory fades, why 80 years is a particularly dangerous threshold, and how Germany managed to maintain historical consciousness when most countries haven’t.

Authoritarianism’s New Clothes — What’s actually emerging globally while we argue about labels, why scholars avoid the word “fascist” for most of it, and the uncomfortable gap between academic precision and public alarm.

The Vocabulary of Vigilance — Whether precision can save us, what thoughtful comparisons actually look like, how to maintain the ability to warn when the warnings have been worn out, and maybe—just maybe—what to call the thing that’s actually in front of us.

I don’t have clean answers. I’m not sure anyone does. But I think the questions matter.

Because Orwell saw this problem in 1944, when the thing itself was right there, and we’ve had eight decades to figure it out.

We haven’t.

Maybe it’s time to try.