This is long but, hopefully, worth it.

Like much of Umair Haque’s writing, this essay is both irritating and right. But what stands out for me is its double focus: on the one hand the question he asks in the title, on the other his emphasis on whether it’s OK to use the word fascist — or, in slightly more posh terms something like the discourses around the act of naming. As I think about it, huge swaths of the US’s current political problems revolve around the issue of naming and how we fetishize the act. From Malcolm’s adoption of X as a last name to the long history of radical reappropriations — black (and yes ‘the n-word’), gay, fag, queer, and many more I don’t want to rattle off — turning scarlet letters into badges of pride has played a crucial role in liberatory movements. Obviously, if there’s any power in renaming something, then naming things — or misnaming things, or refusing to name things at all — was powerful too. Except, really, all this naming, renaming, unnaming, denaming is just a sideshow, isn’t it?

‘Political correctness’ was a whole chapter in this saga, a meta-fight about the power of naming. Conservatives who opposed it didn’t object so much to the new names that were being proposed; instead, what put a bee up their butt was the recognition that they were being ‘forced’ to use new names. Suddenly, they were on the other side of power relations, being told what they could and couldn’t say. In a country where vast swaths of culture consist of commercial activity — trademarking every stray molecule of bullsh*t, relentless ‘re/branding’ rubbish, tone-policing, and even a lot of the endless litigation over bogus copyright and patent claims — popular assertions of the right to rename represent a serious threat to the order of things.

Early on in Trump’s reign there was ‘the Resistance,’ which struck me as a slightly cringeworthy effort to rebrand protesting in the stirring tones of WW2-era French freedom fighters. Reasonable people can disagree, but when was the last time you heard about the Resistance? Probably before ‘antifa’ became a thing in the US, I’d guess; but all that chatter about punching nazis and antifa faded away too. Now the political pumpkin spice is the slow re-recognition that ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ name different things. Liberals are in an uproar because the name they’ve embraced for so long has become, they moan, a dirty word. It hasn’t. ‘Liberal’ was, for decades, a way of misnaming the left, in a way, of denying it any name at all. Now that the left has begin to name itself again, ‘liberal’ has lost its power: what was a badge of pride has become a scarlet letter, except this time it’s a sort of ‘depropriation.’

In any event, it’s un/fun to watch Serious People learn to use the word ‘fascist.’ It’s like watching a baby learn to use a spoon: it’s a mess, but it’s great to see someone develop an essential life skill. I’d say the ability to (as we say) call a spade a spade is another essential life skill. But in the same way that spoons aren’t intrinsically interesting, neither are names: they’re shorthand, more or less arbitrary labels we stick on things to get something done. So, really, Serious People debating about whether to call Trump and his supporters ‘fascist’ doesn’t matter much. What matters, once you’ve named them thus, is what you do. That kind of observation usually leads to “TAKE TO THE STREETS,” but I’m not a big street fetishist. Protests come and go, but the street remains, and the conflict is washed away by everyday traffic. Now that it’s more acceptable to call the GOP fascist — I mean, even NYT columnists are doing it — what really matters sucks: you need to work backwards and ask yourself which parts of proto-fascism were actually working pretty well for you. In other words, start to account for the roles you played in letting things reach this point. I’m not pointing any fingers — I benefited too.

For years now I’ve been asking on FB — my words have been precise and formulaic — whether it’s considered acceptable in polite society to call the GOP “fascist” yet. Note: yet. As Haque notes, and as some of us knew, it was all there for all of us to see. The problem was in naming it and, in particular, in the benefits that came from not naming it. Maybe by dismissing it as apocalyptic fantasy, maybe by arendtsplaining that what was happening in the US now didn’t precisely match the conditions of pre-WW2 Europe (no!), maybe by tuning it out an scrolling past — I don’t really GAF how or why someone refused to name it. That kind of psychological turn is a dead end.

The sad thing is that, all along, we had a perfectly good name for people who made this call too early — premature anti-fascist, a phrase that dates back to mid-20th-C red scares. The joke (and it was partly a joke) was that the emphasis wasn’t on anti-fascism, it was on premature. The obvious implication is that majority opinion was, let’s say, ‘post-mature’ — in plainspeak, it was too late. But I’m a good American (we’re like those ‘good Germans’), so I say it’s never too late.

So what can you do before it really is too late? How about naming things that are unacceptable, that is, things you absolutely cannot and will not accept under any circumstances. I don’t care where you draw the line, and to be honest a lot of perfectly good people won’t draw any lines at all. It’s like that list of all the subtle changes all around you that so many people were advocating when Trump took over — except, instead of documenting outside stuff, try documenting inside stuff. You can start with easy ones like “transporting adherents of a specific religion to death camps” or “drugging political opponents and throwing them out of airplanes,” then work your way backwards to easier — or maybe harder — things.

What you do if or when you can’t accept them is your business, but I think naming them is all of our business. I’m serious: set aside some time to make a do-not-ever-under-any-circumstance-do-or-allow-to-be-done list. It’s a bitch. And, unlike most of this stuff, it’s not really about naming.