Left intellectuals have argued in circles for years over whether it’s academically valid to call Donald Trump and his Republican devotees fascist.
The debate has mostly pitted practical thinkers, drawing on a nine-year record of creeping fasicsm, against territorial theorists or factionalists retreating to ever-more arcane reasons to absolve MAGA.
They made up their minds early and won’t admit error, or else they can’t acknowledge Trump’s a fascist for strategic reasons.
It’s all very tedious.
But now I believe the debate has become obsolete. It’d be more instructive, at this point, if we supplanted the old debate with a new, analogous one over whether the GOP is simply fascist or given over to outright Nazism.