‘Fascism’ and the Tea Party
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So, on a recent trip through the northeast US, I ran across no shortage of these flags, and other signs of this ‘tea party’ movement which has lately drawn the attention of the media. No less a luminary than Noam Chomsky has publicly equated these gatherings with the masses of Nuremberg, claiming that
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
Normally I defer to Prof. Chomsky’s judgment on matters political, and though my own anarchic political leanings lie slightly to the right of Chomsky’s, I consider myself a fellow-traveller. But I think he’s grossly misapplied the ‘fascist’ tag here, as have many others drawing this connection, and I think Chomsky’s mistake speaks to the wider issue of invoking ‘fascism’ in public discourse. So here, I’d like to offer a few comments about the misapplication of an early 20th-century Italian political movement’s name to any vaguely populist, vaguely scary political clique which one opposes.

