Words do have a meaning but meaning can also shift over time.

I'm not saying that using those labels arbitrarily is a good thing but things are not black and white. It's easy when you contrast a modern administrative inconvenience with the Holocaust - but is a Jew being forced to sell and emigrate a victim of fascism or is that reserved for camp survivors?

What about reclaiming words like gay and so on? Or does that disrespect the original meaning of the word?

I think it's part of the euphemism treadmill where calling something socialist, left or conservative, right is no longer creating the shock value you want for contrast. Now they are communist and alt left or fascist and alt right.

I think that looking at the modern connotation and trying to contrast it with the historical context is as helpful as trying to contrast your way to school uphill and through the snow both ways with modern school kids and how they should have nothing to complain about.

Like, people won't run out of things to complain about and they most often don't mean the accurate historic things when they are using words.
 

How do you call someone who makes a fascist salute in the middle of a large Republican conference?
How do you describe someone who threatens to send the army into cities controlled by the opposition?
Someone who publicly demands that elected opposition members be jailed?
Who declares anti-fascist movements as terrorists?
Who tries to have past opponents prosecuted for imaginary offenses?

I’m not saying the U.S. is a fascist country—that would be absurd. But Trump clearly appeals to fascist ideology. Some argue it’s just provocation; others say it’s his true self. At this point, I no longer care, simply flirting with these dangerous ideas is enough for me to call him as such !
 

How do you call someone who makes a fascist salute in the middle of a large Republican conference?
An idiot.

For the rest, those are all definitively autocratic. But hey, if the worst thing Hitler had done would have been the complete list you just mentioned, nobody would even remember him today. The list is or could be equally true to an extremely wide range of autocrats and tinpot dictators, of all sorts of political or religious colors, e.g. Erdogan.

I'd really invite you to reread a history book about what fascism did to the Jews, Europe, and the rest of the world in the 1930's and 1940's. Trump is really just a pale joke compared to that.

I totally disagree with your absurd black & white notion of "everybody flirting with an idea is X". You are losing all power of language to differentiate. Are you a communist? You are certainly flirting with left ideas. So would you be okay to be shoved in the same drawer as Stalin and Mao?
 

Last time this topic came up I didn't agree with your distinction and unwillingness to label Trump a fascist. I will say my opinion has changed. I don't perceive him as wanting to be fascist anymore because I don't actually believe he cares about right wing or conservative ideas. Trump is just an authoritarian who would love to be a dictator if he had a path to becoming one, but he isn't grounded in right or left ideology so much as the pursuit of what is personally beneficial to him, his family, those currently in his inner circle and what he perceives his legacy to be. His policies supposed beliefs are interchangeable and fluid.

I'll even go a step further. I can totally see an alternate reality where Trump was embraced by the Neo-Liberals that run the DNC and becomes President and acts virtually the same way he does now except pushing forward Pro-Business Neo-Lib policies.

Stephen Miller would be an example of someone who I would say is a definitely fascist.
 

I totally agree. Today’s political news include plans by Trump to extend Obamacare, because that would be popular. Some Republicans are fuming, because they actually *have* an ideology. Trump doesn’t, he is just a vain narcissist.
 

The sad this is that US politicians could care less as long as their point gets across. They'd knock their mothers out cold if that would improve their ratings.
 

"thing", not "this"
 

Not a defense of either position but instead a comment: You can compare the actions of an administration and person like Trump now to the full historical record of what Hitler and the Nazis did over their careers, but I feel it would be better served to identify what period in time, historically, Hitler and his followers were at that is proportionately equivalent to where we are at now. Trump's unlikely to get anywhere close to fascism (imo) but not through lack of desire, rather a lack of competence and his own ego getting in the way. Its his administration, the lackeys he has surrounded himself with that are more than willing to go there that concern me. So in terms of a comparison to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, Is sort of feel like its better to be worried and compare to how that movement developed over time than to point to the very end and say, "No, it doesn't currently look like that." Because left unopposed, and given enough time, it will get there.
 

Words shift over time but the usage of hyperbole from Americans seem to be so extreme that I can only be reminded of Humpty Dumpty "It means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less"

if they call someone a nazi it means I don't like him, the known meaning of the word has nothing to do with what they are actually saying.
Communist, tiny bit left of me, fascist tiny bit right of me