The "good" side no longer has results, it only has insults left

In August 1936, in the first Moscow trial, Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev (early Bolsheviks, Lenin's comrades) were found guilty of belonging to a Trotsky-fascist bloc. The accusation was not based on any evidence of collusion with real fascism, embodied at that time by Mussolini and Hitler; it served to merge all possible opponents into a single word, placing them, according to the formula of prosecutor Vishinski, among the enemies of the people whom it was no longer worth contradicting, as they were outside legitimate political humanity.

Almost ninety years later, the procedure has not disappeared; it has only changed its vocabulary.

A word emptied of meaning

In 1946, George Orwell already noted in Politics and the English Language that the word fascism had lost its own meaning, except to designate "something undesirable." Eighty years later, his diagnosis applies almost literally to the Western political use of the terms "fascist" or "racist": wielded in Parliament, on television, or on social media, they describe less and less a precise ideology (integral nationalism, economic corporatism, cult of the leader) and more and more a simple moral boundary between the side of good and the rest.

During the 2023 pension reform in France, for example, several opposition deputies labeled the government as fascist, without ever discussing the pension funding figures. Few of those who use these words would, moreover, be able to define historical fascism beyond the insult itself.

The insult as a substitute for balance or debate

This displacement compensates for a deficit. When a political movement lacks economic results to showcase, or has proposals too fragile to withstand numerical scrutiny, the moral disqualification of the opponent becomes rationally more profitable than debating the facts.

La France Insoumise (far left in France), which has never held national power and whose economic program remains largely unquantified by independent institutes, illustrates the mechanism. The party leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, regularly labels police, government, or opponents as fascist, without ever engaging in debate about the migratory, security, or budgetary results that his own political family could present.

The side of good has virtue and a superior moral grandeur, and that is more important than balances or arguments.

The procedure is not exclusive to Europe. Argentine kirchnerism, faced with a catastrophic economic balance (with inflation, poverty, or financial isolation), has also labeled its opponents, from Mauricio Macri to Javier Milei, as fascists instead of debating monetary or fiscal policy.

The mechanism is universal; where balance is lacking, where there are no valid arguments, insults thrive, and where insults thrive, democratic debate recedes. When there are no concrete results left to defend before voters or proposals to advocate, there is always, conveniently, a fascist to denounce.