A Chapter in the American Spellbook  – Emmett Rensin

I thought of the many names of Marduk (called Zisi, subduer of the aggressor) last November when I watched the critic Vivian Gornick heckled live by her own fans because she wouldn’t call the president of the United States a fascist. Vivian Gornick is 90 years old. In 1969, she announced the formation of the New York Radical Feminists in a column for the Village Voice. In 2011, she was a National Jewish Book Award finalist for her biography of the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman. She is the author or editor of over a dozen books with titles like Essays in Feminism, Women in Science, and Woman in Sexist Society. Her most famous is called The Romance of American Communism. Moments before the jeers began, she’d read an essay originally published a month after the 2016 presidential election, one in which she characterized the result as a fit of national paranoia carried out by “those who quail before the specter of unlimited secular democracy.” Vivian Gornick is not an apologist for Donald Trump.

Still: During the Q-and-A portion of a reading at the Brooklyn Public Library, she reacted skeptically to the idea that the president was literally a fascist who had, in the nine months since he’d returned to the White House, ushered in a fascist society, and it was at that point that several members of the audience—who had up to that point no doubt been awed to find themselves within shouting distance of a genuine legend of red American letters—really began to shout. Come on, Vivian. For god’s sake, Vivian. It wasn’t enough that Vivian agreed with them on the facts, on the stakes, on the urgency. They needed her to say the word. They couldn’t believe she wouldn’t say it. They demanded she confer the name: Trump, called fascist, who is a really bad kind of guy. He is a fascist, Vivian, as if by saying so she might compel herself, compel the crowd, compel the world to—something. What?

The “fascism wars,” as they are sometimes called, have been waged for a decade now without a settlement. Although this has superficially involved a lot of back-and-forth sniping between partisans for and against the president across various social media platforms, the bulk of the debate—the grinding attritional warfare over details, the long essays and insults, the urgency—has taken place not, as you might expect, between critics of the president (who are employing “fascist” as a rough synonym for “super bad”) and his defenders (who are rejecting it on the basis that he is not, in their view, super bad), but, like Vivian and her hecklers, between figures in the broad American liberal-left spectrum who already agree on the underlying facts of the case: Donald Trump is a bad president. He is a dangerous president. He is a threat to Our Institutions (if the speaker is liberal) or Our People (if the speaker would call themselves “left” as distinct from liberal). He’s cruel. He’s lawless. He’s got authoritarian tendencies. He’s a fascist. No. That’s not quite right. Yes, it is. No, it isn’t. He’s a fascist. I think it would be more accurate to say … He’s a fascist. This is fascism. Say it.

In 2021, fully six years into the fascism wars, Dissent’s Udi Greenberg reflected on the “endless” “avalanche of books and essays” on the subject, produced—as Greenberg pointed out—by “participants in this debate [who] did not differ all that much from one another politically.” In 2023, The Nation’s Chris Lehmann (he’s-a-fascist) once again declared that “The ‘Is Donald Trump a Fascist?’ Debate Has Been Ended” in favor of the ayes and bemoaning the “exasperating and self-involved intellectual sideshow” it had taken to get there. But in 2024, the same magazine published another essay—cautiously titled “Making Sense of the Fascism Debate”—in which author Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins warned readers to “be suspicious of historians moonlighting as prophets of doom and democratic avengers.” 

In early 2025, the left-wing critic John Ganz (he’s-a-fascist) called the debate “very bitter and personal,” accusing skeptics like Robin of resorting “freely to ridicule, insults, and pathologization” before admitting to “[calling] them a bunch of names too: posers, little bureaucrats, and much worse.” Ganz titled his reflection “There Was Never Any Fascism Debate,” but by the end of 2025, he found himself on a livestream with political reporter and novelist Ross Barkan (not-a-fascist) once again having the “fascism debate” that apparently never was. The episode lasted more than two hours and settled nothing except which of the interlocutors was better at arguing (Ganz) and which was easier on the eyes and ears (Barkan). The debate mainly functioned as a kind of kayfabe for those still longing for the days of Heated Literary Rivalries. The participants spent the next few weeks taking petty swipes at one another for their fans. The debate—past tense, settled, never a debate at all—continues.

I can’t tell you if Donald Trump is a fascist. Sorry. Given that one of the few virtues of the president is that he is often more willing to simply say what he’s up to than even his defenders, I’m not particularly interested in what the answer to the question would reveal. But the asking of the question—the relentless intensity with which it has been asked, the years of insults, factionalism, thousands of words of exasperated disbelief published under dozens of Mission Accomplished headlines and followed, inevitably, by thousands of words more, the heated, nearly hysterical acrimony between otherwise ordinary adults over whether or not you should just say it, Vivian—that, I believe, may be revealing.

Participants in the fascism wars have given various accounts of the point of all of this, each of which has been ridiculous and none of which have explained the libidinal fervor of their participation. The most ludicrous explanation of all is accuracy, in part because the accuracy question is only a reframing of the debate over how the word “fascism” is defined, a rather dry topic of academic inquiry that has gone on since before the dust settled in Berlin, producing answers ranging from the position that any militarized capitalist state is to some degree “fascist” to the position that it’s only fascism when it comes from the fascismo region of Italy and which—because fascism is a term of political theory and not a constative element of matter with measurable physical properties—cannot be definitively answered. Fights over the load-bearing power of technical terms do not generally get the blood boiling.

Only slightly less implausible are explanations by way of persuasion and prediction. In its battlefield report, Dissent characterized the fascism wars as “a disagreement about the role of language and history in shaping political agendas,” a debate over “polemic and its value for … political mobilization.” This might explain the passion of the debate, give it a bit of urgency, but precisely nobody believes that the word “fascism” is persuasive. They may believe that other critics of the president can be persuaded—bullied, hectored, heckled, or humbled—into saying it, but there is nobody anywhere who believes that there exist large swaths of Trump voters who would change their minds should they start encountering the word “fascism” in every critical essay they read about the president rather than in roughly half of them. Somebody may have believed it once—the Harris campaign seemed to believe it when it wagered the 2024 election on “threats to democracy”—but like those once invested in the rhetorical weight of the New York Times printing “lie” in a headline, that phase of the conflict has been definitively settled by history without any appreciable impact on the intensity of the overall war.  On prediction, it is enough to reiterate President Trump’s tendency to express his tyrannical desires plainly. What is left to predict?

Among the explanations in circulation, the most plausible is that this is all a kind of self-aggrandizement, something that began as a minor debate over terminology and spiraled into a decade-long dictionary-measuring contest between academics and essayists who do not generally see this kind of action. But there is a desperation to the fascism debate, an urgency animating the name-brand participants and the anonymous audience hecklers alike, that cannot be explained exclusively by the ego. There is psychology here. But it comes from some other, more tempestuous region of the psyche, a part animated not by the meanings of words, but by the words themselves: their power, their enchantment, their effects not as descriptors or motivators or persuaders, but as spells. 

The fantasy revealed by the character and intensity of the fascism debate is the fantasy that certain words attach a compulsion to their speakers, that certain incantations do shape reality, compel the listener, bind them, summon ancient and irresistible powers. One only has to follow the fantasy to its conclusion, to the imagined moment where the heckler wins their case at last by way of some consensus universal dictionary (See? Donald Trump meets four of five criteria for fascist, and the definition says a person need only meet three to qualify!) and their interlocutor, forced to concede, is not so much persuaded of anything but bound by a kind of magic to inhabit the world where fascists simply cannot be. Just say it, Vivian. Just say it, everyone. Fascist as Rumpelstiltskin: Say it and Trump will be banished back to hell. In the medieval Irish story Brislech Mór Maige Muirthemne, Cú Chulainn, the greatest warrior of Ulster, was bound by a powerful geis: His name, given by the druid Cathbad and meaning “Hound of Culaan,” forbade him from eating the meat of a dog. But among the Irish, there was a powerful taboo against refusing hospitality; to do so would have shamed him beyond measure. When these two compulsions fell into predictable conflict, Cú Chulainn felt his strength leave his body and died in battle the same day. Fascist as a mighty geis: Force the world to say it, and the Orange Man shall fall, struck down by the cosmic referees.

Fascist is not the only word that has become a locus lately for American fantasy life.  The particulars of that debate—the president, the infighting among members of the liberal-left, the vagaries of Italian history—only mark it as a particular instance of a conflagration found wherever Americans, feeling increasingly powerless to do much of anything about the issues dearest to them, have begun to vest the words themselves with the power to act.  The declaration of racism took on similarly incantatory powers for more identitarian liberals at the end of the last decade; corruption became a spell for those invested in the 2025 crusades of Elon Musk. Fake news switched sides, as did woke. The oldest thaumaturgic talisman in American life, communist, still retains a great deal of its power. Since 2023, we have witnessed a rare bidirectional appellative mania between genocide and antisemitism, as if the former might compel those invested in Israeli self-defense to turn on it, and the latter might cause those who object to the murder of Gazan children to suddenly approve.

Both camps invested a great deal of time in resisting these specific terms. They spent more time insisting on or outraged over these words than they did on resolving any number of disagreements over the facts that might inform a consensus judgement of the conflict (many Americans possess a semi-conscious belief in magic; none are stupid enough to believe any consensus is forthcoming here). This only reveals how potent the onomastic fantasy has become. These are not merely rhetorical disputes. Nobody who approves of Israeli foreign policy would actually change their mind if only some international body declared a Gazan genocide. Nobody who disapproves would change their mind if some high linguistic council ruled such accusations antisemitism. It does not matter if either, or both, or neither term is accurate. I won’t tell you what I think. I couldn’t persuade you because nobody fears persuasion. They fear the hex, the taint, the bad voodoo that would come from leaving the adversary’s curses uncontested. As faintly ridiculous as this all may be, I suspect it is easier to bear than the growing alternative, where words, already bereft of their persuasive and descriptive powers, lose their magic too. A world where concession means nothing. Okay, I’m a fascist. Okay, I’m corrupt. I’m a genocide apologist, a racist, an antisemite: So what? Now what? It is easier to believe, more tolerable to believe, that certain words, gravely spoken, retain their power to rule certain desires and attitudes out of bounds.

It’s fitting that this state of affairs is best explained by another word whose accurate meaning has long since been buried under its apotropaic powers: poststructuralism. You may have winced to read it, but remember: We are talking about hexes here. I am also sorry to report that whatever your reaction to the term, you live in the world that this theory made; you already implicitly accept its orientation. In its broadest terms, the poststructuralist theorists of the 20^th century revealed that our language is not dead, that words do not possess fixed meanings anchored to the “real” things that they describe. Beneath the technical language you may have mistaken for nonsense—talk of referents and significations, différance and the transcendental signified—there is only the insight that our capacity to describe the world, to describe ourselves, to advance ideas, to say almost anything at all is built upon unstable ground, on words with many shades of meaning. These words are defined and redefined by context and by use, by who is speaking and whose speech carries weight in its context. There is no consensus universal dictionary, pinned forever in its place by God. Our lives occur in an arbitrary subsection of a negotiation without end. Because we are not telepathic—because I cannot show you precisely what I mean, what I feel, what I see; because neither you nor I can think of anything the least bit complicated without thinking of words—our lives are built on the same shifting stuff as the language we use to speak it. The map, as Alfred Korzybski said, is not the territory. But we speak in maps and think in maps and fight over how to draw them.

If this seems obvious, then it should only show you how much theory is in the groundwater you were born to. As another man so influential that his thoughts have become white noise even to those who treat him as a specter said: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” 

The poststructuralist revelation of the accessible world as mere discourse arose—perhaps not coincidentally—just as the world became more terribly and incessantly connected than it had even been before, when it began to seem that everything had taken on an impossible and painful urgency. One of the few remaining points of absolute consensus in the United States is that something is very wrong. You are bombarded daily with the urgency of it all. Everything is important. Everything is a crisis. Every act, every word, every development in every nation in the world demands your attention, your action, your effort to understand what is happening. This is true whether you are committed to the notion that Donald Trump is a fascist or the notion that the Deep State will make you eat bugs, or the notion that both of these views and a million others are symptoms of a world going mad. And yet the world, so immediate, has never been so obscured behind the kaleidoscopic haze of mediation. Reality dissolves on contact, the event recedes behind the coverage of the event, the discourse about the coverage, the counter-coverage, counter-discourse. It would be hard enough to grab hold of the situation, to get it under control. It is impossible when the brain goes fogged and desperate, when you have trouble just remembering what you were trying to grab in the first place. The world has never seemed so immediate and real. The world has never seemed more glib, obscured, and stupid. If you could only think straight about it, look straight at it, hear it beneath the smoke and din—but you can’t, not most days, and neither you nor I nor anyone will ever be able to again.

The situation is intolerable. Like any intolerable thing, it has given way to hysterical regression. Unable to retreat back into the Enlightenment’s tidy correspondence of world and language, we have begun clawing back further still, to the pre-Shakespearean belief that calling the flower rose is what makes it smell so sweet. Belief is not quite right. Nobody will say that they believe that words are incantations. Almost nobody will profess a belief in magic. But we act—we argue, we insist, we tell Vivian to just say it—as if it were so. There is a video I saw once many years ago, although nobody else seems to remember seeing it: two LARPers in a public park, one yelling “Fireball! Fireball!” while the other, holding a pretend sword, says “I blocked it! I blocked it!” every time. The fireball man gets frustrated: You can’t just block every fireball. He wants the sword man to play by the rules of the game, to respect the fantasy of what philosopher J.L. Austin called the perlocutionary act. But as his frustration grows—Fireball! Fireball! I blocked it! I blocked it!—you can see desire in his eyes, see a secret hope that a real fireball will emerge from his hands and settle the matter for good. 

In the 13^th century, among the Vikings of the Eiríks saga rauða, there were no police, no prisons, no executive authority at all. The people were ruled by the Althing, an assembly of free men presided over by the law speaker, who could recite vár lög, our law, by memory. When a man was accused of a grave crime, his victim or his victim’s family could bring the man before the Althing. If found guilty, and unwilling to make any other compensation, that man could be pronounced skógarmaðr, a man of the forest, a wolf, beyond vár lög, an outlaw. A man called outlaw could be killed without penalty. No man within the law could give him food or shelter. His property could be seized. No Viking believed the Althing had cast a real spell, but everyone abided by their word. It was in this way that Erik the Red fled from Iceland and sailed west, where he discovered Greenland, a new territory not marked on any map. We do not live in the world of the Althing—of Erik, of the skógarmaðr whose new name binds the world to forsake him—anymore. Now we know that “outlaw” is just a word. We cannot even form a quorum to pronounce it. Erik could just say, Okay, I’m an outlaw. I’m skógarmaðr. So what? Now what? What are you going to do about it? Lmao, he’d say, rofl, lol, lmao, sure pal, lol, before raising half a million dollars on GoFundMe and setting off to conquer Greenland properly, in style.