Maybe we should pH balance our political vocabulary.
There should be fascism and phascism.
Fascism would be what actual fascists supported. You can read about their doctrines in Giovanni Gentile, for example. People who have actually read Gentile and Rocco and Mussolini would get to refer to fascism. And spell it right.
Everybody else would spell their understandings of the term, in their preferred loosey-goosey ways, without any historical justification (just like most uses), as “phascism.”
This would especially be the case for Marxists, who have always mischaracterized fascism for their own political advantage, and social justice warriors, who cannot explain the term in any plausible way, and libertarians, who think it makes sense to tar neo-mercantilism with the f-word.
Oh, and especially those people who spell Adolf Hitler’s name not with an “f” but with a “ph”: phascism is for you!
Wirkman Comment 