THE NATURE OF BIG GOVERNMENT IS AMBIGUOUS.

I cannot remember a Republican nominee from the presidency that Democrats, their court intellectuals, and their willing accomplices in the legacy media haven't attempted to pin the "fascist" label on.  Sometimes that goes as far as a Hitler comparison, and, yes, those have been flying around of late.

Two recent round-ups from the legacy media, to their credit, argue that "fascist" is not as easy to define as, oh, "stalemate," or "no nondegenerate solutions in integers."

I'll start with Kiara Alfonseca of ABC.

Former President Donald Trump has recently been called a "fascist" by his former chief of staff, John Kelly, his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and leading historian Robert Paxton.

Kelly, a former four-star Marine general and former chief of staff to Trump, hammered his old boss as a "fascist" in a New York Times interview.

"Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy," Kelly told The Times.

"So, certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America," he added.

But for scholars who've long studied fascism, defining fascism isn't so simple.

"We're not just debating whether or not Trump fits that definition; we are not agreeing on what that definition is," Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, told ABC News in an interview.

There is no scholarly consensus on the term, according to both Berman and Mark Bray, a political scientist from Rutgers University. This is, in part, because fascists historically have not been tied to "rational consistency," Bray said, pointing to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler whose policy positions changed on a variety of occasions.

I don't know that there is such a thing as "rational consistency" when we are dealing with complex adaptive systems.  About the best we can do is hope to find a set of organizing principles to go to as far as it is practicable to do so.  Associated Press contributors Will Weissert and Laurie Kellman start there.

History's two most famous fascists were Nazi chief Adolf Hitler in Germany and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Known as Il Duce, or “the duke,” Mussolini headed the National Fascist Party, which was symbolized by an eagle clutching a fasces — a bundle of rods with an axe among them.

At Mussolini's urging, in October 1922, thousands of “Blackshirts,” or “squadristi,” made up an armed fascist militia that marched on Rome, vowing to seize power. Hitler's Nazis similarly relied on a militia, known as the “Brownshirts.” Both men eventually imposed single-party rule and encouraged violence in the streets. They used soldiers, but also fomented civilian unrest that pit loyalists against political opponents and larger swaths of everyday society.

Hitler and Mussolini censored the press and issued sophisticated propaganda. They played up racist fears and manipulated not just their active supporters but everyday citizens.

Today, the term fascism has taken on a looser political definition and is often evoked as a catch-all for efforts to spread oppression and racism — as well as to decry dictators or leaders who embrace totalitarian tactics.

It is not just the left that has used the term, denouncing a push rightward in the U.S. and in many parts of the world. Some conservatives decried lockdowns imposed during the coronavirus pandemic as “fascist.”

That article continues with a manifestation of that fomented unrest from Team Trump.

Robert Paxton, a Columbia University professor emeritus who wrote “The Anatomy of Fascism,” has cited the Jan. 6 attack as evidence of Trump's fascism.

“It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” Paxton told The New York Times Magazine in a piece published this week. “It’s the real thing. It really is.”

A social phenomenon that bubbles up from below is emergent, and it might reflect discontent among marginalized people, a sea in which the cadre can swim.

To Berman, fascists are totalitarian with the goal of not just controlling politics, but reshaping society and controlling the economy.

"These were inherently violent movements," Berman said. "They didn't just use violence as a means right to conquer power or to go out and conquer other parts of the world, but they believed violence is an end in and of itself. It had this kind of cleansing and empowering aspect that would again contribute to sort of changing society, changing the individuals that compose society."

Yes, I deliberately mixed all sorts of metaphors leading into that quote.  The distinction between "revolutionary" and "reactionary" violence might not be as clear-cut as Barrington Moore and his ilk had it back when I had longer hair.  The academicians who attempt to define fascism, though, also see all manner of muddles.

David Kertzer, a Brown University professor and Italian historian, said he was “a little horrified” to hear Harris call Trump a fascist given the term's “historical resonance.” He said there are some similarities, including “mass movement, a cult of the strongman.” He noted that Trump sometimes juts out his chin, though he isn't prone to tearing off his shirt and bare his chest, like Mussolini did.

Kertzer said that fascism involved "a one-party state, a banishing of all opposition newspapers and jailing people who disagreed,” and that, while Trump has talked about jailing opponents, he's not moved toward embracing other key facets of the movement.

"Multicultural transformation" is a fancy way of saying "reshaping society," isn't it?  "Controlling the economy" is the quintessence of industrial policy, isn't it?  Complaints about "disinformation" or "misinformation" don't rise to the banishment of opposition newspapers, but that's not exactly consistent with constitutional principles, is it?

That's what happens, dear reader, when you trash the mediating institutions because it's convenient.  A decadent or nihilistic culture can be a seedbed for fascism.

“There are certain echoes, but in terms of turning the Republican Party into a one-party state, that seems rather farfetched at the moment,” said Kertzer, author of “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe.”

David Clay Large, a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies, said “the alarm bells now going off may be somewhat overblown."

“Our democratic institutions, however beleaguered, remain much stronger than those of the European nations that turned fascist in the ‘20s and ’30s,” Large said. Still, he added, there would be “a real danger to these institutions” in a second Trump presidential term.

The rise of far-right parties across Europe and Trump’s control of the GOP, Large said, carves out “an entirely new situation: The center cannot hold as it once did.”

Add to that mix social media, which in the digital age mirrors the use of propaganda, amping up emotions and division, he said.

"Where everyone’s an expert, we’ve lost respect for factuality, objectivity, and actual expert opinion,” Large said.

An expert class that got a few things right, which we haven't seen much of lately, might be the place to start, although acknowledging that facts are stubborn things and some realities are objectively true could be even more important.