In the interwar decades, many observers of rising fascism failed to understand what was new about this threat. Clinging to the word fascism to define today’s growing reactionary forces risks falling into the same trap.

Over three decades ago, the British historian Tim Mason sounded the alarm. He spoke of a “disappearance of theories or articulated concepts of fascism from research and writing.” Examining the relationship between Italian Fascism and German Nazism, Mason urged scholars to identify these regimes’ “specific” similarities and their contrasts, while maintaining “a strict agnosticism” about the radical uniqueness of either of them. At first glance, such debates may seem remote from today’s political climate, when discussion of fascism seems ever present. Yet the questions Mason

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