Fascism? Maybe...

The word fascism is everywhere now.

Every administration that takes office in this country, in either direction, gets the label slapped on it within the first ninety days. The administration in the seat as I’m writing this is wearing it constantly. The previous one wore it constantly too, from the other side. The one before that wore it on the way out. It doesn’t matter who is in the chair. The word is going to show up on the front page within a quarter.

This bothers me, but probably not for the reason you’d expect.

I’m not bothered because I have a horse in the partisan race. I’m bothered because the technical definition of fascism — the historical one, the one that produced the bodies in the photographs — is enormously specific, and almost nothing happening in modern American politics fits it. Real fascism is a fusion of state and corporate power under a single charismatic ruler, mobilized around ethnic and national myth, willing to deploy organized political violence against domestic dissent, dissolving the institutions that limit executive authority, and channeling the whole machine toward war and racial purification. Mussolini did this. Hitler did this. Franco did a version. The mid-twentieth century has a body count we’re still counting. None of the modern American administrations being called fascist are doing the actual thing the word means. The institutions are still standing. The opposition party still campaigns. The courts still issue rulings the executive doesn’t like. The press still publishes. Voters still vote, and the side that loses still gets to be loud about it.

So technically the word is wrong.

But the people using it aren’t doing technical history. They’re reporting a felt experience, and the felt experience is real even if the label is wrong. The felt experience is closer to a spiritual crisis. An administration is in power. It has actual priorities — not the polite both-sides-agree priorities of a thirty-year consensus, but its own sharp set, picked by its own coalition, and pursued through the democratic process the country is still nominally running. Those priorities cut directly against the priorities of the people who lost the election. The people who lost look at the executive orders, the agency reshuffles, the policy direction, the rhetoric, and they feel an existential thing — my values are not in the room. The room is being run by someone whose values come from somewhere else, and the values are being installed on a fast clock.

That feeling is real. It’s also, in any normal democratic system, the feeling of losing an election. The other side gets the keys for a while. The keys turn the car in a direction you don’t want. You wait, you organize, you build, you try to win the keys back. That has been the shape of self-government since self-government was invented. Calling the experience fascism inflates the word until it stops meaning what it used to mean.

When I hear the word now, I hear something more like these priorities are way too narrow and way against my values. That’s a coherent complaint. The priorities probably are narrow. That’s what priorities are. A focused agenda is, by construction, going to ignore the things outside the focus, and the people who care about the things outside the focus are going to be unhappy. The complaint translates honestly into we lost, and the people who won aren’t going to do the things we wanted done. Fair. Welcome to democracy. Pick a tribe, organize for fifty years, and try again.

The thing that worries me about the inflation of the word is the second-order effect. If we’re calling everything fascism, then when the actually darker thing rises — and the actually darker thing does eventually rise, in every civilization, on a long enough timeline — the word will already be spent. We’ll have burned the alarm bell on every administration that turned the steering wheel a little harder than we wanted, and by the time someone shows up who fits the technical definition, the word will land on ears that have heard it a thousand times and tuned it out. The next generation of operator may be darker than anything in living memory, and the warning system the previous decades trained will be deaf. That’s a real cost. It’s going to be paid by people who don’t yet know they’re going to need the warning that has been pre-broken for them.

Life is a constant balancing act, and I’m not in this essay to litigate the politics. I’m here to do something different with the word, in my own house, on purpose.

I’m running my life on one priority. One.

The priority is health. That’s the entire list. The body, the metabolism, the nervous system, the marriage that runs on top of those, the foundation, the protocol, the inputs that produce a calm and capable animal that can do whatever else the universe asks of it. That’s the priority. There is no second priority. The other things on the previous essay’s list — the household, the writing, the land, the inner ring — are real, but they are downstream of health, because none of them works if the body underneath them stops working. Health is the first node. Everything else hangs off it.

Most people would call this excessive. The word a few of them have used lately, half-joking and half-not, is fascist. You’re kind of a health fascist, Jeff. Said with affection. Said also with a small accusation underneath, because the discipline is uncomfortable to be near, and the easiest way to handle discomfort is to label it with the most aggressive word in reach.

Fine. I’ll take it.

Health Fascist. I’ll wear it. The word is technically wrong — there’s no ethnic myth in my basement gym, no political violence at the cold plunge, no charismatic ruler beyond the standard I set with myself when I was sober — but the feeling people are pointing at when they reach for the word is accurate. The priority is narrow. The priority is non-negotiable. The priority crowds out a lot of things polite adult life expects you to also care about. The priority is, in the felt sense of the person across the table, too much.

It’s too much, on purpose, because the alternative — running three priorities at once, or six, or twenty — has been the experiment of every adult I know, and it hasn’t produced the outcomes mine has produced. The hundred pounds came off because the priority was narrow. Effie’s medication list shrank because the priority was narrow. The marriage is in the trench at year fifteen because the priority was narrow. The body works at fifty in a way it didn’t work at forty because the priority was narrow. Broadening the priority is the move that would unwind the gains.

Here’s the part that matters most. The discipline doesn’t feel like discipline from the inside. The narrow priority isn’t a grind — it’s a neuro-chemical buffet of happiness you can’t get in a pill. The body that’s well-fed, well-trained, well-slept, well-loved, and well-pointed produces, as a daily output, a chemistry the pharmaceutical industry has spent eighty years failing to replicate. The pills are downstream guesses at what the body produces upstream for free when the inputs are correct. The Health Fascist isn’t white-knuckling through a joyless protocol — the Health Fascist is the one in the room having the best Tuesday afternoon of any human within fifty yards, and the other people in the room, kindly, in the polite way the modern world handles excellence it can’t quite forgive, call him a fascist.

I’ll wear the word. I’ll wear it with joy, because joy is the actual output of the protocol, and the people calling me the word are mostly not having any. The pejorative becomes the brand. The brand becomes the recruitment poster for anyone in the room who’s quietly tired of running their life on the standard six-priority American protocol and getting back the standard mediocre American result.

Fascism, in the historical sense, was about subjugating the individual to the state. Health fascism, in the only sense I’m willing to claim, is the opposite — the individual subjugating everything else to the project of becoming a working human, on purpose, for the rest of an honest life. The word is the same. The vector is opposite.

So go ahead. Call it. Call me. I’ll answer to it. The label is wrong on the history and right on the energy, and I’ll trade the history for the energy any day of the week.

Health Fascist. Hell yeah.