1 December 2015
The term for a right-wing political ideologue arises in post-World War One Italy, but its etymological roots go back to the Roman Empire. Fascis (pl. fasces) is Latin for a bundle of rods, especially one bound with an axe, and carried before a Roman magistrate as a symbol of power and authority. English use of the word dates to the late sixteenth century, and the use of the image of fasces has a long history—bronze reliefs of fasces appear on either side of the speaker’s rostrum in the U. S. House of Representatives, for instance.
In the late nineteenth century the term was adopted by a number of Sicilian labor and socialist groups. The government cracked down and disbanded these groups in 1894, but they did succeed in the implementation of social and labor reforms. Papers of the British parliament use the term Fasci in 1893 to describe these groups, although the use was italicized, indicating that it was an Italian, not an English, word:
Several local unions were dissolved without legal cause, meetings were broken up, leaders and members of the Fasci imprisoned, the flags of the unions confiscated, and legal proceedings instituted against many of the members.
Following the First World War, various right-wing Italian political groups co-opted the symbol and the name Fascismo. These groups coalesced into Benito Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista by 1921. English use of Fascist to describe members of this right-wing movement is found as early as October 1919 in the pages of the Observer newspaper:
The “Fascists”—a group, this, of political opportunists which, beyond expressing ultra-patriotic doctrines, seems to have no more definite policy than that of attaining to power.
The use of fascism to describe the movement and its ideology appears by February 1921 in the Syracuse, NY Daily Herald in a stunningly wrong prophecy:
No doubt fascism is a transitory phenomenon.
By 1934 English-language commentators were using Fascism to describe the ideology of the Nazi Party in Germany and similar groups in other countries.
The first citation in the OED of the term in a figurative sense for autocratic or intolerant behavior in general dates to 1939 in a letter by writer Dylan Thomas:
I think that to fight, for instance, the fascism of bad ideas by uniforming & regimenting good ones will be found, eventually, to be bad tactics.
In the decades following the Second World War, the semantic power of fascism and fascist became increasingly watered down and often applied, once again, to progressive or left-wing groups and initiatives. In 2007 the Adam Smith Institute in Britain could post on its blog regarding anti-smoking regulations:
When modern filtration can make the air even cleaner than it was before anyone lit up, an outright ban is just fascism—an attempt by one group to impose its own choice of lifestyle on another.
Or this that appeared in the Scottish version of the Sun newspaper in February 2013:
[His] obsession with food fascism reached new heights this week with a demand that the entire [...] Staples Centre in Los Angeles should be cleared of all meat products before he takes the stage.
Sources:
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. fasces, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s. v. fascio, n.; fascism, n.; fascist, n. and adj.