In one respect it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump and the other MAGA leaders in charge of the federal government are fascists or simply corrupt authoritarian oligarchs — it’s bad either way, and we need to get rid of them and their policies and turn around the social forces that gave rise to them.

But to assert, as Daniel Bessner does in “This Is America,” an article published in in this magazine on March 27, that the “use of the term obscures both the nature and stakes of the present moment” is wrong. The meaning of fascism may be debated, and as Bessner notes, there is a long tradition of scholarly argument around its definition. But to deny that Trumpism is a contemporary form of fascism one must put forward at least one of those plausible definitions and provide evidence of how MAGA fails to fit. This Bessner does not do.

And it is precisely what he calls “the nature and the stakes of the present moment” that demand understanding that a fascist movement is taking power in our country.