When language dies, nations follow soon after

As political terms lose all meaning and elite contempt for citizens grows, the fundamental question remains whether America can restore the civic virtue that once made it worthy of love

Edmund Burke’s England was indeed lovely, and his wisdom about our capacity for love of country seems cruelly prophetic today. When the Anglo-Irish statesman penned Reflections on the Revolution in France, he understood that a nation’s character—its “distinct system of manners” —must undergird any lasting affection for the homeland. Yet here we stand, citizens of a republic whose vast beauty cannot disguise its withered soul.

The modern American condition is most clearly revealed in our degraded political vocabulary. When every political disagreement becomes “fascist,” for example, we witness not merely semantic inflation but the collapse of serious discourse itself.

Consider the scholarly consensus: Stanley Payne, the foremost authority on European fascism, observed in his seminal 1980 work, Fascism: Comparison and Definition, that “fascism is probably the vaguest of contemporary political terms”. Ernst Nolte developed his “fascist minimum” —antimarxism, antiliberalism, anticonservatis…