In his weekly Big Tent newsletter, Brian Beutler says the time for nuance is over:

[Since] a neo-Nazi adherent of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory massacred 11 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY’s, black community, . . .  zero elected Republicans who have espoused or played footsie with the same fascist libel recanted or renounced the lie that elites—usually (((elites))) in their telling—have orchestrated a mass influx of non-whites to the U.S. in order to breed the white race out of political relevance, if not actual existence. [Meanwhile] Republicans nominated a fascist named Doug Mastriano to run for governor of Pennsylvania—largely, it seems, because Mastriano has promised to overturn future elections when Democrats win them. . . .

We’ve reached a juncture where few Republicans will renounce the Great Replacement lie, where many will embrace it, even as it drives violent fascists to commit mass murder; where they close ranks around an enemy of democracy like Doug Mastriano, knowing there cannot be a free-and-fair presidential election so long as he’s in power; where Republicans in Congress purge all truth-seeking members, but provide safe harbor for any and all fascists in the House of Representatives (so long as they don’t drop a dime about the Washington GOP’s secret moral deviancy).

It’s more than fair to say that the [Republican Party] has been captured by a fascist movement, and if that’s what you want people to take away from the shit-flooded-zone of politics, you’re better off saying so than meekly gesturing in that direction. . . .

Republicans are of course happy to tell all kinds of egregious lies about their opponents, particularly in the Trump era. But the idea isn’t to just turn the tables. It’s to make voters hear accurate warnings about the modern GOP at least as often as they hear GOP agitprop about socialism or “grooming” or whatever the latest slander is.

And this is why I think simple, forceful, resonant messages will serve Democrats much better than over-researched ones or excessively specific ones. Precision is important for getting tenure but it’s often the enemy of solidarity.

Liberals (because they’re liberals) like to parse the fascism question into dust. Perhaps it’s safer, to avoid the wrath of fact-checking gods, or to play it safe with more all-encompassing terms like authoritarianism, or more refined ones like Christian nationalism. But we are by no means playing a Price is Right-style game where the goal is to lay the GOP bare with as much nuance as possible, without going even $0.01 over the perfectly accurate description. For one thing, there is no perfectly accurate description; for another, pinpointing various shades of fasc-ish authoritarianism makes it hard to convey the critical fact, which is danger: racial supremacy, violence, Orwellian lies, dictatorship.

Christian nationalism is not a good thing, when you know what it is—but if you don’t know what it is, the words don’t convey the horrors Republicans would like to impose on the country. Which explains in part why the far-right is so fond of it: There are a lot of Christians in America, and most Americans don’t have uniformly negative associations with the word nationalism. “Since [Charlottesville], there has been a major shift among far-right groups, white nationalists, and militias toward espousing Christian nationalism, much like the Ku Klux Klan did,” Alexander Reid Ross, a scholar of radical-right movements, told the New Yorker last year. “The tactic has been to use Christian nationalism to cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism.”

. . . Not every Republican in Congress uses fascistic rhetoric or seeks fascistic power. [But they are all comfortable saying] “the radical Democrat socialist party blah blah blah” and out the other side shoots endless handwringing over whether Democrats have moved too far left.

. . . Almost every Republican in elected office has acted irresponsibly since D____ T____ took over. . .  It’s fair to say of them that their irresponsibility—whether driven by fear or ambition or both—has included putting party over country. [Even if] they haven’t embraced the ethos of fascist slime, the time has come for them to take sides. Do they subscribe to the the same ideology as the Nazi who massacred the grocery store or not? Their colleagues are fascists—what are they going to do about it?

Toying around with terms like “ultra-MAGA” is a way of getting at this same distinction by speaking in code. But after everything we’ve been through, who honestly believes allusion is a more persuasive tactic, a better way to drive narratives, than just shouting from the rooftops.

The good news for Democrats [is] they can note that Doug Mastriano will steal elections from voters, and [his Democratic opponent] Joshua Shapiro will not; Mastriano will sign a bill banning abortion; Shapiro will veto it. The Republican wants to crush our freedoms to govern ourselves, our bodies, our families. What does that sound like to you?