It’s a common gambit of dishonest ideologues to argue using vague, muddied terms, if not to abuse language wholesale. Ideologues of all stripes are prone to this mendacious behaviour, of course, but as George Orwell noted, the left are particularly dire masters of the gambit.
Consider merely the word ‘fascism’: it is an ideology with a specific medium, which its founders expressed in both short and very long forms (from Benito Mussolini’s brutally pithy All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, to his and Giovanni Gentile’s long-winded Fascist Manifesto), but of which almost no one who uses the word ‘fascism’ seem in the least aware. Indeed, even when it was a live ideology, Orwell noted how debased the term had become: The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.
