The left-right spectrum of political speech is getting increasingly crowded. The rise of Donald Trump has popularised the term “alt-right”, which sounds more indie and cool than “far right”. Meanwhile, those on the alt-right have recently begun to describe their opponents as the “alt-left” – a coinage that, asymmetrically, seems to be an attempt to rhetorically downgrade them to a fringe group of eccentrics, rather than a broad coalition of people who don’t like racism much. “What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at the, as you say, the ‘alt-right’?” Trump asked, Solomonically, after the clashes in Charlottesville. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

Some of the people who actually protest against alt-right protesters in the US are from a group called “Antifa”, short for anti-fascist. Their opponents happily adopt the term, aiming to paint any and all anti-racist liberals as a small militant conspiracy, but their acquiescence in such language seems a bit peculiar when you think about it. American shock-babbler Ann Coulter, for example, tweeted that she hoped Trump would denounce “the violent left-wing Antifa that shut down my Berkeley speech!” If Coulter agrees to call her opponents “Antifa”, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

“Fascist”, of course, has long been a term of abuse on the left that has not, historically, been restricted to actual fascists, but applied liberally to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush and many others before Trump. As Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, wrote in 2004: “Fascism – unlike communism, socialism, capitalism, or conservatism – is a smear word more often used to brand one’s foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them.” We may suspect that the same is increasingly true of almost all political descriptors applied to other groups these days.

If Coulter agrees to call her opponents “Antifa”, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

The angry white men who congregated in Charlottesville were widely described as “Nazis”, a usage for which there are arguments both for and against. On the one hand, these people love swastikas, chant things like “blood and soil”, and hate Jews and black people, which definitely seems pretty Nazi. On the other hand, to call them “Nazis” is a convenient “othering” that refuses to acknowledge their identity as Americans, standing in the US’s own proud tradition of violent racism. The first of the three groups calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan formed in the mid-19th century, after all, and US eugenics and investigations into the “science of racial cleansing” in the early 20th century were themselves taken as inspiration for the Nazis’ murderous programme.

To resist calling them “Nazis” is not somehow to make excuses for savage paranoiacs who claim that liberal policies amount to “genocide” of their group. A similar point can be made about the term “neo-Nazi”, which was already in use in the 1940s when actual Nazis were still around, and probably ought to be limited to groups that explicitly want to reconstitute something very like the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The unfortunate truth is that nazism does not exhaust the scope of possible human evil.

What, then, about “white nationalists” or “white supremacists”? Such terms certainly seem more coolly analytical than “fascists” or “Nazis”, though it might be seen as a problem that they both contain the word “white”, and so implicitly acquiesce in the underlying idea that skin colour is really important. And “white supremacist” itself (from 1896) was formed from the earlier phrase “white supremacy” (1824), and thus carries within it the exact noxious ideology that opponents wish to denounce. It might seem that the simple term “racists” would suffice, were it not for the unfortunate fact that there are so many racists in the world that it’s just not specific enough to pick out this particular rump of morons.