Story highlights Michael Weiss: It's jarring to hear hatemongers in Charlottesville described as members of the "alt-right," which is a euphemism

The violence in Charlottesville reminds us that fascism is alive and well in America, Weiss writes

Michael Weiss is an international affairs analyst for CNN and author of "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror." The opinions in this article belong to the author.

(CNN) A year before the end of the Second World War, George Orwell wrote an essay inspired by an American poll, which asked for a serviceable definition of "fascism."

The answers, he noted, ranged from "pure democracy" to "pure diabolism." And to this admittedly baggy semantic category, Orwell added the examples of people applying it fatuously to the Boy Scouts, the London Metropolitan Police, the Catholic Church and the British Labour Party, until he finally concluded that "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless."

The man who wrote "Politics and the English Language" had taken a bullet in the throat from a Francoist solider in Spain and so it was especially shrewd of him to detect, in 1944, that a pointed political term had been worn down into a cliche encompassing everything from a nasty child on the playground to an agent of the Gestapo. His advice was to use it "with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."

Curiously, this degeneration has proceeded apace with the far more specific term "Nazism," which has become a postmodern byword for authoritarian cruelty, if not a cartoon label applicable to feminists, as per Rush Limbaugh, and sitcom soup-ladlers alike. However, the f-word, which is less moored by time and place, has all but abandoned the American lexicon when it is arguably most in need of revival.

If the old rule for hardcore pornography — "you know it when you see it" — is no measure to go by, then surely taking fascism's modern adherents at their own word should be. Why, then, do so many Americans stubbornly refuse to do just that?