What does it mean to label someone a fascist? Today, it is equated with denouncing someone as a Nazi. But as intellectual historian Paul E. Gottfried writes in this provocative yet even-handed study, the term's meaning has evolved over the years. Gottfried examines the semantic twists and turns the term has endured since the 1930s adn traces the word's polemical function within the context of present ideological struggles. Like conservatism, liberalism, and other words whose meanings have changed with time, fascism has been used arbitrarily over the years and now stands for a host of iniquities that progressives, multiculturalists, and libertarians oppose, even if they offer no single, coherent account of the historic evil they condemn. -- from dust jacket.