The positions of the commentators in this debate did not correspond to a political division between center and left; on both sides were writers of different political persuasions. Despite Moyn's warning that the primary function of the fascist label was to reassert Whatsapp Mobile Number List centrism and stifle more progressive alternatives (by blaming its supporters for sabotaging the immediate task of defeating Trump), the reality was much more complicated. Some of the most vociferous proponents of the fascist analogy, like Stanley, included pleas for bold progressive reforms, from strengthening unions and ending mass incarceration to fighting militarism, while more centrist commentators, like Jan -Werner Müller, they rejected the epithet.
Proponents of the "Caesarist" analogy in the interwar decades argued that it lent clarity to the analysis. But they also insisted on its controversial value. By Whatsapp Mobile Number List invoking the ghost of the Roman tyrant (at the time, a foundational reference Whatsapp Mobile Number List the North Atlantic political imagination), they hoped to foment unrest and unleash anger. Like most works of the polemical genre, its purpose was not to open the eyes of supporters of the autocracy to their supposed madness, but to infuriate the already persuaded and deepen existing fault lines.
Ironically, this was also one of the causes of the final decline of the term "Caesarism": after the mass atrocities of the 20th century, controversial evocations of Stalin and Hitler had a more visceral appeal than references to Julius Caesar. Polemical writers of the Whatsapp Mobile Number List last two centuries have often launched attacks against new movements, ideologies, or regimes using familiar historical precedents. Nineteenth-century Catholics, for example, lambasted the spread of new liberal ideas and institutions, often characterized as the revival of the Protestant Reformation.