system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Calling any right-leaning person or thing fascist is the same as the left-leaning equivalent being called communist.

To be clear, I am firmly leftist so feel free to consider how this influences my observations and assumptions.

Being on reddit - a rather leftist space - I have noticed a lot of people decrying any policy that is right of centre as fascist. I also particularly notice this on things like supporting Trump - trump supporters are automatically labelled racist extremists and fascists when in reality most are just regular folk (though I must admit that I have only met a very small number of pro-trump people, as I am not American and in my country we generally disliked trump well before he came to political prominence - I am just skeptical to think that about half of the USA are actually the way they are portrayed on reddit).

One thing you have to be aware of, especially in the current political climate and if your views are fairly far from centre, is that assumptions, reasoning, and logical steps that you will take for granted just dont apply to a lot of other people. I know and have befriended lots of people who diametrically oppose my politics and there are a few I can have really interesting discussions with, and whilst I often very severely disagree with them, I can see how their particular situation brought them to their conclusions. And so the best thing you can do to actually have a constructive conversation about this is to empathise and appeal to that line of thinking.

What not to do is to just see that they have come to a conclusion that you don't like and just assume that they are the worst version that they can possibly be. Sure, overt xenophobia is a lost cause and folks who practice that should be condemned because they aren't reasonable. But to go back to the example of trump supporters, seeing only the crazies that invade the capitol building and tarring them all with the same brush is absolute nonsense.

To me it is exactly the same as people on the right claiming that e.g. universal healthcare is communism, or that people who want better wealth equity or racial justice as communists. They're not. Sure, there are some tankies in there, and from my point of view they should be ignored and condemned too, but when I see the entire left being tarred with that brush I just think it's an absolutely nonsensical and bad faith put down to try to avoid any actual discourse and instead just try to say "other side bad"

Remember - the folks who say that are also getting algorithmically fed only the examples of the very worst of the left such as destruction left by BLM protests and the least intelligent amongst the community. That's what they're fed of the left, and we know that we're not actually like that. So don't ignore that self-awareness and extend it to the folks on the right too.

Edit: I realise that I am speaking to a primarily American crowd, but I used trump as a contemporary example and this point is not explicitly about him. Trump himself could ostensibly be labelled as fascist, but the point I am making is that being very slightly right of centre and voting a certain way because it's your party and it aligns with your tax policy is not the same as being far right and voting trump because you hate black people and he will stop immigration. I know that the US electoral system bunches these people together, but that does not mean they're all the same.
gpt
The primary difference is that you could actually make a pretty good case for Trump being at least somewhat fascist: focus on identitarian unity, rhetoric about returning to a pre-lapsarian time of greatness where his followers will drive out the decadent elements ruining society, obsession with a shadowy, omnipresent enemy that is at the same time terrifyingly powerful and laughably weak, resort to populist strong-man politics, challenging democratic election results, exhorting followers to violence, etc etc etc.  Although there are many different schools of thought with slightly different definitions of 'fascism', various of these are primary aesthetic and tactical features of the political philosophy of fascism that most scholars agree on.

Since the right actually elected to president someone with strong fascist tendencies and aesthetics, it's not insane to say that those who support him are supporting fascism, even if that's not what they consciously intend to do.

In contrast, Democrats have never elected a Communist to president, or any major office.  Even the most economically left-wing major figures, like Sanders or Warren, are still entirely ideologically committed to free-market capitalism, and want mild democratic-socialist reforms at most... and they weren't able to get enough support for that to become a presidential candidate.  Instead they elected Biden, the latest in a long string of neoliberal free-market obsessed Democratic presidents.  

There's just no way in which the average Democrat supports a slightly-communist politician, in the way that most Republicans support a slightly-fascist politician in Trump.

Now, even despite that, you may think it's still not *fair* top call them fascists - Trump isn't fascist *enough* for it to be fair, or it's not fair to call them fascist when it's not their *intent* to promote fascism *per se*.  And that's fine.

But the point is it's not a *symmetrical* case, as you were arguing - it's not 'the same thing'.  One side has an ambiguous but plainly evident case, the other side is pure fantasy.