Sure, Harris has caused great excitement among centrists on X, whose favourite pastime is comparing things they don’t like – Trump, Brexit, immigration controls – to fascism. There will be flattering leader pieces in the New York Times and the Guardian, I’m sure, praising her bravery in standing up to “the new fascism”.
But in everyday America, it feels like it isn’t landing. Even in liberal New York City, where I currently am, I sense shoulder-shrugging more than barricade-building over this latest denunciation of Trump as Hitler 2.0.
It is partly that it feels like such a knackered accusation now. It is eight years since Trump won the White House and the American republic is still intact. Whatever your perspective on the events of January 6, he did not crush democracy under the boot of his supposed fascist tendencies. Tens of millions of Americans like him enough to want to vote for him in two weeks’ time. The idea that he is the 1930s made flesh is clearly silly.
Many American voters seem to have cottoned on to the fact that it is a species of the politics of fear. A naked effort by the Dems to terrify people into giving their vote to Kamala. “Vote for me or fascism will return” – it’s hardly inspiring, is it?
There is something else, too. Over the past year, we have seen things in America that really do have the whiff of fascism about them – and they came not from Trump supporters, but from Trump haters. I am referring to the fallout from Hamas’s 7 October assault on the Jews of southern Israel.
That pogrom unleashed across the West a culture of Israelophobia that teetered constantly on the brink of outright anti-Semitism. And nowhere was that clearer than in Leftist circles in liberal America.
Witness the Gaza encampment at Columbia University in New York City, where Jewish students were harassed. Or events at George Washington University, where radical students projected the slogan “Glory to our martyrs” onto a library, in reference to the anti-Semitic terrorists of Hamas. Or any of the anti-Israel demonstrations in cities across the US, where you would often see the swastika mangled with the Star of David and hear chants of praise for Hamas and the Houthis.
This stuff felt genuinely fascistic, or at least profoundly sinister. And it was the handiwork not of Trump or his supposedly “redneck” support base, but of educated Leftists who are far more likely to vote for Harris next month.
This is not to say that Harris is the real “new Hitler”. We’ve had more than enough nonsensical Hitler talk.
It is simply to point out that calling Trump a fascist sounds more ridiculous than ever when Trump’s sworn foes on the American Left are on the streets making life miserable for Jews.