There can be few more worrying symptoms of the degradation of political discourse in the West than the hyper-inflation of the term “fascism”. Kamala Harris’s splenetic invective against Trump is not only a sign of the panic gripping her campaign in the dying days of the presidential election – it represents a dangerous trend that needs to stop.
Today, any challenge to progressive orthodoxy risks being labelled fascist. Question lax border security or the need for voter ID? Fascist. Happy that the Supreme Court has returned abortion as a political issue to the democratic deliberation of state legislatures? Fascist. Support free speech and oppose bureaucratic overreach? Also (somehow) fascist.
This unconscionably loose use of rhetoric for political gain is a symptom of the decline of political discourse in the West and a mark of how far Western political culture has slipped its moorings in the more measured moral mythography that Christianity bequeathed it.
The hyper-inflation of fascism as a term is, of course, wildly anachronistic. Fascism ought to denote nothing more than a circumscribed phenomenon in interwar Italy, specifically Mussolini’s fusion from 1922 onwards of corporatism, militarism, and futurism under the totalising sway of state control. It was a self-consciously neo-pagan invocation of the power and prestige of Republican Rome, distilled in the metonym of the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods woven around an axe to symbolise the strength and unity of the state.
Now the label seems to function as little more than a weapon to demonise perfectly principled resistance to radical progressive politics.
The latest barrage of insults against Trump marks a new low for the Harris-Walz campaign. How far the ticket has fallen from the euphoric sugar-high of Harris’s coronation as the Democrat Party’s nominee – a coronation that was, incidentally, arguably the least democratic selection of a presidential candidate in living memory, and quite the contrast to Trump’s crushing victories over his rivals in the GOP primaries.
If Trump is indeed a fascist, he is a remarkably unconvincing one. Far from seeking to weld every aspect of life to state control, his platform is geared towards reducing federal power and protecting those pre-political institutions – families, churches, charities, corporations, universities – that Tocqueville recognised long ago as essential to America’s democratic way of life and civic flourishing.
His electability rests largely on promises to cut back the bloated bureaucracies of the federal government, scale back the military adventurism of his predecessors, counter the organised suppression of dissenting voices in the digital public square, and limit the extreme economic dirigisme that has saddled America with the highest level of sovereign debt in history.
Trump’s recent surge in the polls partly reflects how millions see him as a bulwark against federal overreach. This support has persisted despite – or perhaps because of – the increasingly unhinged rhetoric of his opponents. Indeed, it seems plausible that the two recent attempts on Trump’s life would not have occurred had he not been so routinely lumped in with the twentieth century’s darkest enfants terribles.
The hyper-inflation of “fascism” as a term of invective is a classic instance of what the psychologist Nick Haslam has termed “concept creep” – the gradual expansion of negative concepts to encompass an ever-wider range of phenomena. By turning a distinct political pathology into a catch-all denunciation of Trump’s populist and less-than-orthodox leadership style, the Democratic Party and its media cheerleaders are undermining the very liberalism they claim to defend.
The consequences are serious. It is not just that this rhetoric is historically ignorant, cheapening the memory of the victims of actual fascism. It’s also a cynical strategy that poisons the well of democratic debate and justifies any means – democratic or otherwise – to keep Trump away from the White House.
When ordinary policy positions on border security or bureaucratic reform are smeared as fascist, meaningful civic discourse breaks down and the spectre of political violence that Trump’s critics believe – no doubt sincerely – they are chasing away begins to loom on the horizon.
In their zeal to defend democracy, the Harris-Walz campaign is abandoning the very principles – free inquiry, open debate, presumption of good faith – that make democracy possible. If it continues down this path, it risks incubating the very sort of authoritarian climate that liberalism has always opposed. The time has come to retire “fascism” as a political epithet and for reasoned and temperate political rhetoric to return.
Dr James Orr is associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge