RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s hard to know what’s worse about Kamala Harris agreeing that Donald Trump is a fascist. Is it that eight, long years after Trump was first elected president in those heady days of 2016 the Dems are still playing the Hitler card? That they’re still wailing ‘You’re a NAZI’ like idiot 15-year-olds in the throes of a particularly bad temper tantrum? Or is it that they think they can still get away with crap, with this cheapest of cheap shots, in the post-7 October world? At a time when something that really does have a whiff of fascism to it – the unhinged animus for the world’s only Jewish nation – is sweeping not through Trump’s ranks, but theirs?

To put it another way: when Harris murmurs her haughty approval of the use of that f-word, is she being trite or ignorant? Overreliant on knackered cliché or blind to what has changed – which is it, Madame VP?

It was in a chat with the comic Charlamagne tha God that Harris agreed that Trump has fascist tendencies. Yesterday, on his hip-hop radio show, The Breakfast Club, Charlamagne suggested to Harris that Trump’s vision for America is ‘about fascism’. ‘Why can’t we just say it?’, he asked. Here was an opportunity for Harris to make good on her supporters’ belief that she will rise above our ‘age of political name-calling’and say that while she disagrees with Trump, she doesn’t believe he’s Mussolini reincarnate. But instead she said: ‘Yes, we can say that.’

The ‘Yes We Can’ cry really has degenerated of late. Now it’s ‘yes we can’ call our opponents fascists. Yes we can reach to the very bottom of the barrel of slurs and haul up the Hitler thing again. Yes we can overlook that Trump is now on what might be his third assassination attempt and keep calling him a fascist threat to the republic regardless. ‘When they go low, we go high’, said Michelle Obama. The Harris equivalent is ‘When they go low, we go even lower’ – all the way into the gutter of calling everyone we dislike a fascist with no regard for meaning, accuracy or truth.

Harris’s playing of the old tunes had the media classes dancing in the aisles. She went ‘further than she [has] before’ in casting her rival as a ‘dangerous authoritarian leader’, said a gleeful New York Times. Where her aides worry she’s ‘too cautious’, this time ‘she did not hold back’, said the NYT. It especially appreciated her warning that this man who’s ‘about fascism’ might ‘destroy our democracy’. Harris ‘agrees Trump is “about fascism”’, trumpeted CNN. In the UK, the Independent was positively cock-a-hoop over Harris’s ‘assailing [of] Donald Trump as an un-American “fascist” who isn’t fit to serve a second term’. She didn’t quite say all that, but hey, people embellish when they’re excited.

The media elites are thrilled that the Dem pick for president has given them permission to substitute name-calling for serious debate all over again. For how much easier it is, and how much more flattering to one’s outsized sense of self-importance, to holler ‘Hitler’ at Trump rather than try to understand why tens of millions of people intend to vote for him. Why so many in the working classes see a better future under the Trump-Vance economic programme than they do under the regime of ‘vibes’ Harris promises. These people take refuge in self-aggrandising ‘fascism’ talk to avoid confronting their own staggering unpopularity among vast swathes of working America.

The Hitler 2.0 thing was always dumb. It was always ahistorical. It was always fuelled more by the blind fury of coastal elites who had been unceremoniously bumped from their perch of power by the Great Unwashed. At times it was dangerous, too. The branding of Trump as a ‘Hitler pig’, as someone who had ‘The Reich Stuff’, as a man whose ascent to the White House represented a ‘new dawn of tyranny’ that was not unlike the ‘rise of fascism’ – nurse! – did not only massively exaggerate the threat of Trumpism. It also relativised the crimes of Nazism. It made the unique horrors of the 1930s seem almost mundane through comparing them with the rise of a controversial politician in the 2010s. The elites’ ‘fascism’ fretting that Harris has now resuscitated whipped up undue fear of Trump and ignorance about the past.

But this time round, it’s even worse. For now they’re screaming ‘fascist’ at Trump while all but ignoring the truly disturbing sight of young Americans marching through the streets carrying massive ‘Jew heads’ with blood-stained horns, and keffiyeh-wearing leftists on the New York subway shouting ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist’, and students on the leafy lawns of Ivy League campuses calling the Jewish State the ‘pigs of the Earth’ and telling Jews to fuck off ‘back to Poland’. After 7 October, I don’t want to hear one word about fascism from the Dem elites or the media class, for there are people out there who vote for you and who read you who really are behaving like little Hitler pigs.

After Hamas’s pogrom against Israel, a frenzied hostility to Israel swept through correct-think circles in the US. And it gave rise to properly bigoted behaviour. Show me one Rust Belt Trump voter who has ever held up a banner saying ‘Long live 7 October’. Or who has descended on the private dwelling of a Jewish museum director and daubed it with the blood-red triangle that symbolises support for the anti-Semitic army of Hamas. Or who has harassed Jewish students, told Jews to go back to Europe, marched with placards showing the Star of David mangled with the swastika. All of these pretty fascistic horrors occurred in America over the past year, and they were the doing of leftists, not Trumpists; of people far more likely to vote for Kamala – even if they hold their noses while doing so – than for Trump.

No, this is not to say that everyone who protests against Israel is a trashy fascist. Nor is it to hold Harris responsible for these crimes against reason and decency on the streets of modern America. She has spoken out against anti-Semitism. It is simply to say that when you irrationally cry fascism morning, noon and night, it is likely you will miss the thing that really feels like fascism as it bubbles up from the sewers of Israelophobia. The truth is that it wasn’t Trump who made America feel like a hostile place for Jews – it was Trump haters. You want to talk ‘about fascism’, Kamala? Okay, let’s do it.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy