Kamala Harris's closing argument is simple: "Donald Trump is a fascist and I'm not."
Why does she expect voters to drop what they're doing, clap their hands to their forehead, and exclaim "That's it! I got to vote for Harris because she's not a fascist!"?
The left has very short memories. They've been calling conservatives "fascists" since Hitler's day. Their biggest problem is that no one they say is a "fascist" meets the scholarly or literal definition of fascism. Not even close.
Britannica defines fascism in part, as "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: "people's community"), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation."
Oh, yeah. That's Trump all the way.
Webster has fascism as "a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition..."
I challenge anyone not besotted with partisanship to find Trump in that definition.
I believe that the English language is meant to illuminate meaning and not obscure it. Liberals obscure the meaning of fascism by using the word carelessly to describe their political enemies, whether their policies reflect anything similar to fascism as a political movement or ideology or not.
Calling Trump a fascist is a lie. Fifty years ago, if someone like an opposing presidential candidate had called an opponent a "fascist," the race would have been over and the politician referred to as a "fascist" would see his career come to a quick and inglorious end.
Today, it's just another lie told in service to winning an election.
Fascism, much like communism, is a whole system based on lies. The political scientists don’t call them lies. They use words like “theory” or “ideology.” But the theories and ideologies are wrong because they describe reality wrong. If you’re convinced that bears are repelled by the smell of Cheeto dust, when you put that theory to the test, the story will end with a bear eating an abnormally orange dude screaming, “This makes no sense! It’s like the bears didn’t even read my book!”
Fascism is a system of lies for other reasons. Fascist (and, again, communist) leaders organize and mobilize people around lies. They make up stories about how some group is an existential enemy, and therefore we must crush them before they crush us. They lie about how the economy works, about their own brilliance and mastery. And the lies often work. There are still fewer Jews in the world than there were when Hitler came to power because his lies about Jews led to the deaths of so many of them
Indeed, Hitler's "big lie" that the Jews were responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I and all social evils that followed was swallowed whole by the German people because it was easier to blame the Jews than accept the truth.
Lenin's "big lie" that capitalists were oppressing the working class and had their foot on the necks of ordinary people survives to this day, despite its spectacular failures all across the world.
Democrats can't win unless they lie about the right, painting them as evil, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, Islamophobic woman-beaters. The fact that Republicans keep winning elections tells us that voters have stopped believing the lies.
For decades the left believed that calling someone a fascist was enough to win an argument. They believed that if you could slap a fascist label on a thing that made it fascist. And since “fascist” is coded as evil, there’s no more room for debate. “Racist” works the same way: For the left once you call someone a racist, the argument is over. Much of the left believes they have a monopoly on political virtue. The further away you get from the left, the closer you get to bad. It’s like the heliocentric theory of political morality. The closer your orbit to the left, the closer you are to righteousness. The outer planets live in the permanent darkness of fascism or racism.
Voters have learned to tune out chargers like "racist" and "fascist" as it relates to Republican candidates. That doesn't mean they will automatically vote for them. It just means they've learned to judge candidates based on other criteria than what some left-wing nut tells them.
That's progress.
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