The fascism fantasy of Kamala Harris
Scare-Mongering About Fascism and the Politics of Fear
Once upon a time the most consummate practitioners of the politics of fear were the fascists. That was then. These days fear mongering is the specialty of scaremongering activists playing at being anti-fascists.
The ghost of 1930s fascism is constantly evoked by fear mongers who wish to discredit their opponents. Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has decided that demonising Donald Trump as a fascist will give her a ticket to the White House. She decided to use a CNN town hall meeting in Pennsylvania’s Delaware County to use the F word. In response to the question of whether she considered Trump to be a fascist, Harris replied ‘Yes, yes I do’[i].
Harris’ live performance of antifascism serves as a reminder of the triumph of the politics of slander in American public life.
It is evident that Harris has been trying to raise the stakes for some time and her denunciation of a supposedly fascist Trump was her way of signaling that now is the time to initiate a campaign of hysteria designed to scare off voters from voting for her rival. Two new attack ads by her campaign focus on the threat of fascism posed by Trump. According to The New York Times, the ads titled ‘A Warning’ ‘are scheduled to immediately go into the Harris campaign’s rotation of television and digital advertising, a campaign official said, adding that they would be targeted in particular at markets with larger populations of veterans[ii]. Just in case the viewers do not get the message both ads ‘begin with a black screen and a pulsating, alarm-like sound as the words, “An unprecedented warning …” are typed onto the screen’.
Until recently the current hyperbolic use of the term fascist was confined to deadbeat political illiterates who inhabited the margins of public life. Empty-headed student radicals were addicted to denouncing anything that moved as fascists. Unfortunately, since the turn of the century, many mainstream academics and politicians have become converted to the practice of fascist baiting. Unable to engage with the emerging phenomenon of populist aspirations they became habituated to using the F word. A new cohort of fascists-under-the-bed commentators took it upon themselves to normalize the casual use of the term fascist to de-legitimate opponents.
Alarmist accounts of fascist mobs on the march were frequently endorsed b Ivy League academic experts. In the spring of 2017, Yale historian Timothy Snyder raised the supposed parallels between developments in the US and the rise of totalitarian monsters in the 1930s. He coined the term ‘pre-fascist’ to characterise the ‘post-truth’ political style of Trump.
The term ‘pre-fascists’ was an extremely useful one for linking developments that one does not like to the imminent arrival of fascism. In other words, there was no need for the presence of real fascists for it to be a clear and present danger. The concept of ‘pre-fascism’ gives the impression that unless something is done, the question is not if but when the fascist takeover occurs.
The violent demonstrations in Washington D.C. on the 6 January 2021 provided Democratic Party supporters with permission to freely use the F word. At the time, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who has turned the politics of fear into an art form, rhetorically asked: ‘So, is it finally OK to use the F-word?’ Pretending to be sensitive to misusing the F-word, Krugman wrote that ‘one shouldn’t use the term “fascist” lightly’. However, he threw caution to the wind and declared that Trump ‘is indeed a fascist’ and ‘so are many of his supporters’.
In response to 6 January, Arnold Schwarzenegger published a Twitter video in which he stated that the invasion of the Capitol reminded him of Kristallnacht in 1938. He did not actually say that what happened in Washington, DC was the same as Kristallnacht but that both started with the same thing: a lie. In Schwarzenegger’s fantasy word the violent mob hunting down Jews and destroying their property on Kristallnacht was comparable to the events of 6 January
It is worth noting that amongst anti-Trump commentators the only reservation they expressed about Kamala’s scare tactics is that it might not work. Bret Stephens of The New York Times wrote that ‘like “racist” or “sexist,” the fascist epithet has lost much of its moral force over the years by dint of overuse’[iii]. The Economist concurred. It too feared that the promiscuous use of fascism by political activists may fail to scare people off from voting for Trump. It explained,’ “Fascist” has become a common insult hurled by leftists and liberals at the hard right, further muddying the waters’[iv]. A similar point was made by the CNN’s Scott Jennings who stated that ‘Democrats had cried wolf on referring to top Republicans as Hitler so many times that the public had no appetite’ for another round of react about it.[v]
Crying Wolf about the return of fascism has no doubt lost much of its force. And that is to be welcomed. However, the corruption of public language through the tendentious normalization of fascism has a damaging impact on political life. The politicization of fear by the fascist-under-the bed brigade encourages the coarsening of public discourse. Only the enemies of democracy can profit from fear appeals that target people’s anxiety and vulnerability.
Unlike the real fascists whose destructive power threatened the very existence of civilisation, Kamala’s caricature of a Trump as a fascist is a fantasy. What those who fantasise about fascism don’t realise is that by artificially resurrecting Hitler and constantly warning about the return of Weimar, they are trivialising the dreadful events surrounding the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
Am I wrong to wonder what other fantasies Kamala has in store for us?
I discuss the Politics of Fear at length in the book below
Check it out on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com.be/-/nl/customer-preferences/edit?ie=UTF8&preferencesReturnUrl=%2F-%2Fen%2FProfessor-Frank-Furedi%2Fdp%2F0826487289&ref_=topnav_lang&language=en_GB
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/opinion/harris-trump-fascist-town-hall.html
[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/us/politics/john-kelly-trump-fascist-harris-ads.html
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/opinion/harris-trump-fascist-town-hall.html
[iv] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/10/24/is-kamala-harris-right-to-call-donald-trump-a-fascist
[v] https://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-scott-jennings-accuses-dems-of-crying-wolf-on-trump-and-hitler-they-did-it-to-john-mccain-mitt-romney-paul-ryan/
For a few decades after the Second World War politicians shared a mutual respect born of a shared experience. Debate and argument were very different back then because of that recognition that both sides had been through an existential fight for freedom (with actual fascism) with most individual politicians having played a part in the war effort. The ideological divides were as great as today but neither side saw the other as evil for both had fought real fascism.
There is an overindulgent decadence to poltical debate these days with participants having enjoyed a long period of freedom from fear and want. The realities of war are on TV screens but not viscerally a part of personal experience and family memory. A few immigrants bring their stories but rather than examples of and warnings about dictatorship they are used as props for conspicuous compassion by the middle class.
Kenneth Clark in his series Civilisation suggested civilisations fall when they lose confidence. After the war the UK was bankrupt, depleted and a shadow of itself. But, it was a confident nation. It would pull togther again and rebuid in a spirit of optimism. Identity and purpose were shared.
What Clark did not discuss was how civilisations lose confidence. But we see how now. They lose touch with their history, they cease to have a national story to be proud of, marriage and family are no longer sacrosanct, and instead of pride in the nation it is regarded as a problem. This is the left's project to undermine nationalism (in the patriotic sense), the family, and worst of all to 'decolonise' education. We are no longer peoples with distinct and shared characteristics - Italians are Italian in ways unique to them etc etc - and people become fungible instead.
Renaud Camus gave a telling example of cultures losing content: “a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture can say to a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais …I am just as French as you are”. He cited this to illustrate how being French comes to mean nothing. This is the doctrine of muticulturalism and applicable here as being English is diluted and denigrated.
He points out you can join a peoples different from your own at the individual level - through appreciation or even love for their language, literature, history, art, landscape and architecture. But this cannot be done at scale as the rapid, mass immigration shows. Bangladeshi communities and similar do not assimilate. They recreate their homelands here encouraged by a govermning class that no longer believes in or has confidence in itself.
No wonder then that the left, for they are the ones repudiating their past trying to deny being a distinct peoples, can only hurl abuse at "fascists", devoid of any argument. The West's elites, the controllers of a nation's self-narrative, no longer have confidence in themselves and Kenneth Clark's observation is playing out in front of us.
This could be projection. As Michael Schellenberger says, "Democrats are the party of mass censorship, the weaponization of the CIA, FBI, and DHS, and the politicization of everything. What does that sound like to you?" Antifa are the ones that dress in paramilitary clothing. A more sinister interpretation is offered by Mark Steyn, who thinks it is positioning by the Democrats who will refuse to engage in the peaceful transfer of power to Trump. He points out that Schleicher handed over to Hitler is January 1933 and died in a hail of bullets a year later. If you truly believe Trump is a fascist (and it is nonsense especially as there is zero evidence he ruled as one last time) then surely you would be justified in not handing over power? Personally, I still think the Democrats will steal the election as they did in 2020 but surely must have found a different way to do it.