The Left have failed miserably in labelling everyone they disagree with as fascists.
Accusing evidently mainstream politicians like Donald Trump of being the second coming of Hitler is baseless hysteria.
Tom Harris
07 November 2024 3:34pm GMT
To those of us who are, at best, indifferent to the prospect of a second Trump administration in the US, some of the reactions by progressive voices have been – like the commentary in advance of election day – an unhealthy (though entertaining) blend of hysteria and overreaction.
A panel discussion on MSNBC yesterday included one participant who, in all seriousness and seemingly on the verge of tears, praised Kamala Harris’s “flawlessly run campaign”, on the basis that the vice president had been endorsed by none other than Queen Latifa (who, it turns out after a quick Google search, is not the monarch of an obscure African nation but is in fact an American rapper) instead of the rather more prosaic metric of having won more votes than the other guy.
Across social media there was breathless and anxious fatalism – just as there had been during the campaign – that democracy itself had come to at an end. The movie Civil War wasn’t just a Hollywood blockbuster but a prescient warning of the inevitable fate of the Republic. In that film, the ill-fated third-term president is portrayed as a fascist, and there are no prizes for guessing who provided the writers with the inspiration for that particular character.
As on many previous occasions, it was left to J.K. Rowling to inject a much-needed dose of realism into the debate (ironic, given her authorship of the world’s most beloved and successful series of fantasy novels). “Judging from my X feed, a lot of progressives think the only mistake they’ve made recently is failing to call opponents Nazis often enough.”
The accusation that Trump is some sort of fascist, or even the new Hitler, as some excitable X users have suggested, is an easy one to dismiss. All those valiant activists who put “anti-fascist” in their X bios (almost always included side-by-side with their preferred pronouns) would no doubt have been prepared to die violently in the fight against Hitler’s regime had they been around in Germany at the time.
That being the case, if they truly believed Trump is the leader of a nascent Fourth Reich, wouldn’t they be prepared to use all possible means – including violence – to remove him? You wouldn’t tackle Hitler by posting angry Tweets and waiting for the first opportunity to vote him out; you’d take direct and fatal action, surely?
But they don’t advocate such action against Trump; ergo, they do not consider him an actual fascist. The rage, the intemperate language, the tears – they are all performative. Which makes the accusation of fascism – not only against Trump himself but against most of the ordinary Americans who voted for him and, of course, everyone in Britain who voted for Brexit, Reform UK or who objects to record levels of immigration – all the more dishonest and criminally irresponsible.
What makes such comments cross the line from irresponsible to hypocritical is that those same progressives (and that term itself is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) refuse to acknowledge behaviours and philosophies closer to home that are easily more identifiable as fascistic.
Gender ideologues, for example, who denigrate “Terfs” (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) like Rowling and who courageously mask up before going round punching women in the face for voicing opposition to biological men in women’s spaces are textbook fascists – they’re wearing black shirts, for goodness sake! How many clues do you need?
And Hamas is an unambiguously fascist organisation which imposes its medieval misogynist and anti-Semitic philosophy on its own people by force and intimidation and uses extreme violence, including rape and torture, against non-Muslims, especially Jews. Hamas’s leaders, those that are still alive, anyway, would probably regard Goebbels and co. as bafflingly lenient and liberal towards Germany’s Jewish population.
Yet Western students and grown-ups who should know better regularly indulge their Keffiyeh Chic, publicly demonstrating their solidarity with the Islamist terrorists while bemoaning the imminent arrival of a fascist regime in the White House, albeit a regime that was democratically elected in a fair and free election and which is strictly time-limited by the constitution.
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Rowling’s point needs to be carefully noted and absorbed by the Left: name-calling your political opponents might make you feel better but it doesn’t actually work. Doubling down, as many have since Tuesday’s election, on their previous smearing of their political opponents doesn’t deliver the political dividends they hoped for. A more nuanced and sophisticated response to Trump’s appeal might be in order.
Meanwhile, they should wake up to the genuine examples of modern day fascism. It’s not hard to spot. Some of their best friends fit the bill. DT.
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