The Party That Cried ‘Fascist’

By Becket Adams

Sunday, October 27, 2024

 

Donald Trump once voiced admiration for the loyalty Hitler commanded from his generals, according to Trump’s former White House chief of staff and retired general John Kelly.

 

For the Harris campaign, it was a shocking revelation. It was so shocking that Vice President Kamala Harris held a pop-up press conference just to discuss the GOP nominee’s alleged remarks. Yet, despite assurances from Harris, her staffers, her campaign surrogates, Democratic lawmakers, Democratic strategists, retired journalists, working journalists, “democracy experts,” “election experts,” disaffected Republicans, and so on that Trump’s alleged remarks are as serious as they are disqualifying, the story started fading before the weekend was over.

 

Is it true that Trump said these things? Maybe. It could be. Given his on-the-record admiration for dictators, his inability to check his inside thoughts, and his seemingly all-encompassing obsession with loyalty, it can’t be ruled out.

 

Yet, the story is destined to slink into the background, and with just nine days until the election.

 

Don’t be angry at voters for the collective shrug.

 

Indeed, it is no surprise that the general’s weirdly tardy revelation should be met with a yawn. It figures. Some of us have warned for years that exactly this would happen if people continued to toss the word “fascist” around like a beachball at a music festival, leaving the term just as weightless and unthreatening.

 

Can voters help but be unfazed? After all, they’ve heard this before: That [Insert Republican’s Name] is a fascist! Vote for me! This is the problem with abusing the word “fascism,” especially to attack individuals who are most certainly not fascists. People eventually get accustomed to the noise and learn to block it out.

 

In 1964, following Senator Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Democratic California governor Pat Brown remarked that the address “had the stench of fascism . . . All we needed to hear was ‘Heil Hitler!’”

 

In the 1980s, President Reagan was charged by Democratic representative William Clay (Mo.) with “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” In the commentariat at the time, Esquire columnist Harry Stein said of Reagan voters that they were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”

 

Later, in the 1990s, the late representative John Dingell (D., Mich.) characterized the conservative-controlled House as a cross between the Duma and the Reichstag.

 

In the decade that followed, Al Gore accused George W. Bush of “[unleashing] squadrons of digital brown shirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the president.’’ There are no shortages of materials — books, songs, TV episodes, artwork, posters, etc. — comparing Bush to Hitler. It’s all a Google search away.

 

Then, in 2012, South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian infamously compared then-Republican governor Nikki Haley to Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun.

 

There’s much more where this comes from, courtesy of authors Larry Elder and Steven Hayward, and this was all before the rise of Trump and the widespread narrative that fascism is everywhere in America, hiding behind every bush and under every doily.

 

Since Trump’s unlikely ascent to power, we’ve heard not just that he’s an actual fascist but that those in his immediate and extended orbits are also fascists (that is, of course, until they quit or get fired and decide to make opposing their former employer the core of their entire personality; then, they are no longer Nazis, but patriotic heroes).

 

Even more exhausting is that the fascism charge hasn’t been enough for Trump’s critics. They’ve also linked anything that can be considered “conservative-coded” to white supremacy, including inanimate objects, hobbies, and even concepts.

 

Goodbye, “Okay” hand gesture, milk, exercise, and a “sense of urgency.” Hello, foundations of America’s inherent white-supremacy substructure.

 

Goodbye, flag designed by George Washington. Hello, an insidious secret symbol of American authoritarianism.

 

At this point, it’d be easier and quicker for the “anti-fash” crowd to compile a list of all the things that are not explicitly or tangentially “fascist” or linked to white supremacy.

 

More seriously, Democrats have screamed and shouted for so long that the Right is the Fourth Reich with slicker marketing that it’s no wonder these allegations have done nothing to hinder Donald Trump’s political career. You can threaten the apocalypse only so many times before people stop paying attention. Unfortunately, this becomes rather troublesome should the apocalypse show up for real.

 

Perhaps realizing this uncomfortable truth, that there’s little gas left in the “fascism” tank, certain handmaidens of the Democratic faithful moved on last week from the Kelly scoop to declaring outright that Trump is going to kill women, literally and not metaphorically.

 

Most of us learned the principle of “false alarms” as children from the fable about the boy who cried wolf.

 

Too bad for Democrats and their friends that they’re learning (or re-learning) this lesson only now and under the most consequential of circumstances.