Never mind joyless Harris tired slur surging Trump is no fascist

Kamala Harris has officially ended the “joy” phase of her campaign and has entered the “Trump is a fascist” stage. Asked at a CNN town hall whether she thinks Donald Trump is a fascist, Harris said, “Yes, I do.Yes, I do.” She added that she realizes people care about issues like inflation, but they “also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”The F-word is one of the Left’s favorite swear words, and applying it to Trump must be emotionally satisfying, whether it makes any sense on the merits or politically. To this point, Harris has tended to make a case against Trump as a standard Republican who cares more for the wealthy, as unserious and as selfish.

Now, in the final days of the campaign, she’s ramping it up to portray him as an American Mussolini.The occasion for Harris’ new line of attack is former Trump chief of staff John Kelly telling The New York Times that Trump meets the definition of a fascist, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley maintaining, according to Bob Woodward, that Trump is “fascist to the core.” These are serious men who once held positions of serious responsibility, but that doesn’t mean their ideological taxonomy should be accepted. As I wrote in my book “The Case for Nationalism,” 20th-century fascists hated parliamentary democracy.They believed in an all-consuming state and had contempt for bourgeois life, promoting a cult of warrior youth.Fundamentally, fascism celebrated violence in a nihilistic rejection of rationality and elevation of military struggle.As for Hitler, he believed in an existential struggle between the species, a conflict the German race would wage in a vicious war of annihilation against inferior peoples. Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election, but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear...