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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.
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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.
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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.
Obviously, Trump isn't deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to intimidate and war with his enemies on the streets.
Rather than pursuing the classic fascist objective of territorial aggrandizement through conquest, he inveighs against his party's own military hawks.
In his first term, he appointed constitutionalist judges, reduced the power of the federal government, extolled free enterprise, restored due process on college campuses and proved a profound friend of the Jewish state.
Instead of pursuing a politics of racial purity, he is now trying to build a more multi-racial political coalition and showing signs of success.
The indictment against Trump as a budding fascist often relies on distortions or exaggerations.
He said in an interview with Sean Hannity that he wouldn't be a dictator, except for Day 1 — a joke referring to the executive actions he'd undertake the first day.
This has become Trump's supposed pledge to become a dictator beginning on Day 1.
He has said the National Guard or military could be deployed to quell election-related unrest in the streets if he wins.
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This has become Trump threatening to use troops to go after his political enemies, as if he's talking about the 101st Airborne arresting Democratic senators.
Fascism is not an indigenous American phenomenon, whereas Trump, to use Milley's phrase, is American to his core.
He is, for better or worse, a Jacksonian figure, with the same populist appeal, emphasis on strength, combativeness, opposition to the elite, insistence on loyalty and willfulness.
As a Jackson biographer noted, Old Hickory believed "the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to those who were on the inside."
He reflexively resorted to "the language of combat," and engendered a fierce resistance to his rule among those who feared him and dubbed him King Andrew.
Situating Trump within this tradition doesn't make for a fevered closing argument in a hard-fought election, though.
It's not clear that Harris' message is going to appeal to its intended audience of fence-sitting Republicans disaffected with Donald Trump.
One would think these voters would be more naturally moved by a credible centrist message on the economy, national security or the border.
By this point, Republicans are so used to their standard-bearers being called "fascists," the allegation may have lost much of its sting; George W. Bush, an earnest, Bible-believing Christian who was committed to spreading democracy around the world and saved countless lives in Africa, was called a fascist, too.
In the final days of the campaign, it seems whatever joy produced by the Harris campaign will have to be derived from the revival and elevation of this tiresome charge.
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