Crying ‘fascism’ didn’t work before, and it won’t work now

‘Could we get a precise definition of fascism before all this kicks off today?’

So asked Merryn Somerset Webb, a senior columnist at Bloomberg, just before polling day in America.

It was – and is – a question worth asking. The election of Donald Trump was inevitably going to draw the comparison, particularly after Kamala Harris (remember her?) said that she believed Donald Trump ‘is a fascist’. There is even a Wikipedia page on ‘Donald Trump and fascism’.

When the guests on the Rest is Politics American election livestream asked themselves whether Donald Trump is a fascist, Rory Stewart answered ‘I don’t think yes or no is very useful’, Marina Hyde answered ‘potentially, yes’, Anthony Scaramucci answered ‘he’s a fucking fascist – he’s the fascist of fascists’ and Alastair Campbell said he thought Trump was ‘well down that road.’ Predictably the only sane voice in the room was Dominic Sandbrook, who said he didn’t think Trump was a fascist, before going on to explain that fascism ‘is a very time-specific thing that emerges in the debris of the first world war’ and that Trump does not have a paramilitary force, a cult of war, a plan for aggressive expansion or the ideological dynamism to remake society – in particular new men.