Fascism vs. Centrism

The stakes have seldom been higher. Enabling the rise of neofascism would be a historic mistake for the left.

Today is Election Day in the United States, a defining moment not just for the U.S. but for the world as a whole.

In these final moments, how should we think about Donald Trump’s candidacy? I recently listened to Joe Rogan’s 3-hour interview with Trump (so that you don’t have to), and Rogan is right to point out that Trump has “comedic instincts,” engages in a form of “stand-up,” and often performs with “great timing.” Trump’s flair for self-deprecation no doubt helps explain his political success. He is, at heart, a performer. By comparison, centrist Democrats often feel wooden—the gap between Biden and Trump is the distance between modernist self-seriousness and postmodern playfulness. But with her charisma, Harris has been far more successful at circumventing this obstacle than her predecessors.

Trump’s comedy, however, is for a narrow set: His is not a universalist playfulness. To those maligned during the October 27th Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, the jokes come with an existential bite. Trump’s court jester, Tony Hinchcliffe, spoke of a “floating island of garbage...I think it's called Puerto Rico”—hardly likely to endear Trump’s campaign to voters of Puerto Rican, Hispanic or Latino descent.

Trump’s Neofascism

Behind Trump’s jokey facade is the beating heart of a fascist. On Rogan’s podcast, Trump spoke of Kamala as a “low-IQ person,” an “imbecile, literally,” the kind of pseudoscientific discourse about intelligence typifying the far right and playing on racist, misogynist ideas about successful Black woman—and made all the more absurd in light of Harris’s considerable credentials. Trump also evidenced a weird obsession with his Air Force One pilots, which he likened to “perfect specimens,” a strangely clinical term, with one pilot said to be a “perfect-looking human being,” a fethishization of military aesthetics familiar to viewers of Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematography.

More centrally, Trump repeatedly invoked an image of foreign and/or criminal Others set on destabilizing the American social fabric, a classic fascist move, with “hundreds of thousands of criminals” said to be overrunning American communities, including “convicted rapists, drug dealers, drug lords.” Trump claimed that Springfield had “32,000 migrants dropped in,” all of them Haitians, and, surprisingly, “they speak no language.” Rogan corrected him: “No English, you mean?” But Trump doubled down on his claim. The idea that Haitians possess “no language”—a smear that has deep historical roots, involving the denigration of Haitian Creole—was likely intentional, reducing a vulnerable, hard-working immigrant community to language-less animality. Portraying minorities as barbaric (literally, those who, from the ancient Greeks’ perspective could only say bar bar, or meaningless, guttural sounds) is straight out of the far-right’s playbook. 

Unsurprisingly, one of Trump’s crucial final rallies took place at Madison Square Garden, perhaps referencing the 1939 Nazi rally in the same location. Back in 1939, more than 20,000 people gathered to participate in a “Pro America Rally,” sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” give the Hitler salute, and listen to speakers talking of “job-taking Jewish refugees.” In the 2024 rally, meanwhile, Trump invoked the alleged need to “stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country” and claimed “30,000 illegal migrants were put into a town of 50,000 people” and that “no place can withstand that.” The comedian Hinchcliffe, meanwhile, evoked the idea of an overly fertile domestic enemy, in the crudest, most repugnant terms: “These Latinos, they love making babies too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” 

In How Fascism Works, the philosopher Jason Stanley rightly warns against how dangerous all of this rhetoric—and potential, implied policy—is:

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

In October 2022, a top Israeli medical official spoke derisively of “the Arab womb,” that is, the idea that Palestinian, or “Arab,” women were overly fertile, with terrifying overtones of racist, misogynistic reductionism (as if all Palestinian women partook of one collective “womb”). Two years later, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed on the Gaza Strip. There is a straight line running from fascist words and ideas to fascist actions and policies.

Thankfully, Trump’s neofascism still comes with considerable electoral risk, even in the current political moment. With his recent anti-Puerto Rican statements, and earlier scurrilous claims that Haitians migrants to Springfield, Ohio were consuming pets (“They’re Eating the Cats,” as one New York Times headline read), there is a real chance that the Republican nominee may lose—big time—with Latino and Hispanic voters; recall that Hispanic voters now constitute nearly 15 percent of the eligible voter population and cannot simply disparaged at will. The politics of ethnic identification and voting patterns are ambiguous, of course. But the Madison Square Garden rally may have proved a bridge too far.

Regardless of ethnic affiliation, it is clear what Trump stands for: massive trillion-dollar tax cuts to corporations and the rich, aggressive attacks on minorities and women, and the rehabilitation of fascism as a politically salable ideology.

Harris the Preferable Centrist

Harris, meanwhile, has a Palestine problem. She has been part of an administration that has enabled the Israeli genocide on the Gaza Strip. Disappointingly, Harris has failed to distance herself from the Biden administration’s policies, or offered meaningful assurances on ending the bloodshed. This is likely causing the Harris campaign to hemorrhage voters to not only third-party candidates but just sheer apathy and abandonment of electoral politics altogether. Some pro-Palestine (or anti-genocide) voters may even, misguidedly, choose to vote for Trump, despite the fact that Trump will only stay or worsen the line: Recall that Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2017, thereby recognizing it as the capital of Israel despite its annexation of East Jerusalem. And back in April 2024, Trump said that Israel needed to “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast”—hardly the words of a peacemaker. Everything suggests Trump will maintain or deepen the Biden administration’s policy stance on Israel/Palestine.

The crucial difference between Harris and Trump is that Harris remains a centrist neoliberal—a kind of Emmanuel Macron transposed across the Atlantic—while Trump is a neofascist. For leftists, the choice is one between two evils, yes, but one of the sides is clearly—by a wide margin—the lesser evil. The political calculus is, in this sense, clear and unambiguous, the choices and overall electoral context being what they are. For those who care about economic redistribution, too, Harris is clearly the preferable candidate: While Trump’s taxation and spending policies will allow the rich to grow richer, Harris’s policies will likely raise the incomes of the poorest one-fifth by nearly 20 percent, while making the top 0.1% pay more than $150,000 in additional taxes by 2026.

Strategic Timing

In this context, the left must learn the hard lessons of kairos, of “the right time,” which is to say strategic timing: The situation is not right for a third-party vote. For activists eager to punish Biden, the right response in the long term is to build a mass movement capable of pulling Democrats leftwards. For the near term, the leftist activist and writer Joe Mayall has produced an exemplary analysis of the concrete situation facing progressive voters. His analysis comes down to one basic insight: Harris and Trump are not the same; in total, Trump is far worse: “Domestically, the boilerplate Democratic politics of Harris are preferable to the MAGA agenda.” Given the grievous threats of Trumpism, Mayall argues that compromise is the order of the day:

This “compromise” is leftist voters casting ballots for Harris, so that we are not “hurled into battle” against the army of Donald Trump, who wants to “use the military to handle the radical left. I’m not sure what Trump means by “handle,” but I know none of us will be able to advocate for Palestine, abortion rights, or socialism from a jail cell, camp, or grave.

I also agree with the anthropologist Vito Laterza, a theorist of political communication:

Yet, this remains a binary contest - that is the nature of the electoral rules in America, rules that could use some changes, but these are not changes that will occur now or in the foreseeable future. Dispersing votes for third-party candidates on the left effectively gives a hand to Trump. And voting for Trump just doesn't make any sense. Not on any of the issues that Harris and Walz confidently stand for - and not on Palestine and Israel.

It would be a historic mistake for progressives to depress the vote for Harris, thereby enabling Trump’s return to power. Doing so won’t help the Palestinians; it will, however, harm women and ethnic minorities inside the United States; and it will create four years of instability, unpredictability, and potential chaos on the global stage. Neither liberal democracy nor the world as we know it may survive a second Trump term. As Trump himself told a group of evangelical voters in July: “In four years, you don't have to vote again.”

For once, we may take him at his word.