What does “fascism” actually mean?

The term is now so overused that it has lost all its meaning.

Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night appears to have tipped the commentariat over the edge. In his report for MSNBC, Jonathan Capehart described the event as “particularly chilling, because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called pro-America rally”. He neglects to mention that this was in an entirely different building, since the venue for Sunday’s rally wasn’t built until 1968. I suppose such details might have dampened the sheer drama of it all.

Does Capehart really believe that he is witnessing a re-run of a scene from Triumph of the Will? When one watches this kind of frankly deranged media coverage, one wonders why Democrat voters aren’t more offended. Evidently, the reporters at MSNBC are under the impression that their viewers know nothing whatsoever about history and will be swayed by this kind of ludicrous propaganda. The young woman screaming on Donald Trump’s inauguration day in that famous viral meme made a more convincing argument.

We are told that Trump’s event was populated with Nazis of all kinds. These included Jewish Nazis flying their Star of David flags (a common sight at Nuremberg) as well as black Nazis, Hispanic Nazis, Indian Nazis and even gay Nazis. There was a broad range of ethnicities among the speakers too, so at the very least MSNBC should have admitted that when it comes to white supremacist gatherings this was one of the most diverse.

Here are just some of the malevolent racists in attendance:

These are the people who vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has dismissed as fascists. “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said at an event in Nevada. “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden”. He might as well have referred to anyone considering voting for Trump as “deplorables”, because of course that worked out wonderfully for Hillary Clinton.

Since I published my article on the infantilism of political discourse on Friday, it has become clear to me that matters are only going to get more extreme as we inch towards the election. Many of the responses to my piece have only confirmed my fears. Some attempted to dismiss my arguments on the grounds that I am a “Trump supporter” or a “Republican mouthpiece” or variations on that theme. None of which is true, of course, but in this world of binary thinking we shouldn’t be naïve enough to expect sophisticated feedback.

And so for the sake of the congenitally soft-witted, I feel obliged to point out the obvious. I am a supporter of neither the Republicans nor the Democrats. I have no voting rights in America, and if I had I would not cast my ballot for either party. I am a liberal who has criticised both Trump and Harris repeatedly on television and in my writing. The assumptions made about my motives demonstrate just how difficult it has become to analyse the tenor of the political debate without being accused of “shilling” for one side or the other. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the accusations of fascism against Trump and his supporters are unjustifiable and untethered from reality.