Early this week Kamala Harris said it was fine with her to describe Donald Trump as “fascist.” By the end of the week, she had been joined by Gen. Mark A. Milley, Hillary Clinton, and Liz Cheney. The use of the term fascist to describe Trump’s peculiar brand of politics moved J.D. Vance to object. Vance said it was an incitement to violence.  Vance, of course, raises no such objections when Trump flings the term at Harris.

We should all welcome this political clarity in describing Trump. Many of us remember that efforts to use the term fascist  in 2016 were met with derision.  We were accused of overreacting and diminishing the real horrors of fascism. 

The importance of political language is that is helps us think more clearly about what we are seeing. It invokes both analytical categories and historical perspectives to enable us to make judgments about the consequences of ideas and actions. The understanding of Donald Trump as a fascist is not so much to label him as an extension of the European experience of strong man leaders like Hitler and Mussolini, but to enable us to look honestly at our American Nazi and fascist past. Trump is fascist, a particularly American kind.

In the 1920’s coming out of WWI, much of America turned toward isolationism, antisemitic and anti-immigrant ideas. The eugenics movement, touting racial purity and ethnic hierarchies, fueled the Jim Crow south and US policies abroad. As the Great Depression developed, anti-immigration feelings intensified and the “America First” movement emerged as a powerful political force. 

Here in Michigan we had our own radio priest,  Father Charles Coughlin, whose antisemitic, anti-labor,  pro Hitler broadcasts earned him a following of 10 million listeners.  Their donations built the Shrine of the Little Flower, and the Royal Oak post office, made necessary by the volume of mail being sent in support of his work. Coughlin’s southern contemporary, Huey P. Long is often termed an American demagogue. It was their extremism that prompted Sinclair Lewis to pen his famous antifascist cautionary tale “It Can’t Happen Here “in 1935. His warning often summarized as, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” applies as much today as then.

Trump’s rallies have encouraged direct physical violence, including attacks on protestors and journalists. He has overtly supported KKK and American Nazi’s as “good people.” As Amy Goodman noted, “Donald Trump is fanning the flames of bigotry and racism. He is exploiting the fears of masses of white, working-class voters who have seen their economic prospects disappear.”

In a thoughtful article exploring the long literary efforts to remind Americans of our fascist tendencies, Sarah Churchwell observed:

American authoritarianism has always been entangled not only with patriotism, but with the country’s two most familiar belief systems: religion and business...Lewis’s novel does make a similar (if less pithy) observation, declaring that in America, fascism’s most dangerous supporters would be those “who disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty”. American fascism will necessarily be shaped by capitalism – or, as Lewis memorably puts it, “government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits”.

Donald Trump is a fascist. And he is as American as apple pie.