When I was an acne-encrusted and angst-driven teenager in the eighties, one of the risqué things to do was to watch the comedy The Young Ones. For those too young to know of this series, it concerned the lives of four university students renting a house together. Each was a student stereotype: Vyvyan the anarchic punk, Neil the drippy hippy, Mike the spiv and, of course, Rik the middle-class communist. Part of the genius of the comedy was its ability to combine a wide range of genres such as farce, ribaldry, slapstick and satire into an energetic and explosive mix. It was regarded as groundbreaking because of the extent to which it could be crude, but it had its antecedents in the chaotic gaffes of Basil Fawlty and Monty Python’s surreal clowning.
Rik was renowned for calling anyone a fascist who held moderate, right-of-centre views or even appeared simply to be telling him what to do. This was meant to make the audience laugh, and so it did, for people at the time had some understanding of what fascism is. According to Simon Blackburn’s Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, fascism is a political ideology which is characterised by a charismatic leader, a hatred of minorities and so-called degenerates, ultra-nationalism and single-party rule. If the Young Ones was a satire at the expense of Margaret Thatcher, it was also a satire of her far-left opponents who were foolish enough to call a democratic politician a fascist. In true British comic fashion, everyone was a target of jest, particularly self-righteous pontificators such as Rik. Accusations of being a fascist were therefore part of comic discourse not serious political discourse, unless one’s opponents did merit the title such as the boneheads of the now thankfully defunct National Front.
But what was once regarded as silly is now part of supposedly serious political commentary. For instance, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has made abundant use of the synonymous accusation of Nazism when describing Donald Trump. Back in 2017, when Lammy was on the backbenches, he called Trump ‘a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser’. When Trump visited the UK in 2018, Lammy took the opportunity to go on record in Time magazine to label Trump as ‘a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’ and a ‘tyrant in a toupee’. Lovely.
But as you no doubt know, it is among Trump’s American opponents that the accusation of fascism is most prevalent. Hilary Clinton has accused her old rival of re-enacting a Nazi rally by holding recently a party gathering at Madison Square Garden which was also used to host a pro-Nazi rally months before the eruption of World War Two. The fact that the Garden has been used by the Democrat party for four of its national gatherings appears to have escaped Ms Clinton’s memory.
Trump’s former chief of staff cum Trump-hater, John Kelly, has added to the hysteria by claiming in an interview with the New York Times that his former boss spoke dreamily of Adolf Hitler and said he wished he had Hitler’s generals because they were wholly loyal to him. Trump’s camp has, of course, denied these accusations; thus, whether Trump said these things or not is uncertain.
Taking her cue from Kelly, Kamala Harris recently stood at a podium decorated with the presidential seal no less, to brand Trump as ‘a fascist’ who seeks ‘unchecked’ power and a military that is personally loyal to him rather than the nation. Harris’ only evidence for her claims seems to be Kelly’s contested statements. As a former attorney, she ought to be able to do better than this, such as pointing out which of Trump’s policies are actually fascist. She cannot, of course, because none of his policies are. Perhaps she should have pointed out who among Trump’s supporters are Nazis, but if you watch the following video, you will find out why she cannot:
https://x.com/MichelleMaxwell/status/1850729202691264627.
What is behind the Democrat’s smear? There is the fear of Trump’s increasing success at appealing to ethnic minority voters who traditionally have voted Democrat and among whom are ethnic groups who were victims of Hitler’s racism.
Another reason is Trump’s policy of mass deportations of illegal immigrants strikes Democrat politicians as genuinely fascist. But note that Trump wishes to deport immigrants who have entered the US illegally, and not because of their ethnicity. If someone enters another nation illegally and has no humanitarian reason to be considered for asylum, then s/he has no right to stay. Furthermore, it is estimated that illegal immigrants cost the US half a trillion dollars every year. Why should the American people be saddled with such a tax burden? It is not fascist to want to protect your people: it is in fact the first duty of any government. .
Andrew Doyle is right to describe political discourse in the US as infantile. What ought to be characterised by intelligent critiques has been reduced to the level of Rik’s adolescent tantrums, and no one is meant to laugh. But Doyle reminds us that Trump is also guilty of this. He has called Harris in one go a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist” which is laughably untrue and ludicrously oxymoronic. It takes two to…well, you know how that cliché ends.
We in Britain ought not to feel too superior in this matter. Admittedly, our politicians’ language is usually more restrained, but we have our epithet-hurlers too such as our aforementioned foreign secretary and Sadiq Khan who has called Trump, you guessed it, a racist.
May satire live long in British and American political discourse, though British satire may be dying. And let us not dilute and desecrate Anglo-American politics with ad hominem attacks that reveal an unwillingness to think rationally and empirically. It does our democracy no good, and makes us look fools in the eyes of real dictators.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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The Young Ones first aired on TV when I was a PG, only a couple of years after first graduation – I hated its purile slapstick and failed to recognise in the four main characters any genuine student types that I’d encountered in two very different U of London Colleges. Having said that, it wouldn’t be made today despite name calling becoming more common because hurty words can’t be used in comedy anymore.