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If you’re so anti-fascist, why aren’t you more right wing?

If you’re so anti-fascist, why aren’t you more right wing?

Stopping Trump means endless compromises

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Nick Cohen
Jul 28, 2024
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Writing from London
Writing from London
If you’re so anti-fascist, why aren’t you more right wing?
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You Are Joking painting
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

You think it is easy to oppose fascism? You think it is a principled cause? There’s no cause harder or less principled than anti-fascism. Your sole aim is to stop the fascist winning.

And if that means moving to the right to detach wavering conservatives from your far-right enemy, then move you must.

This is exactly what Kamala Harris is doing as she prepares to fight Donald Trump. It is not a pretty sight, but if they mean what they say, American progressives have no choice but to urge her rightwards.

Since 2016 they have been telling themselves and the rest of the world that Trump is a fascist or at the very least a fascistic politician. If the only way to stop him is to compromise, then that is what they are duty bound to do,

Before I go any further, I must concede that US progressives are perfectly capable of descending into a babbling frenzy. The paranoid style in American politics is as much a left-wing as a right-wing disease.

Trump is not a fascist in the 20th century meaning of the word. Although, you must have noticed, that every actual fascist in the US supports him. But he is a far-right or fascistic politician leading a far-right or fascistic party.  

US Republicans are not “populists” or whatever other euphemism polite commentators wish to use to describe them. They are members of a far-right movement that distinguishes and demeans itself by its willingness to undermine democracy.

You must never let them and their fans in the UK and Europe bully you out of using the English language plainly. There are plenty of politicians to the right of traditional conservatives, who nevertheless respect democracy.

By contrast, Donald Trump and his supporters refuse to accept the rules of democratic politics. It is not progressive hysteria but an acceptance of reality to say that they deny the results of legitimate elections and incite, idolise and promise to pardon insurrectionists.

By any sober definition, the Republican party is a far-right movement. As such, it must be stopped with the anti-fascist tactic of forming the broadest possible popular front.

Ah, anti-fascism. It sounds so glamorous. It conjures up images of the International Brigade or the French resistance. In fact, anti-fascism is a miserable ideology where the greater good of stopping the far-right trumps – and please forgive the Freudian slip – any good cause which gets in the way.

The euphoria which greeted Joe Biden’s decision to retire hides the fact that Trump is still ahead in the polls and still the likely winner– with all the grim consequences for democracy from the US to Ukraine his return to power will bring.

Like a sleeping army caught by a surprise attack, the US right’s propagandists did not expect that Harris would replace Biden, and is now panicking – “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!”

But they won’t be off their guard for much longer, and they know that Harris is vulnerable.  Already there is no shortage of accounts of how Harris flipped flopped from being as tough prosecutor in California to trying and failing to appeal to the left as she attempted to secure the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.

Here is a writer I once admired, the English Tory journalist Andrew Sullivan, who transported himself to the American right, revelling in his contempt for “a super-woke leftist”.

Harris is virtually a communist, he says. Indeed, now he comes to think of it, Harris is worse than a communist because she endorses “equality of outcomes over equality of opportunity, a position that even Communist China has now abandoned.” She favoured decriminalizing illegal border crossings. She helped raise money for protestors arrested in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

And so on, and on he goes until he reaches the dismal terminus that backing Trump is a regrettable necessity. (He and his allies “really don’t want to vote for Trump” Sullivan explains as if fighting back the tears. But – and of course there is a “but” – they “don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had”.)

Get used to many superficially civilised American conservatives reaching the same cowardly conclusion. Get used, too, to tens of thousands more opinion pieces in which the words “woke,” “super woke” and “communist” feature prominently.

But above all get used to Trump’s opponents reaching for the only available strategy and ditching their left-wing commitments.

This may be why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other leaders of the left in the Democratic party stuck with Joe Biden to the end.

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