When the last zoning war is won, and the Donald J Trump Presidential Library finally opens for business in Manhattan, it is not hard to imagine future historians idling inside the gift shop, regretting that their subject had not done them all a favour and gone full fascist. How much easier the history would be to write if one could date the beginning of the end of the democratic era to the day Trump took office? How much more convenient if the echoes of the 1930s had been of perfect pitch: if Trump had locked up Hillary Clinton, if the trade wars had turned hot; if, instead of withdrawing security clearances from his enemies, Trump simply had them shot.
The intellectual reflex of today’s Western liberals is to invoke the spectre of fascism. It is the most solemn way of registering their revulsion at the course politics has taken. Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state and herself a child of fascist Europe, writes that fascism “pose[s] a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of the Second World War”. Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s leading liberal intellectual, declares fascism is under way. “What we are living with is pre-fascism,” he writes. Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times agrees: fascism “is already here”.
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