Joy comes in the morning, as the Psalmist says, but by late evening of an incompetent political campaign, the paranoid bitterness really takes over. That’s what we’re seeing in the late stages of the Democrats’ ill-conceived attempt to win with a deeply unpopular and incompetent candidate who never received any primary votes. The October Surprise is that (shockingly!) after nine years of facing Donald Trump, the Democratic Party has no surprises. Like some ill-educated drunk, all they can do is sputter the “F” word over and over. In this case, we refer to “Fascism.”

That lack of a real surprise shouldn’t be surprising. As anybody with a passing acquaintance with the retail political skills of Kamala Harris (Top Chef champion: Word Salad division) or the titanic weirdness of Tim Jong Walz (Elmer Fudd impersonator and Supreme Leader of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota) knew that the campaign of “Joy” was not to last. The Harris-Walz Campaign’s flailing finally landed this week exactly where the parody/prophecy publication The Babylon Bee predicted in July: “Dems Announce Comprehensive Plan To Win Election By Calling Trump ‘Hitler’ Again.”

Yes, this week, with help from The Atlantic and New York Times reports of disgruntled former Trump staffers such as John Kelly making odd claims, Kamala Harris turned again to the tired account of how Trump is really like Hitler. Perhaps sensing that the campaign isn’t going far enough, The Atlantic published a breathless account by Anne Appelbaum of how Die Orange Führer is using the powers of all the great modern dictators. It was titled “Trump is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”   

For anyone who really believes this, I have some good psychological counselors I can recommend.

            The fact is, though, that it’s not really working. As of October 26, 2024, the RealClearPolitics national average of polls has Trump beating Harris by 0.1% and 0.9% in the battleground states. He’s never polled better. And the betting markets average has a Trump victory at 60.5% with a Harris victory at 38.3%.

Nothing is guaranteed, but even left-wing Vox seems a bit dubious about choosing the “Trump is a fascist” strategy as a “closing argument.” Writer Christian Paz’s explainer piece about why the campaign took the Democrats’ road continually traveled explains that it has arisen from desperation: “According to polling, she’s been largely unable to make more inroads with independents or continue making gains with swing-state voters after an initial burst of support after taking up her party’s nomination.” And yet, Paz also observes that this iteration of “F” word bombing isn’t really that different from Joe Biden’s “democracy and Dobbs” approach, which wasn’t successful: “Based on Biden’s polling, that message wasn’t working.”

            It’s pretty clear why it isn’t working to gin up support from those independents in swing states or anywhere else. Again, The Babylon Bee explains it best: “Democrats Explain Trump Was Going To Be Hitler During His First Term, But He Forgot.” All sorts of people were very upset by Donald Trump’s first term. Along with death and taxes, the certainty of this proposition is pretty absolute. But nobody can really point to anything remotely fascist or Hitlerian during his term as POTUS. Far from it, this father and grandfather of Jews (Ivanka and her children with husband Jared Kushner) moved the U. S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a desideratum of every president since, ahem, Bill Clinton.

And, despite egging on campaign crowds in chants of “Lock Her Up” about his then-opponent, Hillary Clinton, he did not use the power of the United States government against his political enemies—even in the case of Mrs. Clinton, whose illegal use of a private server for government business should have resulted in a conviction. Trump saw that putting a political opponent in jail after his election would harm the country. It is considerations of this nature that should cause the Harris-Walz Campaign to see that the “F” word campaign they are running is likely to be more than merely ineffective. It is likely to blow up in their faces. 

How might it blow up? To take the mildest case scenario, it’s likely to make Democrats who are not terminally online start to think about the level of ridiculousness they have been and are being asked to swallow. For even Democrats are likely to learn, find out, or recall from their repressed memory banks that every Republican nominee has been called a fascist, Hitlerian, or Hitler himself for decades.

Indeed, the only fault one can find with “Reductio ad Hitlerum: 60 years of Democrats falsely calling the Republican nominee a fascist,” Christopher Tremoglie’s article in the Washington Examiner this week, is that this trend didn’t begin with Barry Goldwater in the 1960s. The October 26, 1948, issue of the New York Times blared the following headline: “PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL; Says When Bigots, Profiteers Get Control of Country They Select ‘Front Man’ to Rule DICTATORSHIP STRESSED Truman Tells Chicago Audience a Republican Victory Will Threaten U.S. Liberty TRUMAN SAYS GOP PERILS U.S. LIBERTY.”

That’s right. Before Donald Trump. Before the milquetoast Mitt Romney. Before John McCain, who alternated between fascism and being a brave “maverick.” Before George W. “Bushitler.” Before his father and before Reagan, Nixon, and Goldwater, there was the original Republican Hitler, Fascists’ Tool, and Dictator-in-Waiting…Thomas Dewey!

As Daffy Duck was in the habit of saying, “It is to laugh.”

But there’s a greater danger to Democrats than the electorate merely ceasing to take seriously this now-74-year-old schtick. Because Democrats constantly accuse Republicans of tyranny, authoritarianism, and dictatorship, more voters are starting to consider whether it is now time to apply Rush Limbaugh’s famous dictum: What they accuse you of they are doing right now. After all, Donald Trump did not pursue his political enemies with the power of the DOJ. The Democrats did.

Too many Americans now understand that the various legal cases concocted against Trump are without merit. That’s why “convicted felon” and all the rest of these silly phrases for Trump are not sticking.

They are remembering how the DOJ went after parents upset at school boards adopting DEI and LGBT agendas without informing the parents. They remember pro-life activists being arrested at gunpoint in front of their families.

Americans who hear all this talk of fascism are being reminded of the Covid-era tyranny of figures such as Tim Walz, whose own terrible record included not only the closure of businesses, mask mandates, and an insane policy of sending Covid patients back into nursing homes, but also an official government snitch line and the right of the State of Minnesota to hand down $1000 fines and 90-day jail sentences to Covid policy violators.

And they are being reminded of how the federal government worked with private tech corporations to stop Americans from finding out the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Covid studies that contradicted the federal agencies’ approved positions, and anything the government didn’t want them to say or know about.

On any serious definition, fascism involves the combination of private and public power at the expense of the citizenry.

Most importantly, Americans hearing about fascism and authoritarianism are being reminded that both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to use federal power to shut Americans up again and keep them from exercising their religious liberty rights.

Walz has been clear for years about his own views. As he told MSNBC a few years ago, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, especially around our democracy.” But as we get closer to the election, Walz has been asked whether he still holds this view more than once. As legal scholar Jonathan Turley has written, Walz’s answer to this question from Fox News Channel’s Shannon Bream was “a flagrant example of misinformation.”

Turley reminds readers that “the Biden-Harris administration has helped fund and actively support the largest censorship system in our history, a system described by one federal court as ‘Orwellian.’” Not surprising, for, as Betsy McCaughey recently observed, Harris as Attorney General of California tried to pressure conservative non-profits to reveal donors and pro-life clinics to advertise for abortion. In 2019, she argued that Twitter should ban Donald Trump. And to demonstrate how much she supported the Orwellian system she helped preside over, she chose Rob Flaherty as her deputy campaign manager. Flaherty was the chief censor in the Biden-Harris Administration, cited in court filings as the one who pressured Twitter, Facebook, and others to censor views they didn’t like. It’s no wonder Turley labels Harris-Walz “the most anti-free speech ticket in centuries.” 

Harris also doesn’t like the other part of the First Amendment. She told Hallie Jackson of NBC News this week that she could not allow religious liberty exemptions in the case of abortion. Christian health providers and medical systems would be forced to participate in this evil or be forced out. She’s not kidding, either. As a Senator, she sponsored the Do No Harm act, which, if passed, would have taken the guts out of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

 Walz is similar to Harris. His Covid record included much harsher rules for churches than for retail outlets. In 2023, he signed a law that would forbid any school that required students to sign a statement of faith from being able to offer dual-credit college courses. Faith-based schools sued, and though the state isn’t enforcing it during the litigation, they are still defending the law in court. He signed into law a 2023 amendment to the Minnesota Human Rights Act that did away with religious exemptions, meaning that churches and faith-based schools and organizations would be subject to legal complaints if they did not accept someone’s “gender identity or expression.” Because of the pressure, he did return the exemptions this year. But it’s pretty clear he does not believe in any robust notion of religious liberty. He wants religious people to accept his extreme ideology.

Calling Republicans Hitler and the political “F” word is still exciting to a certain sort of true believer Democrat. They may not understand that it’s as traditional—and stale—as a Christmas fruitcake. To most Americans, it has lost its capacity to shock and persuade them to run from Donald Trump and the Republicans. And to many of them, it may well start them thinking about the fact that Democratic behavior might be more fittingly described with these terms.   

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.