America's future isn't fascist Whatever's coming is far more worrying

Before Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden last night, the internet was sizzling with cries that the rally would resemble the Nazi assemblies of yore. But nowhere in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous cinematic account of the Nuremberg spectacle was there a segment where, once the massive gathering ended, workers rushed to convert the rally site to the German equivalent of a Knicks game the following evening. (They are playing the Cleveland Cavaliers — from a former swing state!)

The whole evening was less Nuremberg rally than Trump’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” experience, that eerie moment when a heavily drugged, super-sexualised Marilyn Monroe sang to JFK on the occasion of his 45th birthday at a gala event in Madison Square Garden. But this was Trump singing to himself. He spoke, startlingly, about “if” he wins rather than “when” he wins. This was his last hurrah, and he knew it. He had to give one flamboyant middle finger to the city that rejected him before his middle finger faded into history.

Trump spoke for his customary 90 minutes. Some people started leaving 20 minutes into his speech; the rest cheered and laughed as though they were at a music festival, not a political rally. The yardstick for excellence in just about every realm of American life now is individual pleasure and satisfaction. For all Trump’s darkness about “enemies from within”, and murderous immigrants, and soaring crime rates, and mass deportations, you felt he was playing not to a burning desire for revenge, but to a good-old American Saturday night fever. It was jarring to watch him sway to the rally music before he spoke, then to abruptly swing into talk of American carnage, almost as jarring as it is to watch Harris amateurishly readjust the expression of her face from indignation to a broad grin in the space of a nanosecond. Both figures are the phoniest presidential candidates in modern American history. The difference is that the obviously unstable Trump is a first-rate monstrosity. Harris is a second-rate mediocrity.

No one believes Trump when he summons a vision of America as being overrun by barbaric immigrant hordes, or so ridden by crime that a person cannot walk across the street to buy a loaf of — barely affordable! — bread without being murdered or raped. That is a super-charged version of Trump’s depiction of “American carnage” in 2016 — it is so yesterday. No one knows what he is talking about when he talks about America as if it were Sudan, with the exception of his most isolated and narrowly parochial supporters, who think they know.

As for Harris’s toothless charge that Trump is a fascist — that is also so 2016. The term disappeared from the liberal vocabulary for a while, only to be revived in these desperate final days of campaigning. The ordinary American has no more idea of what it means to be a fascist than they have the experience of watching their neighbours being slaughtered on their way to the grocery store.

No, the fears being marketed by the candidates, the way they are marketing impossible promises, are more like pacifying lozenges for the electorate to suck on while the real terrors of history gather. Immigration, crime, economic collapse, cultural outrage — this is the rhetorical stuff of every political campaign since the beginning of the last century. The fact that the language in which they are being delivered has become more strident and explicit only accentuates their familiarity. They are known terrors, standard and consoling because they are so familiar to hear. But behind Trump’s murderous hordes and Harris’s legions of fascists are the fears that few people will face or acknowledge. Yet they are an open secret.

There is the fear of Elon Musk. Not the Musk who is so ham-fistedly trying to interfere in the election process by promising money to people who sign a petition as registered Republican voters. But the Musk whose Space X and Starlink capabilities are precious to America’s generals. You cannot have a fascist coup or any kind of coup without the complicity of the generals. Up until now, Trump has alienated America’s military and its intelligence agencies. But if he were to be elected, he might well have the generals, who would do anything to keep Musk’s technology in America, eating out of his hand. Already Jeff Bezos, the motto of whose newspaper, the Washington Post, is “democracy dies in darkness”, has refused to allow his newspaper to endorse Harris, for fear, so people say, of losing precious contracts he has with the federal government.

And there is the fear, not of civil war, but of an accelerating withdrawal from reality, regardless of who wins the election. If it were to be Trump, then the institutions of American civil society, all of which are in liberal hands, would rise up and make the woke revolution look like a Girl Scout cookie drive; Trump is the greatest gift to the morally ravenous liberal ego since Watergate. If Harris wins, then MAGA alienation and MAGA fantastical conspiracy theories would accelerate to the point where their criterion of truth is simply the opposite of what liberals believe. It is hard to have a civil war when people on both sides keep checking their phones. But self-contained screen-worlds are perfect for fomenting mental and spiritual chaos. Neighbour does not need to fight neighbour when neither really registers the other’s existence except to deny it. Strife then becomes numbed into ever more advanced forms of social atomisation.

Finally, there is the most hidden fear of all; the fear of nuclear war. Trump likes to blurt it out as just another on the laundry list of catastrophes that will befall the country should he not win back the White House. It is not clear whether nuclear war horrifies or fascinates him. Harris does not bring up the subject at all.

In Volume V of A History of Private Life, published in 1991, Gerard Vincent observes that although nuclear capabilities are now able to destroy the planet many times over, there is no cultural “obsession” with nuclear annihilation. At this point, there is not even a cultural preoccupation with that possibility. In past times, writes Vincent, when vast numbers of people died in various pandemics, “impressive works of art emerged from the collective imagination”. In our time, the possibility of catching Covid was our obsession, while the chance that we will be wiped out by nuclear war is no longer even the subject of art of entertainment. Annie Jacobsen’s scrupulous, brilliant, terrifying book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, became a bestseller, but it failed to lead to a sense of historical crisis.

And yet Putin has threatened to unleash nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the Middle East is hurtling toward a final reckoning. No one doubts that Israel would use its nuclear arsenal were its existence threatened; once Iran has a similar capability, no one doubts it would resort to the same. But instead of urging Americans to confront the possibility of nuclear horror, some politicians and journalists in America like to play chicken, fatuously reminding America’s leaders of their obligations to Taiwan, for example, no matter what such obligations would entail, if China invaded.

There is no doubt that a mentally unstable Trump, should he be president again, poses a threat to America and to the world, just as a mentally unstable Biden would have had he run and prevailed. Harris, on the other hand, if she comes out on top, will be operated by committee, along more or less rational lines. And there is no doubt that whatever side wins, there will be people left feeling angry, unhappy and betrayed. But civil war? Social apocalypse? Conflict over who won lasting tense, agonising weeks after the polls close next Tuesday? Not likely. By Thanksgiving, the country will have returned to its routine go-go stupefaction, continuing to sleepwalk toward the fears that dare not speak their name.