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A polarized America goes to the polls: ‘I’m in a house divided’
America had previously always been “somebody else’s country,” said Christopher La Rose, a health researcher, as he waited just before 7am in Pine Lake, a village that’s too small for postal delivery just outside of Atlanta, Georgia.But that changed recently for La Rose, who is of Guyanese descent, when he became an American citizen. He had the jitters on Monday night, before using his first-ever vote in a US election to back Kamala Harris.View image in fullscreen“I am sincerely concerned about the way that the country could devolve if the other chap got into office,” La Rose said. “I’m concerned about the political party that has coalesced around him, and how they have, in my mind, lost their way, and I’m voting to protect my kids.”Georgia is one of the seven swing states where election results are close enough to fight over and voters in all of those states say they definitely feel fought over.At a busy polling place in Scottsdale, Arizona, the conservative youth organization Turning Point brought out a bright pink party bus adorned with “Trump train” signs, which they will use to take voters to other Scottsdale polling places if the lines become too long. The group also put up signs imploring voters to stay put: “stay in line, don’t leave your country behind,” one sign said.View image in fullscreenA man was also gathering signatures for America Pac, Elon Musk’s group that is paying circulators to sign up other people who could win a $1m prize. “Elon Musk needs our help,” the man told one voter.Musk’s controversial effort to drive turnout is late to the race. In many swing states, most people who are going to vote have already done so. More than 80 million people cast ballots before election day across the country, with 4 million in Georgia alone – 80% of Georgia’s 2020 vote total.Georgia’s in-person votes will be counted and announced about an hour after polls close at 7pmlocal time, elections officials said last week. Georgia officials have meticulously tried to avoid giving election integrity denialists something to wrap a grievance around this year. The election interference attempts of 2020 still resonate.View image in fullscreenGabriel Sterling, election operations chief for Georgia’s secretary of state, at midday on Tuesday that all polling locations were working smoothly, with an average wait – if there is a wait – of two minutes and an average check-in time of 49 seconds.Cyndi Keen, a lifelong Republican, voted a straight Republican ticket on Tuesday. “When it comes down to looking at having a better life for my children, for my grandkids and for myself, I like the Republican policies better,” she said. She thought the results will be close – and her household had voted for different candidates. “I’m in a house divided, my sweetie went the other way. He’s straight Republican but he voted for Harris.”View image in fullscreenCathy Garcia, an activist with the Working Families party from Santa Fe, New Mexico, flew to Atlanta this week. Tuesday morning with eight hours to go, she was beating on doors in Atlanta’s south-eastern suburbs, looking to put the last voter in line. She was accompanied by a far-flung team visiting from safe Democratic states – Massachusetts, California, New York – putting in work where it might count the most.They wrestled with the cellphone app showing them where to find clusters of registered voters who had not yet voted. The apartment complex in south DeKalb county gave them some density to work with, but low-income people tend to be more transient … and less likely to be at home in the middle of the day.Their effort demonstrates the effort the campaigns are making to get every last voter they can to a poll.Kamala Harris was spending the day on Tuesday at the Naval Observatory, the vice-president’s residence in Washington. The public is not expected to see the Democratic nominee until Tuesday night, where she is poised to deliver remarks at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington DC. But she has been blitzing radio stations with calls across the country in a last-effort push for votes.Trump has ratcheted up outrage in the waning days of the election, wrapping himself and Republican voters in the politics of extreme grievance over descriptions of himself and his supporters as “garbage”, Nazis and fascists. And yet, his comments at rallies have included increasingly strident attacks on undocumented people, who he has called “animals” and “monsters”, and personal attacks on Harris.Trump partisans have cheered him on and adopted his tone.“He’s a big daddy. He’ll smack you if you’re an asshole,” said Joanne Kelchner, 77, a retiree from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who voted for Trump had harsh words for Harris. “Why is she not proud of her Brahmin heritage?” Kelchner asked. “I mean the elite class of India and pretending that she’s not Black, whatever … God bless us all.”View image in fullscreenBut partisan rancor abounds.“Donald Trump is crazy. I mean, he’s a lunatic and the people I think that vote for him are lunatics because he is crazy,” said Jeannie Strickland, a retiree from Georgia. “He’s trying to get people revved up to fight for him. I think if they put his butt in jail, like they should have done at least two years ago, it might calm him down a little bit, but they don’t do anything to him. I’m scared he’s going to win, and I might have to find an island somewhere and go live somewhere else, because he likes Hitler, and he liked the things Hitler did.”View image in fullscreenBoth sides have armies of lawyers in anticipation of legal challenges on and after election day. And law enforcement agencies nationwide are on high alert for potential violence.Tensions briefly flared outside a polling site in a library in downtown Phoenix, where a group of men decked out in American flag T-shirts had gathered to wave “Union Yes for Harris Walz” signs. As another man in a truck drove past, he hollered at the men: “Fuck you!”Angel Torres Pina, a 21-year-old who serves in the military and who voted for the first time on Tuesday, wanted politics to become less divisive and fear-based. He was somewhat nervous about voting at the library at all. “Am I making the right decisions? Am I making the wrong decisions? Are people gonna bad-talk about me because I voted for what I believe in?” said Torres Pina, an independent who voted for Harris. “I keep seeing on the news about these riots, these protests, these chaos, and it makes me a bit scared for if I’m voting right or wrong.”While many Americans have described how stressful this election is, Dawn Alter, a 50-year-old sales representative from New Berlin, Wisconsin, was in good spirits on Tuesday morning. Alter was supporting Harris, and thought the vice-president stood a chance in Wisconsin – a key swing state.Alter believes Trump has shed support here since 2020, and viewed herself as evidence: she abandoned Trump after supporting the former president in 2020, saying she was tired of the division and “negativity” he has sowed.“It’s a lot of discord, there’s too much misinformation,” said Alter. “There needs to be change and unity – I think those are the two biggest things for me.”In 2016, Wisconsin voters elected Donald Trump by less than a percentage point, and in 2020, the state flipped for Joe Biden by a similarly narrow margin. Polling suggests the presidential race in Wisconsin is essentially a toss-up, and voters were acutely aware of the uncertainty they face.View image in fullscreenMatt Steigerwald, a college lecturer from Wisconsin, said he was “cautiously optimistic”, adding: “Wisconsin is probably going to be pretty tight.” Steigerwald, who joked that he was a “bleeding-heart liberal”, said that even as a left-of-center voter, he found Trump “especially abhorrent”.“I just don’t know how you can support somebody who’s said and done so many awful things, who treats women so poorly, who treats people of different races so poorly – he’s just an awful human being from my perspective,” said Steigerwald. Additional reporting by Carter Sherman, Alice Herman, Sam Levine and Rachael LeingangRead more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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Giuliani shows up to vote in Mercedes he was supposed to give to poll workers
Rudy Giuliani turned up to vote in Florida for Tuesday’s presidential election in a Mercedes Benz convertible that a court had ordered him to surrender more than a week ago as part of a $148m settlement to two Georgia poll workers he defamed.The 1980s car, once owned by the actor Lauren Bacall, is among the assets of the disgraced former New York mayor and vocal Donald Trump acolyte that Giuliani is deliberately hiding from their reach, according to a letter their attorney, Aaron Nathan, sent to the judge in the case.Additionally, Nathan said, the contents of Giuliani’s $5m Manhattan apartment to which the pair are also entitled were stripped out some weeks ago in contravention of the judge Lewis Liman’s receivership order. Nathan said Giuliani had deliberately ignored the court’s deadline for handing over the assets.“[Giuliani] has yet to reveal where the vast majority of the receivership property is actually located, despite repeated requests to his counsel,” said the letter, sent on behalf of the poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss.“That silence is especially outrageous given the revelation that the defendant apparently took affirmative steps to move his property out of the New York apartment in recent weeks, while a restraining notice was in effect. Furthermore, despite the cooperative pose [he] put on in his letter of October 29, the receivers’ inquiries since that time have been met predominantly with evasion or silence.”In addition to the Upper East Side apartment, Giuliani was ordered to turn over several items of New York Yankees memorabilia and about two dozen luxury watches.In response to the letter, Liman has ordered Giuliani to appear at a hearing in New York on Thursday. Giuliani’s attorney, Kenneth Caruso, has requested a delay so his client can fulfill an obligation to host a radio broadcast from Florida that evening.Giuliani, wearing a New York fire department hat and stars-and-stripes shirt, was pictured arriving at the polling site in Palm Beach on Tuesday in the passenger seat of the Mercedes SL500. He spoke to reporters but had no comment about the settlement.Caruso, in a court filing last week, denied Giuliani was being obstructive. “[He] is, and will remain, ready to comply” with Liman’s order, Caruso said – but claimed that Giuliani, who filed for bankruptcy last year, had not received information about how to deliver it, the Hill reported.Nathan said that claim was “misleading”.Giuliani’s spokesperson Ted Goodman, meanwhile, told the Hill in a statement that he “has made available his property and possessions as ordered” and that he had put a “few items” into storage over the past year.Anything else that was removed was related to Giuliani’s nightly livestreams, Goodman claimed, asserting it was therefore outside the settlement. A separate lawsuit over Giuliani’s Palm Beach apartment is ongoing.In a subsequent statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Goodman said Giuliani had made efforts to hand over the car.“Our lawyers have requested documentation to transfer over the title of the vehicle, and haven’t heard back from opposing counsel,” he said.“This is yet another attempt to render Mayor Rudy Giuliani – a man who has improved the lives of more people than almost any other living American – penniless and homeless. The weaponization of our once-sacred justice system should concern every American, regardless of partisan political affiliation.”Separately Michael Ragusa, Giuliani’s head of security, appeared to defend the disbarred lawyer’s retention of the Mercedes Benz in his own statement.“Mayor Giuliani is an 80-year-old man with a bad knee and 9/11-related lung disease, relies on this vehicle as his primary means of transportation in Florida, where there is no mass transit system like New York City’s,” he said.“He currently holds an active Florida driver’s license. The way he is being pushed toward poverty by those targeting him, after all he has done for this country, is appalling and it is clearly politically motivated.”In July, a judge dismissed Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, clearing the way for Freeman and Moss to begin collecting the settlement. But Nathan said in the letter dated Monday that Giuliani had “refused or been unable to answer basic questions about the location of most of the property”.He wrote: “The visit to the apartment, which all parties understood to be for the purposes of assessing the transportation and storage needs for the receivership property contained therein, instead revealed that the apartment was substantially empty.”Freeman and Moss said they received death threats and constant intimidation following the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden when Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused them of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night.The pair were formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing, and a jury ruled Giuliani owed them $148m for spreading lies about them.The pair subsequently settled similar defamation lawsuits with far-right media outlets the Gateway Pundit and One America News.Giuliani has sometimes been an attorney for Trump, who is running for the presidency again on Tuesday in a contest pitting him against Kamala Harris. 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Everybody gets a sticker: Americans cast ballots in nail-biter election – in pictures
José López (left), 49, congratulates first-time voters Alfonso Garcia (right), 18, and López’s daughter, Mariah Delgado, 18, in Los Angeles on 4 November
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Trump and Musk-fueled falsehoods and threats backdrop US election
Americans went to the polls on Tuesday against a backdrop of misinformation – much of it suspected of originating in Russia – as the FBI warned of fake videos and non-credible threats of terrorism aimed at disrupting the US presidential election and discouraging voting.These tensions were stoked by Donald Trump supporters, and the former US president himself. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s most vocal surrogate, tweeted a video of support that appeared to reference the far-right QAnon ideology.The video, showing footage of the January 6 insurrection and featuring Van Halen’s song Jump as a soundtrack, came after an earlier social media post from the entrepreneur that repeated elements of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy from the 2016 presidential election.“The hammer of justice is coming,” read that earlier post.The flood of untruths was fed by Trump on Tuesday as he falsely claimed he had a “big lead” in opinion polls while casting doubt on the reliability of voting machines. Having already baselessly claimed that there was Democratic “cheating” in Pennsylvania, the Republican nominee said it was “an outrage” that it took so long to count votes in swing states.The former president also took liberties with the truth in an early election day video on his Truth Social platform. In an apparent reference to transgender boxers, the video featured Trump complaining that “men could beat up women and win medals” – a supposed example of how American values had collapsed under Joe Biden’s presidency, which the Republican has tied to his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.The disinformation and false statements from the Trump campaign came as voting in one key battleground state, Georgia, already faced disruption following what appeared to fake bomb threats against at least two polling stations.The threats were made against polling stations at Etris Community Center and Gullatt elementary school in Union City, on the outskirts of Atlanta, according to Fulton county police. Union City’s population is nearly 90% Black, according to the US Census Bureau, fuelling suspicions that the threats were aimed at disrupting a cohort expected to mainly vote for Harris.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, told journalists that the “non-credible” threats came from Russia.“We identified the source, and it was from Russia,” he said, saying he believed that the source had been a Russian troll farm.“They’re up to mischief, it seems, and they don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election,” he added. “Anything that can get us to fight amongst ourselves – they can count that as a victory.”The bomb threats followed a warning from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] on Monday that Russia, Iran and China were involved in efforts at election disruption but that Russia was “the most active threat”.“Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences, judging from information available to the IC [intelligence community],” an ODNI statement said.“These efforts risk inciting violence, including against election officials. We anticipate Russian actors will release additional manufactured content with these themes through election day and in the days and weeks after polls close.”In line with that statement, the FBI on Tuesday dismissed a video – made to look like a news clip and purporting to emanate from the bureau – advising Americans to “vote remotely” due to a “high terror threat” at poling stations.“This video is not authentic and does not accurately represent the current threat posture or polling location safety,” the bureau said.It also disavowed a separate video falsely depicting a political rigging voting among prison inmates.In a statement, the FBI said there were “two instances of its name and insignia being misused in promoting false narratives surrounding the election,” USA Today reported.The second video features a fake FBI press release alleging that officials at five prisons in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona rigged voting among inmates and conspired with a political party. “This video is also not authentic, and its contents are false,” the FBI said.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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Oldest living survivor of Tulsa race massacre casts vote for Kamala Harris
Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa race massacre, cast her ballot in Oklahoma on Tuesday at 110 years old for Kamala Harris.In a photo shared on social media, Fletcher is wearing an “I voted” sticker, and according to CNN journalist Abby Phillip, Fletcher voted for the vice-president, as she had previously said she would.Fletcher was just seven years old in 1921 when a white mob attacked the city’s “Black Wall Street”, killing an estimated 300 African Americans. The mob also robbed and burned more than 1,200 businesses, churches and homes, which left thousands of people homeless.In 2021, 100 years after the massacre occurred, Fletcher and other survivors testified before Congress in support of a lawsuit brought in 2020 aimed at getting reparations for the destruction of Greenwood, a once-thriving Black district.The lawsuit argued that Tulsa’s history of racial division and tension stemmed from the massacre and noted that the city and insurance companies never compensated the victims.The lawsuit also argued that the massacre resulted in racial and economic disparities in the region that still exist today.In 2023, an Oklahoma judge dismissed the lawsuit, undermining efforts to secure some legal justice for the elderly survivors.That same year, Fletcher released her memoir, Don’t Let Them Bury My Story, which details the impact of the Tulsa massacre on her life and advocates for racial justice.Lessie Benningfield Randle, one of other last living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, also cast her vote in the 2024 election this week, according to Essence.Randle, who is 109 years old, told Essence, that if this is her last ballot, “then I’m grateful that it’s for Kamala Harris”.“My grandchildren deserve a world where taking care of their parents isn’t a financial struggle, medication is affordable and women are free,” she said. “And our children deserve a president who will inspire them to learn from history, not a tyrant who will try to erase it.” More
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Trump’s queasy prescription to ‘make America healthy again’ takes shape
From assertions that America’s highest-profile vaccine critic would lead health agencies to new promises for “massive reform” of Obamacare, the chaotic last week of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign will probably serve as a preview of what “Make America healthy again” could mean should the former president regain power.The jumble of proposals echoed conservative policy documents, channeled the residual anger of the post-pandemic anti-vaccine movement and alarmed experts who help set the nation’s health policies.“My first reaction is that a Trump administration would be the most anti-public health, anti-science administration in history,” said Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown Law School.“In my mind, health is very much on the ballot,” he said.Over the last week of the campaign, Trump said he would let the nation’s foremost vaccine skeptic “go wild” at the nation’s food and drug agencies and refused to rule out banning certain vaccines. The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, also promised “massive reform” of Obamacare should Trump win.Vaccines are among society’s most effective public health interventions, saving an estimated 154 million lives worldwide over 50 years, according to a study in the Lancet. Obamacare has grown in popularity even among Republicans.“It reminds me of the chaos of the first administration, right in the midst of the pandemic,” said Gostin, referring to a time when Trump floated bogus treatments for Covid from injecting disinfectant to ivermectin to hydroxychloroquine – all debunked and often actively harmful.“But it’s far worse,” continued Gostin, “because while Trump at least was surrounded by credible scientists like Tony Fauci, I don’t think there will be any similar restraint in the next Trump administration.”The official Republican party platform is short on details, but blames immigrants for high healthcare prices, and says the party will “commit” to lowering healthcare prices through “choice” and “transparency”. It also pledges to “protect” Medicare from Democrats, who it claims plan to allow “tens of millions of new illegal immigrants” to enroll in the program.Voters in both parties cite healthcare costs as their top health-related issue. However, transparency measures would probably only result in a 1% reduction in healthcare prices over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. “Choice” is often a euphemism for reducing health insurance regulations, which would allow Americans to buy plans that cover fewer services.Undocumented migrants are not eligible to enroll in Medicare, and the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, backed away from a policy that would have provided government-backed healthcare to all residents of the US, regardless of immigration status.A detailed look at how Trump’s supporters might attempt to change US health policy is found in the conservative playbook Project 2025. There, health policy proposals are dominated by calls to restrict abortion and diminish the role of scientific research.In it, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should be known as the “Department of Life”, approval for medication abortion should be withdrawn, and health policy should promote “fatherhood” and the “nuclear family” and stop research that amounts to “woke transgender activism”.HHS should stop focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity” and end policies that are “subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage”. Its sub-agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, should be split in two with the power to make policy recommendations severely curtailed. The “incestuous relationship” between government researchers and vaccine manufacturers should end, the plan says.As voters head to the polls, the people who might institute these policies have also come into focus. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the former independent candidate and staunch vaccine critic, said he had been “promised” a role helming the nation’s health agencies by Trump.“The key, which President Trump has promised me, is control of the public health agencies,” said Kennedy on a Zoom call with supporters, according to ABC News. Those agencies include “HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, Food and Drug Administration, [National Institutes of Health] and a few others. And also the [United States Department of Agriculture], which is, you know, key to making America healthy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKennedy ended his presidential run and endorsed Trump in August after a conspiracy theory-fueled campaign that revealed he had health issues related to a brain worm, once sawed the head off a whale and dumped a dead bear in Central Park.Dr Joseph Ladapo has been floated as a potential pick for the head of HHS. The Harvard University-educated Florida surgeon general warned state residents against using Covid-19 vaccines and allowed unvaccinated children to go to school during a measles outbreak.Although ideas floated by Trump’s supporters may be easily disproved, health researchers and policy experts said they take the threat of their influence deadly serious, with the last week highlighting how legitimate concerns about the power of pharmaceutical and chemical companies can be exploited.“I think we leaned into a libertarian left hook,” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of an advisory committee on vaccines for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).Offit said he worried vaccine mandates primed some Americans to believe vaccine misinformation, and even though he supported them, worried they may “have done more harm than good”.Another research advocate who spoke anonymously to Science magazine said: “We’re all in a state of panic … I don’t know anybody who isn’t worried about this.”Soon, the nation will know the extent to which such messages resonated with voters.“I’m surprised that anti-vaccine rhetoric is considered to be convincing enough to get you elected,” said Offit. “I’m surprised that such a significant portion of the population would be compelled by that.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand | Rafael Behr
Donald Trump’s record of refusal to concede defeat after the last US election should have disqualified him from running in this one. His criminal indictments should have meant banishment from mainstream politics. His campaign rhetoric – a rambling litany of bigotry and spite – should not have carried beyond the paranoid fringe.But what use are should and shouldn’t against the brute force of can and does? Things that are supposed to be self-evident in a constitutional democracy have ceased to be obvious to millions of Americans. We don’t need to wait for all votes to be counted to wish for a stronger cultural inoculation against tyranny.A healthier body politic would not have been infected by Trump’s candidacy. How did the democratic immune system fail? He is gifted with a malign kind of charisma, but it needed a confluence of economic stagnation, cultural polarisation and technological revolution over many years to achieve maximum contagion.There is always a risk of romanticising the past when coping with anxiety in the present. Aggressive nationalism that bristles with racism, misogyny and swaggering machismo is an old style in American politics. There is also nothing especially new in polarised social attitudes. Culture wars have been waged with varying degrees of intensity for generations.What stands out as a uniquely 21st-century innovation is the segregation of political tribes into discrete and self-reinforcing information silos. Formerly, even in times of fierce political division, there were institutions and rules that governed debate. There were commonly agreed facts that might be subject to rival interpretation while still connecting partisans of opposite views to a shared reality.That way of conducting politics is not obsolete, but it is rooted in analogue systems. It relies on real-life interactions, deliberations, clunky old institutions, meandering conversations, small talk. It is the stuff of people mingling in assemblies and town halls, breaking bread together. It is the opposite of politics played in digital mode where the platforms on which debate is conducted are also engines of radicalisation; where differences of opinion are accelerated into irreconcilable enmities.This isn’t an elegy for some pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse. Prejudice, misinformation, sheer stupidity and abuse of power were abundant enough when information flows were tightly controlled and volumes were a tiny fraction of what they are now.An apparent correlation between extreme politics and the rise of social media doesn’t prove a causal link. But there is a plausible argument that a very online culture, marked by short attention spans, narcissism and impatient consumer appetites, has a more natural affinity with shallow demagoguery than with representative democracy.The whole apparatus of voting for a candidate who might not satisfy your exact needs, and probably doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred, but might at least make some half-decent decisions for the country as a whole over the coming years, feels oddly antiquated. It is alien to the click-and-collect spirit of digital commerce.A democratic election is the antithesis of an internet transaction. It contains not just an expectation of delayed gratification, but a guarantee of frustration. Compromise, imperfection and disappointment are the necessary price for having a government that tries to balance the complex demands of a variegated society.The alternative is a political movement, such as the Maga cult, that treats elections as a cry of rage or exultant self-actualisation. Trump’s campaign has never construed voting in terms of civic choice, with more than one potentially legitimate outcome. It was always going to be either a heroic restoration of the rightful president or another iteration of the deep-state conspiracy against him. There is no place for defeat in the script except as material to bolster the claim of a higher victory.It is a mode of campaigning that is hostile to the basic premise of a democratic ballot, which is that either side might win and counting votes actually counts.It also exploits a culture of political journalism that measures professional integrity by a refusal to pick sides. It has been peculiar to observe liberal American media continuing to apply their conventional reporting templates, which contain the implicit judgment that the two candidates have equivalent democratic credentials. That is absurd when one of them transparently despises democracy.Much of America’s moderate conservative and liberal establishment seems to have spent the campaign going through the motions of political normalcy, hoping to stir the system into resilience by operation of muscle memory. It doesn’t work.But ringing the alarm at the spectre of fascism doesn’t work either. There is no doubt that Trump’s temperament and ambitions are fascistic. He admires dictators, lusts after absolute power, speaks of political critics as enemies and boasts of his willingness to crush them with armed organs of the state.And yet calling that kind of politics by its proper name doesn’t provoke any scruple among his supporters. Partly that is because the currency of comparison with 20th-century dictators has been dulled by overuse. “Fascist” is a label that has been applied too casually and too often as unthinking abuse to be rehabilitated as a tool with moral precision and rhetorical impact more than 100 years after it was coined.That doesn’t mean the lessons of the 1920s and 1930s are irrelevant to the current predicament. It is easy to find disturbing parallels, and the connection can’t be ignored when white supremacists and card-carrying neo-Nazis are an active cadre in the new radical-right coalition.But there is also a danger for liberal opinion in leaning too heavily on the familiar cautionary tales from history.Casting the threat as a resurgence of something old – a zombie ideology risen from its postwar grave – preserves the convenient idea of liberal democracy as the more modern and more highly evolved political system. It is the instinct to dismiss nationalism as an ideological retirement home for angry white people whose skills don’t equip them to compete in a dynamic, globalised economy, and who express their frustration as bigoted reaction against progressive social change.There might be a dose of truth in that analysis – but it doesn’t contain an argument in favour of liberal democracy, beyond the implication that only stupid, bad people oppose it. Unsurprisingly, those same people don’t find that argument very persuasive.The awkward truth for those of us who rally in defence of liberal democracy today is that it has undergone no obvious renewal since its peak at the end of the last century. We, no less than the nationalists, are imprisoned by nostalgia, wishing the future could be more like the past. And so we find ourselves constantly testing the limits of analogue protection against a virus that is digitally borne.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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