By F. Andrew Wolf, Jr. ——Bio and Archives--October 30, 2024

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“Yes, I do. Yes, I do.” No, this wasn't a response from the vice president to a “marriage proposal.” Rather, such was the refrain of Kamala Harris (the Democratic candidate for president) who has apparently entered the “Trump is a fascist” phase of her wilting campaign. Asked at a CNN town hall whether she thinks Donald Trump is a fascist, Harris was not content with one “Yes, I do;” it took two.

She went on to say that while it is true that the American people care about the economy, they “also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.” The occasion for Harris’ new line of attack is former Trump chief of staff John Kelly telling The New York Times that Trump meets the definition of a fascist, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley maintaining, according to Bob Woodward, that Trump is “fascist to the core.”

But for scholars who've long studied fascism, defining fascism isn't so simple.

"We're not just debating whether or not Trump fits that definition; we are not agreeing on what that definition is," Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, told ABC News in an interview.

There is no scholarly consensus on the term, according to both Berman and Mark Bray, a political scientist from Rutgers University. This is, in part, because fascists historically have not been tied to "rational consistency," Bray said, pointing to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler whose policy positions changed on a variety of occasions. Donald Trump is many things, but inconsistent in his reasoning – what he thinks – is not one of them.

To Berman, fascists are totalitarian with the goal of not just controlling politics, but........

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