“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” is a line attributed to the novelist Sinclair Lewis, whose 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, imagines how fascism would happen there. This line is quoted all the time these days, but when the Sinclair Lewis Society looked into it, they were unable to corroborate it.

What Lewis did write in It Can’t Happen Here was that “in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty”.

I reckon this might be one of the earliest American usages of “fascist” not as a political definition, but as a term of empty abuse. Europe is a long way away from here, and American politics have always been a vast, unlicensed experiment in Europe political thought, uprooted from its contexts and inflated by scale.

Americans are the authors of their own lives, so perhaps it is unsurprising that they take liberties with the language.

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Trump in Mar-a-Lago

President Biden’s recent use of the f-word has a long pedigree. He recently said that the “extreme MAGA philosophy” of pro-Trump Republicans was “semi-fascist”. This was one of those rare instances when Biden knew exactly what he was saying.

The Democrats’s best hope of winning the votes of Independents and even moderate Republicans in the November midterms is to invoke the prospect of a third Trump run, with or without goose-stepping.

A semi-fascist presumably wears only one jackboot and wants only half the trains to run on time. Either way, Donald Trump is not a fascist, or even a semi.

As the FBI’s discovery of boxes of government documents in his Mar-a-Lago lair shows, Trump is an anarchic kleptocrat. His presidency, like his business dealings, was a mess. The corrupt postcolonial republics of South America have long been ruled by this kind of leader.

When the North Americans had allowed their society and democracy to decay, they got one too.

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Trump's Florida home in Mar-a-Lago

Biden followed up with a speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The lighting design had him standing between the red and the blue: the unifier of a divided nation. But the close-ups showed him standing in front of a red backdrop.

Add the darkness of the night, the presence of a couple of Marines in the shadows upstage, and some bad-faith image-trimming on Twitter, and he looked as if he was in a Leni Riefenstahl outtake, or perhaps a Batman movie or one of those other films that, painfully PC as their casting might be, are the visual progeny of Riefenstahl’s look.

Naturally, the extreme MAGA philosophers argued that Biden was the real fascist. The jackboot was now on the other foot, so they gave him a kicking. But this too is preposterous.

Biden is an old-school, big-city Democrat. He’s one of those ward-heelers who used to push the union vote into line at election time, promoted far higher than his abilities. Like Trump, he is a Boomer liberal, distressed by America’s relative decline, and sentimental about its democracy.

In their search for ever more extreme ways of demonising the other side, Republicans and Democrats alike reach for Nazi analogies.

That this registers with the voters might even be a proof that Holocaust education has succeeded, albeit with an assist from the History Channel, most of whose programming is about Nazis or UFOs. But the reckless citing of Nazi parallels is, like a fervent belief in little green men, also a proof that large numbers of Americans have lost touch with reality, and that the quality of political thought has declined.

The dialectic of idiocy is accelerating in America as the economy goes south. These are always bad signs, especially for the Jews. The question is, will the decline in the quality of political thought lead to the collapse of the system it describes?

The Democrats talk socialism, the Republicans talk nationalism, but the real business of America, business itself, goes on. Both parties are officially Sino-sceptic, yet imports from China have risen under both Trump and Biden.

The numbers of registered Republicans and Democrats continue to decline, and the quotient of half-cracked fanatics in their ranks continues to rise.

The Democratic left and the MAGA right share contempt for democracy and the law, and outrage at the collapse of the middle-class economy. Ideological hostility to Jews is always collateral to such sentiments: conspiracy theories about George Soros and Wall Street are common to both.

It’s not a one-party state and national socialism, though. It’s a two-party state, faux-nationalists against faux-socialists, a political costume party where the language has little basis in history or, increasingly, reality.

Dominic Green is a historian living in Boston. He is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute