It's bad news for the Jews as rival parties hurl the f-word

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