*THAT there is debate among conservative thinkers about whether the Republican nominee might in fact be a fascist is quite a thing. Andrew Sullivan thinks that to apply the label to Donald Trump might be an insult to fascism. Robert Kagan thinks Mr Trump is a precursor to a 1930s revival in politics. The problem with the comparison is that it comes with an accusation of impending genocide that overshadows whatever enlightenment might come from making it. Mr Trump is not a fascist, if by that you mean a successor to Mussolini or Hitler.

But there was more to fascism than those two ogres. In the mid-1930s fascist movements cropped up in most advanced democracies. At one point it was sufficient to put on an adventurously coloured shirt (any colour as long as it’s not white) to start one. France had the Greenshirts, Ireland the Blueshirts, Britain the Blackshirts. Even tiny Iceland had its Greyshirts. America, being a big place that prizes consumer choice, had both Silvershirts and Khakishirts.

All these movements had a charismatic leader at their head. None had a coherent set of ideas. Early fascisms had more in common with socialism. Those movements that survived to form dictatorial governments embraced a corporatist sort of capitalism, and set about killing left-wingers. These fascist movements were propelled by the young; Trumpismo, by contrast, has more appeal to the elderly. Perhaps because of this they looked to the future and venerated modernity, whereas Mr Trump often seems to be trying to bring back the 1950s.

What does have a familiarly thirties ring to it is the combination of elite-rot and discredited ideas that Mr Trump feeds on. European elites looked unworthy of the description in the 1930s, after a war that had killed more people than any other before it but resolved nothing, followed by the biggest crisis ever faced by capitalism. In Latin America alone 16 countries suffered coups or takeovers by strongmen within a few years of 1929.

"Early fascist movements,” writes Robert Paxton in "The Anatomy of Fascism" (published 12 years before Mr Trump’s rise), “exploited the protests of the victims of rapid industrialisation and globalisation-modernisation's losers, using, to be sure, the most modern styles and techniques of propaganda." Their successors, in America and in Western Europe, where far-right parties are also flourishing, do the same. Like early fascisms, they have few ideas to speak of. Rather, they point out that the elites don’t know what they are doing and promise an alternative world of prosperity for all with no sacrifice necessary. Plenty of voters take this as plain-speaking.

The best way to refute the contemporary movements might be to ask them to govern. The experience of all those coloured shirts suggests that at that point they would then change into something different. It might be relatively benign: a movement built around a charismatic leader that sought to take the hard edges off economic change by ending immigration and discouraging trade. Or it might be something more like late-fascism, which only really existed in Italy and Germany.

I don’t think such a thing is possible in America or Western Europe now. The dislocations of the 1930s were on a completely different scale to the foreign- and domestic-policy failures of the past decade. Having suffered late-fascism once, the West has some immunity from it, because we know what it looks like. That said, I didn’t think Mr Trump would be the Republican nominee either.