“History never repeats itself,” Mark Twain once said, “but it does often rhyme.” Today, few people want to see a future that repeats anything like Europe in the 1930s, when a lunatic personality cult gained control of the most powerful nation on the continent and then ran amok. While tracking that history in my forthcoming book Shadows of Tyranny, I couldn’t help but notice that while today’s overriding political narrative repeats nothing, yet it looks ominously familiar.

I end the book with an epilogue entitled Where Is Our Churchill? I was casting about, wondering: who is going to lead the resistance? Where is the right person to do that  job. The good news is that our 21^st century Churchill has emerged from the shadows. Her name is Kamala Harris.

Let’s take it from the top. In 1930s Germany, a charismatic demagogue – a convicted criminal who had led a failed insurrection — contrived to unify right-wing extremists bent on seizing control of the state. Adolf Hitler did not start his political career as a genocidal Nazi but as a garden-variety fascist promising a return to a mythical paradise peopled by a superior race. Yes, he was exceptionally racist.

Saner functionaries who believed they could control him found out they could not. He manipulated the system, installed allies in key positions, and encouraged them to knock down the guardrails of a functioning democracy. We all know how that unfolded.

That the world avoided the worst-case scenario – a Nazi victory in the Second World War – was thanks largely to what happened in Britain with Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Late in September 1938, prime minister Chamberlain arrived home from a Munich meeting with Hitler waving a signed agreement and proclaiming that he had achieved “peace in our time.”

Less than one year after that, when Hitler started the war by invading Poland, Chamberlain lost all credibility as a leader – and, under pressure, did the right thing. He resigned in favor of Churchill. It was late in the day – but happily not too late. If you are thinking of Joe Biden, yes, you hear the rhyming.

Since the mid-1930s, while perusing the work of spies and foreign correspondents, Churchill had been warning the world that the Nazis were rearming with a view to wreaking vengeance. In 1938, he declared Chamberlain’s ballyhooed Munich Agreement “a total and unmitigated defeat” and prophesied that worse would follow unless people mustered the courage to speak out. Late in May 1940, with more than 300,000 British and Allied troops trapped in France on the beaches of Dunkirk, Churchill led Britain in working a miracle evacuation. He fought on until the war was won. My point is this: Winston Churchill was the right man in the right place at the right time. He was a man of destiny.

Not long ago, in a front-page article, the New York Times proclaimed Donald Trump “a man of chaos and destiny” because he had dodged a bullet. In truth, Kamala Harris is today’s person of destiny – the individual who has emerged just in time to prevent an epic debacle on the world stage.

Two decades younger than Trump, smart and articulate, fearless, Harris has been hailed as a “tremendous champion” on climate and environmental justice. As California’s attorney general, she sued BP and other big oil companies. While in the Senate, she sponsored the Green New Deal resolution. As vice president, she cast a tie-breaking vote to pass a historic climate bill.

Not only that, but she knows how to deal with felons. In her first campaign appearance after Joe Biden stepped down, she reminded people that, while serving in California as a prosecutor and attorney general, she had taken on perpetrators of all kinds: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

I, for one, hear her loud and clear. Near the top of this opinion piece I quoted myself asking:  Where Is Our Churchill? I was worried sick that nobody had emerged to lead the charge against MAGA. That question has since been answered.

No, History is not repeating itself. But the rise of a personality cult? Those called to respond: Chamberlain and Biden, Churchill and Harris. To me, that sounds awfully like rhyming. Kamala Harris: Woman of Destiny.

In August, with Douglas & McIntyre, Ken McGoogan will publish Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship.