The anti-war coalition that got Obama elected by giving the party a pivot from the stain of voting for Bush’s wars were long accustomed to using that terminology.

It was always used for the Bush administration post 9/11.

Obama got a bit of a pause but the troop surge in 2009 really fractured that coalition.

It was during Obama’s terms that criticism of policy could be automatically slapped with a racism charge, mostly due to all the overt racism being leveled at Obama at the time.

But, yeah, I don’t think it was common in German or European discourse to consider America overtly fascist in 2014.