Red Flags and Yellow Ones

Bob was struggling with his conscience on November 29th. But now we’re in December and the impulse has passed.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump and journalist Chuck Todd on July 23, 2016.

A week ago in this space came a confession, though manifestly not an apology, for authorial schadenfreude on a cosmic scale at the prolonged, infinite, beautiful, beautiful sufferings of the criminal sociopath Donald Trump. It is an agonizing Douche-i-fixion, and may it be eternal.

This week: another confession whose indignity legitimately raises questions about your correspondent’s character. This time the subject is triumphalism, a behavior which is not only distasteful and self-aggrandizing (“I told you so!”), but even in the NFL deemed “unsportsmanlike conduct.” Fifteen yard penalty.

Throw the flag, motherfucker.

After you’ve read through this text, please give a listen to this. It was an essay for On the Media from May 3, 2016. Here’s a brief peek at the piece, which described the imminent threat to American democracy, exacerbated by the media’s craven, politics-as-usual reportage. It was triggered by NBC’s Chuck Todd, who had Trump on Meet the Press and asked him about … wait for it … tax proposals.

ME: Trump has achieved the brink of the Republican nomination, according to the candidate himself, by being himself, no matter how politically incorrect, except that his supposedly courageous candor is contaminated with the most cowardly hate speech — racism, xenophobia, misogyny, incitement, breathtaking ignorance on issues, both foreign and domestic, and a nuclear recklessness, reminiscent of a raving meth head with a machete on an episode of C*O*P*S.

[CLIP FROM C*O*P*S THEME SONG]

ME: The man is a menace of historic proportions, so who the Chuck Todd cares about his tax proposals? It’s like asking Charles Manson about his driving record. But here comes the political press, going into standard general-election mode and treating a demagogue as a legitimate standard bearer, as if the only thing he has to answer for is the latest blip in the news cycle.

It’s kind of a scorching essay. Then, when you’re done, please also listen to this: It was a solemn, off-the-cuff conversation between me and my former On the Media co-host Brooke Gladstone on the day after the 2016 election. I was in despair. Brooke — who offered the preposterous argument that the media had invested too little effort investigating the grievances of the MAGA voter — was otherwise in low dudgeon and characteristically skeptical of my panic. When I invoked Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools — about a group of variously marginalized passengers steaming optimistically toward Hamburg in 1931, in spite of the rise of Naziism — Brooke (neither for the first time nor the last) denounced me as nonsensical: “What the fuck,” she barked, “is that supposed to mean?!” You really should listen. Quite the radio moment. But for now, on the subject of such comparisons, I am herewith waving in your face a third piece, this one my early Bully Pulpit columns. It received quite a few comments, notably these:

Another inane screed by Ole Bob – Hubert Leigh Smith

I am a conservative republican, and a proud Jew. I consider this post to be a personal insult. – Walter Sobchak, Esq

Awwww! Who doesn’t like getting a Telex or two from the Ship of Fools? They were reacting to this, which, like the previously cited warnings, screeds and cries for help, could have been dated today. And so, once again, it is:

September 9, 2021

Call Today’s Republican Party What It Is
Oh my Godwin, do you not see what is plainly in front of your eyes? The Holocaust came after 22 years’ buildup of — and tolerance for — right-wing extremism.

You know how to induce scorn in a certain class of liberal political observer? Just call Sen. Rand Paul a Nazi.

Or Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton. Or Rep. Madison Cawthorn. Or his fellow reactionaries GOP Congresspersons Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan or Marcia Taylor Greene. Or Republican Governors Gregg Abbott, Kristi Noem, Doug Ducey or Ron DeSantis. Or Steve Bannon or Steven Miller. Or Tucker P.O.S. Carlson.

Or the Congressional “Freedom Caucus.” Or the full Republican Party. Or Donald Trump. Because when you start naming names, comes the sanctimony and protest.

Nooooooo. They're not Nazis, the scoffers scoff. Don't abuse that term. Your hyperbole both undercuts the rigor of your argument and, worse still, trivializes the Holocaust.

It’s not a new complaint. Reductio ad Hitlerum, is the term political philosopher Leo Strauss coined in 1953, which was a play on reductio ad absurdum, which is what happens when extrapolating or distilling a problem to its worst imaginable extreme renders the comparison weak, and your moral authority right along with it. An “association fallacy,” in other words. There is also the wry Godwin’s Law to be reckoned with. That's the playful but trenchant observation, circa 1991, that “as an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches one.” The reflex Godwin lampoons is that argument seeks logical extension to a rhetorical destination so irresistibly extreme that the debate must end; just trace an inevitable line to the Holocaust, drop your mic and leave the stage.

Of course, the fallacy Godwin’s Law astutely implies — à la Leo Strauss — is that such dramatic extrapolations aren't necessarily as strong as the argumentative impulse; the logical extension doesn’t really extend logically.

No, Congresswoman Greene, mask mandates are not a shortcut to totalitarianism. Take off the Yellow Star, you blithering moron.

And thus the high-toned disparagement of Nazi comparisons about, say, Donald Trump. “Look,” says Journal of Journeys commentator Brian Brewington, “I dislike Donald Trump as much as the next guy but he’s not a Nazi. In fact, if you’re referring to someone outside of Germany, who wasn’t alive between 1920–1945, they’re probably not a Nazi either. As by definition, a Nazi is a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. I just think it’s a term associated with such awful events, it should be reserved for when referring to precisely that rather than used at will as propaganda, to further personal political agendas.”

“Your political opponent is not a Nazi,” agrees lawyer/author Matthew T. Mangino. “The protesters down the street are not Nazis; the police are not Nazis. With few exceptions none of us have ever had to face a Nazi in the 75 years since the end of World War II, and for this we should be grateful.”

According to the advocates of restraint and precision, when describing today’s far right, you can say nationalists. You can say racists. You can say White Supremacists. Authoritarians. Extremists. Religious zealots. Demagogues. Or MAGA cultists or brainwashed suckers or imbeciles. Just not the N Word.

“One can well understand why demonstrators in the heat of conflict hurl the fascist epithet at a government that acts like a police state,” says Vanderbilt University history professor Helmut Walter Smith, “but the fundamental points of comparison are not the same.”

Oh, aren’t they? With all due respect, the Wannsee Conference, at which was forged the so-called Final Solution — the eradication of European Jews — took place in 1942. The Nuremberg Laws, which officially marginalized German Jews, were enacted in 1935. Mein Kampf was written in 1925. The Nazi Party was founded in 1920. The point being: The Holocaust was a long time igniting, but what the perpetrators were was apparent long before what they finally did. In juxtaposing our current political nightmare to the worst of the 20th century, it’s nonsensical to focus on a grotesque, defining endpoint. The truth is revealed by the trajectory and the conduct along the path. What we must scrutinize and internalize are the comparative architectures of evil.

And those comparisons tell us everything we need to know about America’s plight in September 2021.

Humiliation. The Nazi Party was built upon the politics of grievance and loss, for the German people and the German “race.” Their humiliating defeat in World War I, followed by the even more humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, enabled Hitler to engineer resentment — not just toward the Allied Powers but also the German Social Democrats and the Jews who, he raged, had “stabbed the Reich in the back.”

This is identical to the psychology and politics of Make America Great Again, which is constructed on such Fox News notions as Democratic “apology tours,” a half century of Republican talking points about the desecration of our “traditional values” and Trump rhetoric about our surrender to globalist forces, supposedly rendering our once mighty superpower a weakling before the world. “Nobody respects us,” he declaimed on the campaign trail. “They are laughing at us.”

Minority rule. In November 1932, the Nazis won 32% of the seats in the Reichstag. They had neither the majority nor the coalition partner ordinarily required to form a government, but were legally invited to do so by President Paul von Hindenberg, who bowed to industrialists and the other Communist-fearing elites the Nazis had courted for a decade. 

By comparison, in the latest Gallup polling (August 2021), 28% of the U.S. electorate identified as Republican. Adding independents who say they lean Republican, the GOP commands 43% — the same as November 2016 when Trump won the presidential election, despite trailing Clinton by nearly 3 million popular votes. The GOP is a minority party which nonetheless controls 28 of 49 state legislatures (Nebraska is unicameral) and 27 of 50 governorships — attributable to partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, unlimited dark money from industrial and financial elites and the rural/urban education and ideology divide that buoys nationalists the world over. Meantime, they use the framework of democracy to frustrate the majority through Supreme Court decisions on guns, campaign finance, voting rights and abortion; Senate procedure, chiefly the filibuster; and the power of the Senate Majority Leader to block popular legislation and judicial appointments. All the while staging partisan wild goose chases (Benghazi, election “fraud”) yet suppressing the impeachment case against their fraudulent, mendacious, corrupt and authoritarian president.

Demonizing Jews and other minorities. Nothing needs to be here retold about Nazi genocide of the Jews, but we must recall other Others who were seen as polluting the Master Race: Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavs, homosexuals, blacks, the disabled, Communists and “decadent” artists.

Likewise, modern American Neo-Nazism and Christian Nationalism are broadly antisemitic (“Jews will not replace us!” was the chilling Charlottesville chant) but they also target their hate and xenophobia at Black Americans, Muslims, Latinx populations, Asians and the LGBT cohort.  Much of this was expressed in official Trump Administration policy, such as the Muslim ban, the separation and incarceration of undocumented families, the border wall (blocking, Trump said, “rapists and murderers”) and — along with the rhetorical vilification of Black Lives Matter — the brutal deployment of military and law enforcement during civil rights protests.

“Fake News.” Beginning in 1922, Hitler began using the term Lugenpresse — “lying press” — against the leftist news media, then the foreign press and eventually all journalism that found fault with his authoritarianism and antisemitic scapegoating. To him, all criticism was an invention of his enemies, the Jews in particular, whom he smeared as “enemies of the people.” And, of course, in their propaganda, the Nazis themselves faked news, including preposterous Big Lies that with time and rhetorical persistence took hold. Notably and catastrophically, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a hoax left over from the 19th century — was presented as proof of Jewish conspiracy for world domination. As American journalist John Gunther wrote in 1940, the lies were internalized by the German people via “ceaseless repetition of the argument, left impregnably in their minds, fecund and germinating.” And this process was made easier by the growing cult of Hitlerism, which enthralled the society in willing suspense of disbelief on a massive scale. In the words of historian Benjamin Carter Hett: “The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.”

In identical fashion many decades later, Trump acolytes animated by grievance are willing to swallow preposterous rumors and conspiracy theories — from the canard about Barack Obama’s supposed Kenyan birthplace, to the imagined cheering Muslims in Jersey City whom Trump claimed to have seen on September 11, 2001 to “Mexico will pay for the wall” to the “perfect [extortion] call” with the Ukrainian president to the Big Steal, to the Covid “hoax,” to the 2020 presidential election that saw Trump trounced but which he claims to have won in a landslide. These fantasies, by the way, are embraced not just by fringe individuals and extremist groups, but by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress. In 2021, the Big Lie is the political foundation of the Republican Party.

And the press who debunks the lies? Per Trump: “Enemies of the People.”

Stormtroopers. Hitler had his Sturmabteilung — aka, “brownshirts” — unemployed workers, army vets and thugs turned paramilitaries who provided security for party members, muscled political opponents, staged demonstrations and used violence and its threat to intimidate the Weimar government they hated for its acquiescence to Versailles humiliation. With them as his militia, the Nazis in 1923 staged the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup d’etat — a mob incited by Hitler’s claims that their freedom was in jeopardy: “You can see that what motivates us is neither self-conceit nor self-interest,” Hitler shouted, “but only a burning desire to join the battle in this grave eleventh hour for our German Fatherland.” In the ensuing violence, 20 men died.

In 2021 America, we harbor the many violent, subversive and often explicitly hateful elements of the so-called “Patriot” movement: Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Atomwaffen Division, The Base, KKK, National Alliance and more than 500 other violent militias and hate groups who — according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, committed 67% of 2020’s terrorist plots and attacks. Thus did the Department of Homeland Security warn that violent white supremacy is the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.”

These were the bullies Trump ordered, days before the presidential election, to “stand back and stand by.” Only three months later, on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump’s loss was awaiting certification in the Senate, hundreds of MAGA faithful stormed the U.S. Capitol in an insurrection aimed at undoing the Biden victory. They had been incited by Donald Trump, who falsely claimed a “rigged” vote had put their freedom in jeopardy: “You don't concede when there's theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore. … If you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore.” In the ensuing violence, 5 died.

These histories, laid side by side, will naturally put Godwin’s Law to the test. But answer this: Do reflexive — and righteous — comparisons to Nazism simply prove Godwin to be correct about the inevitability of Reductio ad Hitlerum? Or do they instead prove that just because Godwin is right, the frightened analogizers aren’t necessarily wrong. As Godwin himself wrote a couple of years back (while Trump was busy separating immigrant children from their parents at the border), Godwin’s Law “is about remembering history well enough to draw parallels — sometimes with Hitler or with Nazis, sure — that are deeply considered. That matters. Sometimes those are going to be appropriate, and on those occasions GL should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter.”

Exactly, so permit me to start the conversation this way: For decades, the Republican Party in general, and Donald Trump in particular, have conducted themselves chillingly like Nazis because Nazis are what they are. The absence of death camps does not disprove the truth of their nature. It simply tells us they need to be stopped before still greater horrors occur. In the 20th century, and throughout human history, we have learned too well that the evil smolders long before the flames.

Postscript: With 32% of the popular vote, the Nazis set the world ablaze. On January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol insurrection, Trump’s national approval rating was 42%. Nazism can exist only amid populism, nationalism and a perverse understanding of patriotism.

We. Are. Living. It. May Godwin help us all.

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