The National Socialist Contagion of the American Left

 

anti-trump-protestPerhaps the most infuriating accusation spewed by leftists over the years has been to equate Republican Presidents with Hitler and their followers as fascists, or more recently, as a “basket of deplorables” who are “irredeemable.” Such charges are drenched with the intellectual dyslexia that dominates classrooms, newsrooms, and entertainment chat rooms where reductio ad Hitlerum rhetoric (Leo Strauss’s phrase) displaces reasoned argument. In fact, America’s leftists see fascists everywhere except among their own ranks. Thus, Barack Obama’s pen and phone dictates, IRS perfidies, EPA commands, Supreme Court interpretive travesties of statutes and the constitution, elite media’s blinkered broadcasting proclivities, and leftie-inspired mob actions are all invisible by leftist standards; only Republicans and their ilk on the “right” constitute dangers to America.

This is all preposterous, of course, and especially galling to Americans who are committed to constitutional government but find themselves constantly accused of favoring policies that are exactly the opposite of what they believe. America’s leftists would do well to explore historical analogues to their own views and actions before blithely continuing autopilot recriminations against anyone who opposes well-known elite orthodoxy. Such digging certainly unearths the likes of Marx, Mao, Alinsky, and most recently, Castro, but more disturbingly, investigators find themselves marching on a path laid by Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Göring, along with the leader who inspired them all. Before this thought ignites a supernova of exploding heads that will destroy the universe, consider the following progression that defined Germany’s experience between the world wars — grievance culture, identity politics, statism — and offer comments about left-wing political habits today.

The grievance culture in Germany between the wars is of course one of the most thoroughly probed subjects in modern times. The overriding point is that the German experience was based on something very real and deadly serious involving the entire population — huge loses in lives, territory, savings, civil peace, ravages of the Great Depression — which culminated in establishing Hitler’s regime. Germany’s grievance culture was existentially threatening and demanded immediate action.

By contrast, America’s grievance culture is artificial and meretricious, based on grotesquely magnified wrongs publicized ad nauseam by an industry that thrives on exacerbating social conflicts for the political and psychological benefit of its leaders. The lesson in each case is the same, even though Nazis were “gangsters in a hurry,” while leftists’ interests are best served by keeping the grievance culture alive indefinitely. But the fundamental commonality remains. A grievance culture is indispensable to the ambitions of political leaders; absent grievances, based either in reality or in faculty lounge fantasies, leaders’ entire rationale for seeking and wielding power vanishes.

How should we regard America’s culture of grievance? One temptation is to dismiss much of it, in the spirit of Allan Bloom’s delicious comment in The Closing of the American Mind that modern pedants have created a whole new vocabulary to talk about absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, another commonality prevents this option, and that is the subject of race; or, if race doesn’t work, gender, or ethnicity, or any number of other groupings. Both National Socialists and American leftists are obsessed with race, to the point of psychological derangement in that neither can say anything intelligent about the subject that is not purposely inflammatory. In the hands of National Socialists and American leftists, race talk descends to the practice of identity politics on steroids.

The truly tragic part of this equation is leftists’ weird and almost laughable pluralizing of the master race concept to America’s squabbling minorities; now every group is “special” in some way, regardless of how grotesque or silly its claims are. In fact, the aggregation of minority group claims may be likened to National Socialists crowing about Aryan superiority, while in America the role of Jews is played by whites; or, if you prefer, “non-minorities.” Thus, university Hispanic “studies” programs celebrate Hispanics; African-American majors emphasize black contributions; but “whiteness” studies excoriate western civilization and shriek about how racism is embedded in “white” DNA. While Nazis blamed every calamity in world history on Jews, leftists assign responsibility for all the world’s evils on whites, leading, for instance, Jeff Hitchcock at the Third National Conference on Whiteness to assert, “there is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color.”

The solution to these grievances based on identity politics in each case is statism; totalitarian rule in Germany and unlimited government in the hands of leftists in America. National Socialists and American leftists have contempt for democracy, using it when it suits their purposes and ignoring it when it doesn’t. American leftists drool over Supreme Court decisions to their liking, bureaucratic rules that expand federal control, and executive orders when Congress refuses to assent to presidential demands. Not exactly Ein Reich, Ein Völk, Ein Führer! but close enough for leftist purposes.

All of which makes the current leftist meltdown from Trump’s election victory more understandable. Leftists celebrate cultures whose contributions to human betterment are marginal or nonexistent (multiculturalism), magnify in grotesque proportions racial, ethnic, and gender collectivism (identity politics), denounce western civilization as the cause of everything terrible in history (“critical” whiteness studies), have contempt for people they’ve never met (most Americans), attempt to expunge free speech everywhere they find it (political correctness), embrace statist authoritarianism (modern liberalism), and are astonished when those outside their bubble fail to appreciate their moral superiority by voting them back into office.

Do all these characteristics reduce American leftism to a modern variant of National Socialism? Surely, benefit of the doubt squeamishness recoils at such a conclusion. Nobody wants to be called a Nazi, of course, but certainly the targets of leftist defamation can insist that they cut it out and scrutinize their own thoughts and actions with the same passion they apply to others. In short, sober reminders of the collectivist policies pursued by other regimes on subjects that matter to them most is imperative to prevent leftists’ continued descent into what Paul Johnson has characterized as the Devil Theory of Politics, based on arrogance, hatred, and resentment.

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  1. MichaelHenry Member
    MichaelHenry
    @MichaelHenry

    Powerful analysis. See also LIBERAL FASCISM by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday 2007).

    • #1
  2. Trinity Waters Member
    Trinity Waters
    @

    MichaelHenry:Powerful analysis. See also LIBERAL FASCISM by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday 2007).

    Excellent book.  One reads it and all is clear.  Too bad Jonah dove into the NT swamp, but I still might read his next book.

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  3. Daphnesdad Member
    Daphnesdad
    @Daphnesdad

    Jonah’s book is an accurate history of the left and their propensity for projection.

    After Trump bullied him so unmercifully it really did sound personal.  He couldn’t say his name without spitting.

     

    • #3
  4. cirby Inactive
    cirby
    @cirby

    According to every leftist I meet, the “Socialist” in National Socialist means “not socialist in any way at all.”

     

    • #4
  5. Quietpi Member
    Quietpi
    @Quietpi

    cirby:According to every leftist I meet, the “Socialist” in National Socialist means “not socialist in any way at all.”

    And so it goes.  As I have said, “a few” times here, I rarely consent to any sort of political / philosophical discourse with a liberal; s/he begins by viewing me as “poorly educated and easily led.”  It usually takes all of one minute to determine which one of us is poorly educated and easily led.  “Their” view of “us” is breathtakingly ignorant.

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  6. Herbert E. Meyer Member
    Herbert E. Meyer
    @HerbertEMeyer

    This is very perceptive, and very important.

    • #6
  7. CM Inactive
    CM
    @CM

    The thing that kept these in check is that the villain class is still the majority here. If Jews had been the majority in Hitler’s Germany, the kind of slaughter that occurred there would have been far less likely to occur.

    It makes you wonder what the left’s end game is to be pushing for whites to be the minority of the population. Would they ever have been so brazen as to elect someone who would take their grievance politics to their end?

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  8. NHPat Inactive
    NHPat
    @NHPat

    I saw a clip from one of Elizabeth Warren’s inane rants a few days ago where she was, as usual, demonizing wealthy businessmen and blaming them for the plight of poor minorities.  This article has helped me clarify why I cringe when Warren opens her mouth – she is raging to be a native American so she can push the evils of whiteness and the glories of victimhood.  Wouldn’t it be nice if even one of those liberals talked about how to create opportunity and about the virtues of learning from jobs in order to become more valuable in the workplace and move up the economic ladder instead of whining, demanding minimum wage increases for basic jobs, and blaming white people for any failures in life?

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  9. barbara lydick Inactive
    barbara lydick
    @barbaralydick

    NHPat: I saw a clip from one of Elizabeth Warren’s inane rants a few days ago where she was, as usual, demonizing wealthy businessmen and blaming them for the plight of poor minorities.

    As much as it will cause me gnashing of teeth and beating of breast, do you have a reference for this inanity?

    • #9
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