I have been considering Fred’s post from last week, and there is an element to it that I find lacking.  It is a weakness of language that we can often conflate similar or related concepts in such a way that important points of meaning are lost or mangled through an ill choice of words, or a misplaced punctuation mark, or a mis-reading of context.

Are the Democrats, Progressives, Socialists, or their allies actually evil, or are they “just ordinary people” doing evil things (or misguided, destructive, “just wrong”, or counter-productive things), and is the difference between “being” and “doing” important enough to draw a distinction? Are not our actions a light upon our souls?

@fredcole – The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Democrats and progressives are just ordinary people, trying to live their lives according to the things they value.

Yes, they sometimes have horrible ideas that sprang from horrible ideas in the past, sometimes created by despicable and even evil people. But that doesn’t make those individual Democrats or progressives evil. They just have ideas that are wrong.

And that’s what it comes down to: these people aren’t evil. They’re just wrong.

If we are actively participating in evil activities, are we evil? Even if we think ourselves morally justified in doing so? What do we say of the liberal who reliably donates generously to Planned Parenthood? Who reliably votes in representatives who, as in Oregon, put the taxpayers on the hook for all abortions? What if that person is otherwise law-abiding and loving towards their own family? Are they evil, funding abortions on the one hand, and joining their PTA to demand the firing of a child molesting teacher on the other hand? Can we weigh and balance such acts?

And can we judge someone less harshly because they, on their own moral spectrum, are convinced they are doing the moral, the just, the right thing? Rule of Law alone dictates that we cannot do so if those actions rise to the level of crimes. We do not forgive a PETA zealot for destroying a mink farm just because PETA thinks it is doing the right thing by the minks. We do not forgive a gang member who murders a rival because the rival broke the code and disrespected him. On smaller issues we may give a “pass” for transgressions whose enforcement is merely social, but those transgressions are nonetheless wrong and harmful.

Fred argues that equating Democrats all across their spectrum to their worst representatives (currently embodied in Antifa and their rancid ilk) is unfair to the many who do not hold to such nonsense – those who pay their taxes, work their jobs, raise their families, and bother no one. I see the point, but the point is limited. Of course one could turn the argument and say that of course we on the right should likewise not be tainted with the neo Nazis, the racists, and the anti-semites. Where this falls apart is that we on the right are not the ones claiming any such association, even if the neo-Creeps keep attempting to press their claim upon us. I see no disassociation, no denouncement of Antifa or BLM from the Left. The difference is telling.

And of course the vast middle may want nothing to do with either group, may want to go on with their lives in peace, yet they return to voting in the very leadership who repeatedly drags their party leftwards, who ever seeks to make all Americans complicit in abortion, who ever seeks to silence free speech, who ever seeks to confine religious practice to narrow grounds where it will have no voice, and who will gainsay nothing of the violent Left. When you vote for someone the first time you may be forgiven if they are other than advertised. When you then re-elect that person you are tacitly approving of at least some of what they have done, while disapproving of whatever the opposition is promising to do, and you are definitely agreeing to go along with more of the same. You are involved. You are, in some degree, complicit.

So is it unfair to equally yoke the moderate Left with the Antifa violent socialists? No, not entirely. For if the Antifa zealots migrate from their position today of tacit favor to a point where the Democrat party begins to embrace their, frankly, evil goals, then the moderate Left, who might have stopped them had they acted or spoken up, has made itself complicit.  Further, many of the Democrats are actively defending the Antifa goons.  If their voters do not turf them out for this, then they share in the blame for the violence.

The rest of this essay may be the living embodiment of Godwin’s Law, but in this case it is well worth the time to examine the case of the Nazis and Germany.  As Antifa rather boldly declares against capitalism, private property, free trade, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, while frequently advocating the blanket punishment of whites and tearing down statues (they may be starting with the Confederates, but they will not be content with them), so too did the Nazis declare against religion (while advancing their own neo-paganism), freedom of speech, rule of law, and against racial and religious undesirables.  Yes, we all know that the Nazis gained power despite not having a majority mandate, but in the 1920s, before they fought their way into power, they could have been vigorously opposed.  They were not.  “Good people”, “normal people”, put off by the violence and militarism of the Nazis, still stood by, believing either that they would burn out, or that other good people would step forward to stop them.  None did, and in the chaos of the Weimar Republic the Nazis were invited in.

And it is not as if all Germans were bad once the Nazis took over.  Indeed, they went on with their lives, paid their taxes, raised their families, and led ordinary lives.  More troubling still, many of the actual monsters who worked for the Nazis were otherwise seemingly normal people.  Take the case of Rudolph Höss.  Those who knew him described him as a good family man.  He was a devoted father who tried to raise his children.

At the dining table, the children were allowed to speak only if they were asked. But he was never angry. At the table he spoke of family things and what we would do on weekends for excursions.

This is a quotation from Brigitte Höss, describing her father Rudolph Höss, commander of the Auschwitz death camp during WWII.

Now, speaking in detail for the first time, she has revealed how she was eventually forced to accept that her father – who she’s previously described as ‘the nicest man in the world – was a killer and what was happening next-door as she enjoyed her idyllic family life.

But as a father, Ingebirgitt said he even once reprimanded the children for threatening to tear down the fence, removing the veil of the atrocities, during a game of cowboys and indians and told them they should never hurt people. [ibid.]

So he was a loving father to his own children, even while he orchestrated the deaths of approximately 2.5 million souls.

Of course the Nuremburg prosecutors had their own impressions of the man, yet they do not outwardly describe a monster either:

First, there was the British war crimes investigator, Captain Hanns Alexander, my great-uncle Hanns, the German Jew turned British soldier, who had arrested the kommandant. Alexander had expected Höss to be a monster and was surprised to find him to appear “normal.”

Then there was Whitney Harris, the American prosecutor (and member of the OSS) who took Höss’s affidavit in Nuremberg. Harris said that Höss appeared like a “grocery clerk,” someone you would pay no attention to if you met him on the street.

Similar accounts abound of the seeming “normality” of many other mass-murderers.  Outside of their work in the war, outside of their extermination work, they were “ordinary”.  I am sure many of the Antifa protestors could be described in the same way.  Away from the riots, away from the protests, individually they may well be the nicest people you could meet.  But on this one issue, they are wrong, they are dangerous, and they are practicing evil, even while they think it moral and just.  We hear the same so often after some criminal is shot – that he was a loving brother, a loving son, took care of his kids – and yet he was beating someone senseless, and yet he was robbing a convenience store, and yet he was mugging a stranger, and yet he was dealing drugs.  Was he evil?  Or was he just wrong?

It lies with the Divine to render final judgement on whether a human is evil or not, but are we not known by our actions?  Can we weigh the balance between the myriad of “good” we have done against our transgressions?  Will a traffic cop let you off with a warning because you are otherwise a “good person”?  Even if you killed someone while driving drunk?  The full answer to the question of “wrong” versus “evil” is perhaps beyond us, but we do judge a person by their actions, and a few poor choices, especially when those choices lead to evil acts, seems to count for more.  Most Democrats may be repelled by Antifa, but if they are and yet do nothing, what then?  If they have the ability to stand up against them and do not, or even secretly cheer them on as a way to get even for Trump, have they not chosen to back evil?  We may not be able to just their being evil, but they may well be doing it, and perhaps the difference is not that important.