Overheard at a dinner party: “It’s easy: just don’t vote for Nazis.” What a sublime piece of political insight. If only I had thought of it myself; my mind hadn’t been thus blown since I learned that North Korean leader Kim Jung Il authored 1500 books and shot 39 under par. I declared: “By golly - you’re right!”
Heaven help us when the freest people in the history of the world bemoan their country as fascistic and their president a Nazi.
Nazi-like creatures exist in America to this day. Many make little secret of it, all are anti-semitic, and are to be found on both the political right and left. They marched in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us”; they represent the dark underbelly of the far-right; and they inhabit a number of easy-to-find on-line chatrooms. Even the Women’s March was tainted with anti-semitism, a few leaders of which openly praised an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist and shed light on a portion of the left’s uncomfortable proximity to Nazi-esque ideology. All of this while New York City is experiencing a surge of physical assaults against religious Jews.
I don’t think my party-going compatriot believes that Trump and Republicans are Nazis hellbent on transforming America into a fascist state, goose-stepping, as it were, upon the constitution’s guaranteed freedoms of press, religion, and pretty-much-anything-anyone-wants-to-do/be-so-long-as-it-doesn’t-harm-anyone-else-ism. Rather, he probably employed the term to describe an ideology he associates with conservative ethos, of which Trump is merely the foulest embodiment. For some the Trump presidency (really, anything smacking of politically or culturally right-of-center) is accurately summed up as authoritarian, inflexible, and dictatorial. Add to this the conviction that Trump stands at the vanguard of a white supremacist coup hell-bent on extirpating constitutional rights, and the term “Nazi” offers an edgy way to demonstrate one’s deep political engagement and strong moral conviction.
Of course, the “Nazi” label suffers from the fact that it can’t be taken literally, not even by stretching it to “neo-Nazi”, or by employing the purportedly synonymous term, “fascist”. If either were true of America or were being imposed on its citizens by the Trump administration, Americans wouldn’t enjoy limitless freedom to air grievances as frequently and as numerously as they please. As is both well known and taken for granted, Americans are free to rally en masse in full view of the government, without being teargassed, arrested or killed. Contrast this with the Chinese government’s response to pro-democracy protests, most infamously at the Tiananmen Square protests, during which violent suppression created the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and more recently in the arrests and beatings in Hong Kong. Soviet responses to the Prague Spring, the Venezuelan government’s reaction to its citizens’ protests, and countless other such responses from governments the world over and throughout history, highlights how kindly the U.S. government treats dissent and makes a mockery of the notion that America is teetering on the brink of fascism, or that the Trump administration is gearing up to unleash more than Stephen Miller and snarky tweets.
But large, vocal protests are only one indication that America remains fascist-free. Opposition is as easy as having a phone, as is made clear by the daily deluge of countless tweets, from elected officials waging virtual fingers to basement-dwelling political neophytes. Five minutes on either Twitter or Facebook, make it clear that however Trump may be reshaping the tenor of U.S. politics, he isn’t stifling free expression in the U.S. Consider, too, the large and vibrant pundit class made up of journalists, policy wonks and professors who share their hostility, derision, skepticism, etc. about the administration. In fascist states, opposition punditry is found more in hiding - if not already in prisons or graves - than on widely televised shows or in the op-ed section of every national newspaper. Add to this that politicians both inside and outside Trump’s party condemn him. Outspoken criticism of the government is remarkable for its presence and intensity, and stands in glaring contrast to the absence of freedoms in places like China, North Korea, Russia and Turkey.
“Nazi”, “fascists”, and their rightwing relatives, “femi-nazi” and “communist” deems these recipients pariahs and therefore deserving of certain kinds of treatment. There is now a moral obligation to treat them and their ideas as being beyond the reach of reasonable dialogue. Accordingly, such types are best ignored, and, when they do demand an audience, exclusion, or if necessary, destruction. As most, I see the utter exclusion of Nazism from public discourse as a net gain. However, the broad and promiscuous application of “Nazi” and “fascist” is where we go our separate ways. That America remains one of the safest places in history to express political dissent tells me that when people apply these labels to the president or the country, they are either historically obtuse or, too clever by half.
If every conservative were a fascist - and every progressive a communist (for the left isn’t the only side that mislabels) - reasonable people wouldn’t laugh when a yarmulke-wearing, Orthodox Jew is called a Nazi, or when Hillary Clinton is called a communist. If the Trump-voting conservative is a Nazi, and Elizabeth Warren is a communist malefactor, you needn’t weigh the evidence she presents, sort through data she provides, or subject her ideas to critical evaluation. Because fascists, Nazis and commies are evil, we are called to ignore, or malign, or harm them and to take to social media to remind people of our good deeds. In the face of evil, we have little choice but to identify and publicly shame them, suppress their ideas with whatever means, and bring them in line with the correct way of thinking.
In other words, to employ fascism.