Literal Nazis

During the second Bush Administration, which was approximately two thousand years ago, the left was fond of circulating lists of “signs of fascism” tailored to proving that Bushitler was a Nazi. The list was about as accurate as that old libertarian political quiz that revealed that anyone who liked puppies and ice cream was actually a libertarian, but it was revealing in that many credulous leftists fell for and circulated it thereby proving that none of them had the first clue as to what “fascism” actually was. I bring this up because it is relevant to the definitional struggles that the left is having today.

We’ve all heard the claim that supporters of President Trump are “literally Nazis” or something along those lines. When I hear that, I recall how President Reagan once said that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” The slur that Trump and his supporters are “Nazis” or “fascists” is based on a shallow understanding of National Socialism as simply being a doctrine of the “far right” and thrown about in the way that Orwell identified long ago as meaning simply “something not desirable.” However, if one surveys the scene today with sufficient knowledge of history, the closest thing that we have to literal Nazis in the West today are the new progressives.

The primary feature that separates National Socialism from vanilla fascism is that the former was based upon a pseudo-scientific universal racial theory of the world. National Socialist racial theory influenced every area of policy-making and public life in the Third Reich. The Nazis viewed every aspect of life through the lens of their racial theories, leading them to promote such absurdities as “Aryan physics.” Every aspect of the Nazi regime was race-conscious, and the Nazis interpreted the world as a grand struggle between their own special race and other “inferior” and, most famously, “guilty” races.

If we look at contemporary Western politics today, whose ideology more resembles that of the National Socialists: someone who wants to restrict immigration in order to protect the jobs of native workers and allow for more assimilation of migrants or someone whose entire worldview revolves around the notion that certain races are due inherent privileges and that another is collectively guilty, conspires against the rest of the world, and needs to have its culture erased?

The new progressives will claim that their racial politics can’t possibly resemble those of the Nazis because they are anti-oppression or whatever, but any serious analysis looks beyond surface elements and semantic games. I’ve long joked that denunciations of “whiteness” sounded to me like a game of Third Reich mad libs, but this is a joke that has ceased to be funny. We may be a long way from Dachau, but I defy anyone with serious knowledge of National Socialist ideology to listen to the pseudo-scientific racial babble of modern intersectionality and not hear at least the echoes of, if not quite Nuremberg in 1936, then perhaps Munich in 1923.

Nor do the similarities end there. The sort of petty street thuggery that the so-called “Antifa” groups engage in is more classically fascist than anything that any modern right-wing politician has ever said. For all that the left used to love circulating its little list of the characteristics of fascism, I can think of no more common characteristic of a fascist movement then a political movement with street brawling and window smashing criminals at the vanguard. Silver Shirts. Black Shirts. Brown Shirts. In fascism’s moment in the sun there were so many different groups of fascist thugs wandering around the world that the humorist P. G. Wodehouse invented the “Silver Shorts”, a fascist organization who had to make a bold sartorial choice for want of new shirt colors.

For that matter, even the “police reform” solutions favored by many in this group are, if not strictly fascist, at least totalitarian in nature. Does anyone really think that their proposed army of warrior monk mental health workers are going to be sent against gangs and muggers? Or is it more likely that they’ll be unleashed on bakers who don’t want to make gay wedding cakes and people who misgender other people on the internet? I know which I’d lay my money on. Likewise, the proposal to replace cops with new organizations of essentially community organizers has a distinctly totalitarian smell to it, for it is one of the most common characteristics of totalitarian regimes that they resort to various sorts of party or ideological militias — from the SA to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard — to enforce their will and supplant traditional organizations they distrust.

Heck, what is what’s going on in Seattle right now other than a pathetic simulacrum of the Beer Hall Putsch?

In the great FX show Justified, the hero, Raylan Givens, imparts some advice that’s worth modifying. “If you run into an asshole in the morning,” he says “you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” To some of our screeching friends on the left I might suggest: if you meet Nazi one day, you met a Nazi. But if you think that everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi, perhaps you’re the Nazi.

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