George W. Bush is not Adolf Hitler.
The Republican party is not like the Nazi Party.
There, I said it. How many of you are rushing to post a comment along the lines of "gee, then stick your head in the sand, just ignore reality, you Republican shill"?
Based upon what I've seen around here since late 2004, when we had the influx of people from Democratic Underground, way too many of you. And that's a shame, because it leads to shallow thinking, an abdication of responsible imagination, and a failure to understand the nature of the Bush administration, the modern GOP, the nature of their power, how they try to establish legitimacy, and what we might do to effectively fight back.
In what is probably the n-thousandth diary on the subject, this afternoon I posted, off the top of my head,
a series of fundamental differences between Weimar and Nazi Germany and the US, the modern GOP and the Nazis. The list is by no means exhaustive, and if I really put some thought in to it, I could probably come up with far more dissimilarities. But the key one, the one that almost nobody deals with, is that in fascism, the state had primacy over all other social structures. Unlike the leftist socialist and communist movements, fascists didn't mess with the ownership of business assets. But they certainly interferred with the markets and the methods of production in ways that justified the German fascists' use of the word "socialist" in National Socialists German Worker's Party (NASDP, eventually just Nazi). Nothing could be further from the espoused ideology of the modern GOP, with its fetishization of free markets, deregulation and privatization.
But I'm not as interested in arguments about the nature of fascism and how it's different from Bush and the GOP in terms of ideology, goals and structure. Consider me arrogant if you chose, but I took several classes that dealt extensively with fascsim, and have read a hell of a lot about it, both in terms of specific states and comparatively, and almost nothing I've seen in comments at Daily Kos that argues in favor of the GOP=Fascist position indicates anything more than a passing and cursory knowledge of the academic literature on the subject. [There have been, however, several people more well-informed than me who've destroyed some of the more banal Nazi/GOP analogizing (if that's such a word).]
No, I'm more intrigued as to WHY people feel compelled to make the analogy, and why the only analogy or theoretical construct so many people can use is the Nazi example? Why can't stealing an election (like Bush did in 2000) be compared to the 1876 presidential election instead of the Nazi takeover of power? Why not compare the Patriot Act to the Alien and Sedition act? Why not compare the corruption of the Bush era to Teapot Dome? And if one feels compelled to look to foreign analogies, why only the Nazi analogy? Why not look at the selling off of public assets as analogous to authoritarian regimes like Pinochet's Chile, or what happened in Shock-therapy era post-Soviet Russia? In terms of corruption around the president, why not look to the Marcos regime? For authoritarian tendencies in a supposedly mature Democracy, why doesn't DeGaulle occassionally come up instead of it always being Hitler?
My concern isn't simply pedantic (although I'll cop to a bit of historical pedantry). No, my concern is also political. How can liberals and progressives hope to come up with a theoretically sophisticated and empircally sound analysis of the Bush administration, and how GOP rule has been altering structures of wealth, power and control over public assets when the only constructs employed by most people relate to Germany from the era of roughly 1919 through 1945? Are we on the left so lacking in theoretical sophistication and empircal knowledge that we can so easily mistake Bushism for fascism?
In so many realms, what Bush and the GOP are doing is new in American history. Never before have we had such a muscular and international approach to foreign policy that was also unilateral. Never before have we had a GOP that completely jettisoned any concern with balancing federal budgets. (Reagan may not have cared about balancing budgets, but the Congressional GOP at least espoused fidelity to fiscal responsibility.) Never in American history has a religious fringe had such influence over one of the two major political parties. It is vital we understand the ways in which the Bush approach to politics and governance if different if we wish to effectively counteract it and hopefully defeat it. And unless we understand what they are messing up, we can't hope to understand what will need to be repaired.
We won't understand any of those problems if we dither away saying Bush is Hitler, and the GOP is fascist. He isn't, and they aren't. But they're bad, we need to understand their nature, try to predict their actions and understand what damage will need to be repaired. I honestly believe that some of the people who insist in propogating those ridiculous analogies feel a need to imbue their existence in present-day America with some kind of heroic resistance, like if they're the moral and political equivalents of the heroic members of the German resistance group The White Rose Believing we are enduring a Nazi dictatorship demeans the memory of its victims. Claiming you're so prescient to see that we're about to succumb to a fascist dictatorship doesn't give one foresight of Winston Churchill. It just means you're making a bad historical analogy, and you're not contributing anything to the serious--possibly deadly serious--need to understand the nature of what we are facing, and how to kill off this scourge that's been wreaking increasing harm on our country and the rest of the world since Ronald Reagan, and which has become so dangerous in the presidency of George W. Bush.