The progressive left often signals desperation when they stoop to comparing their political enemies to Adolf Hitler and throwing around labels such as "Nazi" and "fascist." PJ Media lists seven times (!) when talkers on just a single network, MSNBC, made the Hitlerian comparison in the solitary month of July, and the person being analogized to Hitler was, of course, the nefarious Donald Trump.
There may well be people in this country who deserve to be compared to Hitler. There may be people in this country who are genuine fascists, but almost certainly the majority, if not the totality, of such people in this country are on the ideological left. Nazism and fascism are ideologies of the left, not the right, although ever since Stalin the left has tried to convince the world that the truth is otherwise.
In his excellent 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg elucidates the nature of fascism and Nazism and shows beyond any reasonable doubt that these two statist, totalitarian ideologies both fall on the left end of the political spectrum and in fact have much more in common with American progressivism than they do with whatever political philosophy informs Mr. Trump's thinking.
And certainly, Mr. Goldberg argues, neither Nazism or fascism bears any similarity at all to conservatism.
To understand the absurdity of the Trump/Hitler nexus it's helpful to understand that, according to Goldberg, Hitler was driven by four main ideas: 1) power concentrated in himself, 2) hatred of the Jews, 3) faith in the racial superiority of the German people, and 4) the employment of war to secure the other three.
There's no evidence that Trump has any of these traits and much evidence that he has none of them. Taking them in turn, a man who wishes to concentrate power in himself would not undo Obama's executive orders, deregulate industry and appoint constitutionalist judges and justices. Indeed, it's because President Trump is dismantling the consolidation of power that has accrued to the executive and judicial branches of government over the last couple of decades that accounts for the left's virulent hatred of the man and their desperation to get him out of office.
Nor is there a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump is anti-semitic. An anti-semite would not have moved our embassy to Jerusalem, would not tolerate a Jewish son-in-law, nor would an anti-semite have such a close relationship with Israel and look with such favor on that nation. For genuine anti-semitism one has to look at certain congressional Democrats and the left's BDS movement which flourishes on American university campuses.
Some have accused the president of Hitlerian racism because he's been critical of political opponents who happen to be people of color. The charge is ludicrous inasmuch as in order for it to be at all credible one has to assume that it's an act of racism to criticize anyone who happens to be a member of a minority race. If this assumption is seen for the absurdity that it is then none of the allegations of racism made against Trump make any sense.
Finally, Mr. Trump has been the least hawkish president we've had since Jimmy Carter. He has repeatedly shied away from the use of military force even when he could've justified its use, such as when the Iranians shot down our drone in international waters. It's absurd to identify a man so averse to military adventures with the man who wallowed in them.
The left has always accused their opponents of the same sins of which they themselves are guilty, and in the attempt to identify Trump with the erstwhile leader of the Nazi party they present us with another instance of this tactic.
The Nazis under Hitler were, like the left, revolutionary, not conservative; they came to power exploiting a socialist, anti-capitalist platform; they emphasized environmentalism, health food and exercise; they sought to diminish or eradicate the influence of Christianity, transcend notions of class and were masters of the practice of identity politics.
They favored universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the elderly, expropriation of land and industry, and state health care.
Moreover, their ethics, such as they were, were entirely pragmatic. Whatever worked to achieve their goal was ipso facto the right thing to do. Like postmodern progressives they believed that truth and falsehood were arbitrary terms, that the "truth" of an idea lay in its power to inspire the people. It mattered very little whether the idea was actually true or false.
The only real differences between the Nazis and the communists of the 1930s and their progressive contemporaries and their descendents was that the Nazis were nationalists and the communists/progressives were internationalists. The Nazis divided people by race, the communists/progressives divide them by class. Hitler hated the communists of his day, not because he disagreed with them on economics, he didn't, but because in his paranoia he believed they were a Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe.
So, when progressives hurl the Hitlerian epithet at Donald Trump, they're showing not only an astounding ignorance of who Hitler was and what he believed, they're also revealing an astounding ignorance of their own history and current ideological kinship to the people they claim to deplore.
