Conservatives Have Set the Bar at ‘Not As Bad As Hitler’
Conservatives spent the weekend complaining that Democrats were comparing Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden to one held by American Nazi sympathizers in 1939. And the comparison to the Nazis is somewhat overheated — there are important differences, after all, between right-wing authoritarian movements and right-wing authoritarian movements bent on genocidal conquest.
But this very real and meaningful distinction in degree between different kinds of threats to democracy is not the point Trump’s defenders wish to emphasize. And, as always happens to Trump rationalizers, their denials were quickly embarrassed when a rally speaker said, “These Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country,” and called Puerto Rico “a floating pile of garbage.”
The speaker, a comedian, insists these insults were a joke — which is true. But given that the premise of the joke is that Latinos are subhuman and un-American, the fact that it was offered in jest is immaterial.
Trump, again, is not Hitler. But when his defenders deny that Trump is a Nazi or a fascist, they are not merely assuring us that his election won’t lead to mass-scale death factories and global war killing tens of millions of people. They are attempting to put to rest the broader and far more serious charge that Trump poses an existential risk to American democracy.
National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, in the latest edition of his series of columns rationalizing the candidate his magazine once famously attacked as unfit for office, has a column headlined “No, Trump Is Not a Fascist.”
“20th-century fascists hated parliamentary democracy,” writes Lowry, “They believed in an all-consuming state and had contempt for bourgeois life. Fundamentally, fascism celebrated violence in a nihilistic rejection of rationality and elevation of military struggle.”
Let’s consider this list, beginning with the item where Lowry has an important and correct point: Trump does not believe in “an all-consuming state.” This is indeed an important difference between totalitarian ideology (which demands the creation of a state in which the ruling party’s ideology permeates all aspects of life) and mere authoritarianism. But fascist movements attracted allies on the political right who did not consciously adopt all their goals, in part because there are important commonalities between strains of reactionary politics.
Some of the other items on Lowry’s list simply reflect the banal fact that Hitler and other 20th-century fascists were responding to the particular concerns of their time and place. They believed in war because their views came out of World War I, an event that channeled their goals into military redemption. It is true that Hitler was obsessed with revising the Treaty of Versailles while Trump probably doesn’t know what that even was. But this is just a way of saying that fascism was an application of right-wing anti-democratic politics to the right-wing goals of its time and place. It doesn’t mean that only politicians who shared the political objectives of 20th-century Europeans could be considered fascist.
Likewise, fascists “hated parliamentary democracy” because that was the form democracy took in Europe a century ago. The United States does not have a parliament, but it does have other kinds of democracy, which Trump absolutely hates. Contempt for democracy explains why Trump admires dictators for their strength, wishes he could be treated like them, and refuses to accept the right of the people to vote him out of power.
Other items of Lowry’s fascism list describe Trump quite accurately. A “nihilistic rejection of rationality”? Trump’s lies are so promiscuous, his ability to convince himself of fantasies is so profound, that even his closest advisers genuinely do not know what he believes.
More bizarre is Lowry’s casual observation that the fascists “celebrated violence,” as if this does not describe Trump perfectly. He has called for a “violent day” (“One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know?”), delighted in a deranged fan attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband, defends war criminals, and has fantasized about unleashing his supporters to brutalize the opposition (“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad.”)
Later in the column, Lowry tries to draw another contrast between Trump and the 20th-century fascists: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.” Obviously? Trump inspired the growth of right-wing paramilitary groups like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Those groups led the violent attempt to overturn his election defeat, and he has praised them as innocent heroes being held hostage, promising to pardon them. If and when Trump pardons these violent thugs, that they won’t engage in further street violence on his behalf seems far from obvious.
Lowry does not dwell on the different kinds of racism employed by Hitler and Trump. Hitler’s racism was genocidal. Trump’s, while considerably less virulent, nonetheless involves dehumanizing large swaths of the public. His consistent belief is that immigrants from non-white countries can never be full Americans, which is why he lashes out at a “Mexican judge” and insists Americans whose parents immigrated from Africa have no right to criticize leaders in “our country.” He has never applied this ultra-nationalist logic to immigrants like Elon Musk (even when Musk was a Trump critic) or his wife, Melania.
Trump has supplied overwhelming evidence of his racist and authoritarian tendencies. In the wake of Trump’s attempted putsch following the 2020 elections, the conservative intelligentsia denounced him as unfit to rule. Trump never made even the slightest gesture of repentance. Rather than adhere to principle, conservatives kept lowering the bar. We have now arrived at the point where Trump is deemed acceptable because — and here I will concede the factual point — he is better than Adolf Hitler.
If the Democratic candidate was a murderous authoritarian whose intellectual supporters were reduced to litigating the subtle differences between her and Stalin, the election would pose a difficult choice.