From Bernard Goldberg’s best selling 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
In an age of reckless slander, no charge is so vicious as the one that has become so common on the American Left: that their political and ideological opponents are Nazis.
Columnist John Leo has said that, “almost every prominent member of the Bush administration has been identified with some Nazi or other.”
To test this “Bush is a Nazi” rhetoric, I searched for “Bush is a Nazi” on Google. Google returned 15,100 hits for that exact phrase. When I typed in “Hitler is a Nazi”, (and Hitler, undoubtably was a Nazi) however, Google only returned 183 hits. Ok…since Hitler is long dead, I thought most people would probably phrase that sentence in the past tense, “Hitler was a Nazi”. However that phrase still only returned 623 hits.
Not very scientic, I know. But interesting nonetheless.
I agree it is foolish and ineffective for liberals (probably in the 18-24 demographic) to tar the right with the label of fascism. It’s a pity that they can’t see that their activism would be more effective if they avoided analogies or big concepts and stuck with the ‘known knowns’ as Rumsfeld would say: the failures in leadership over the past 5 years.
But I suppose it adds drama to one’s own cause to fight against evil rather than incompetence as demonstrated in allowing the looting of Baghdad, the Medicare prescription bill, the response to Katrina, or the antipathy to science.
The other problem with invoking fascism is that you lose the focus on the present in an argument over defining the past- what is fascism, actually? Obviously few people (besides Kanye West) believe that the Bush Administration is interested in genocide but some like Lawrence Britt have tried to boil it down: 1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism 3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause 8. Religion and Government are Intertwined 9. Corporate Power is Protected 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Britt has likely set the bar pretty low with the purpose of having this administration sail over it but in my opinion any discussion that puts the focus on 1933 instead of 2006 is one that the GOP is winning.
Left by Preston on February 10th, 2006 at 10:02 am