First:
As I was going through my notes, I came across this quote from John Marini who writes:
“If Trump has recognized a real political crisis, it must be understood as a crisis of the sovereignty of the American nation and its people. It was the authority of the people, established politically as a social compact, that was institutionalized as a constitutional order. Is that order still defensible?”
Note that Marini wrote this in 2018 and yet it remains as relevant today as it was back then.
Marini wrote in Unmasking the Administrative State that what makes Trump unique is that he addresses the American as a citizen and Americans collectively as a nation.
I will also add that Trump addresses Americans as citizens whose interests he is responsible for representing and not as pawns to be used in some ideological joy-ride.
Second:
Godwin’s Law was meant less about a genocidal dictator than as a swipe about the inadequacies of the Internet as a playground of the unwashed masses.
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Hardy har har.
Then I see articles like this in the Atlantic, or media firestorms about single-sourced accusations regarding comments made more than four years ago, or comments by the White House Press secretary, so that we need to update Godwin’s Law to:
“The more the Left and the media discuss Trump, the more the probability of a comparison involving fascism or Hitler approaches 1.”
Third:
The Left has been daring itself to answer that old question of “If you could go back in time and stop Hitler from taking power, what would you be prepared to do?”
Or to put it another way…
One does not call his opponent the second coming of Hitler and simply concede an election.
Godwin came up with his “law” back in the early days of the internet when the culture was still “shockingly libertarian”. Whenever someone made an assertion of the lines that we have a duty to obey the laws in a democratic society, someone else would point out that Hitler and the Nazis came to power through a democratic political process. Why this was considered anything other than an appropriate response I have never understood, but apparently in some intellectual circles you can “refute” a perfectly valid point by saying “we’ve heard that one before too many times.”
What’s even funnier is to confront a Democrat/Socialist/Communist about Hitler and the Nazi party whenever they refer to someone as “far-right Nazi”. When you politely ask them if the Nazi party was right-wing, the historically-illiterate will invariably answer, “Well, of course they were.”
I always point out that “Nazi” was short-hand of “Ignatz”, a derogatory term for members of NSPDAP, which in turn stood for “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei”. Translated into English this roughly means “National Socialist German Worker’s Party”. Pointing out that “National Socialist” and “Worker’s Party” doesn’t sound particularly right-wing causes extreme cognitive dissonance within their tiny little pig-ignorant brains. Mentioning that the only reason that the Weimar-era German Communists (largely funded by the Russian Communists) formed the original “Anti-Fascist” (aka, “Antifa”) groups were that the fascist were ONLY socialists, and didn’t take collectivism far enough.
I’ve had hard-core collectivists (completely uninformed about their own political history) tell me that I’m just making it up, and that the Nazi’s were all right-wingers. All you can do is point and laugh at them.
Godwin can be seen as a corollary to “Reductio ad Hitlerum”
It was also seen as an early precursor to the dismissal of the internet as “every village has an idiot and the Internet connects them all”
He coined the term barely early in the internet world while we will still in academia and referring to the alt Usenet groups. Of course I had little to do with those discussions as I usually stuck to alt.beer
Interestingly or perhaps sadly Godwin chimed in on the Trump Nazi phenomena last year by saying that don’t let him in his loss stop you from doing so because Trump really is a Nazi
https://t.co/vrXe9ksXQE
RE: “Third:”
I have every expectation that before the election, or after whether he wins of loses; that the Left will in fact try to remove him. And that the consequences will be most untidy and highly kinetic.
Subotai Bahadur
Bear in mind, if the Dems insist that all Repubs are all Hitler all the time,
by mirror symmetry that implies that all Dems are all Stalin all the time.
Just sayin…
The reason “Hitler and the Nazis came to power through a democratic political process” is rarely considered an appropriate response to a question of obedience to law in a democratic society is because it’s a bad faith argument predicated on a willful misunderstanding of how Hitler came to rule Germany.
The Weimar Republic’s Reichstag was hopelessly splintered among democratic, socialist, communist, and reactionary parties, most of which would refuse to work together. The result was the devolution of power to the Reichpresident who was directly elected but only required plurality support. The Reichpresident had far more power than a typical head of government in most republican democracies, selecting cabinet ministers without need for official approval from the Reichstag and able to dissolve the Reichstag almost at will. Hitler was never elected to the Reichpresidency, and the Nazis only briefly held the most seats, but never a majority, in the Reichstag. As the leader of the largest non-communist party Hitler was selected as Chancellor with the expectation that as a former soldier he might defer to his old supreme commander Hindenburg as Reichpresident. The Nazis were able to capitalize on the death of Hindenburg and the arson of the Reichstag building to convince the Reichstag to give Hitler the powers of the Reichpresidency (but not the title) which was then followed by a stage-managed election to ratify that assumption of power where most non-Nazi parties were banned from participation, by Hitler.
The rise of Hitler is more a cautionary tale about how dictators can manipulate anti-majoritarian elements of republican governments to come to power, and is most reminiscent of the recent victories of Labor in the UK and Macron in France where those parties gained majorities in the parliament far in excess of their popular vote share, and has echoes in the 2016 attempts to manipulate Electors in the US to vote against Donald Trump.
As the man said; “Democracy is a bus you get off when you’ve reached power.”
First, I fear that Mr. Bahadur is correct about the upcoming mess.
Somehow, if (God forbid) someone successfully potted President-reelect Trump, I suspect that the actions of VP Vance might be interesting in a “Nero’s garden lights” sort of way.
Second, FWIW, given a Time Machine forget Hitler, I’d go after Lenin before the Russian revolution.