By David B. MacDonald
Sad but true: comparing US leaders to Adolph Hitler hardly started with Barack Obama, and will no doubt continue well after he completes his two terms in office. In Wired magazine, Mike Godwin introduced his famous “Law of Nazi Analogies.” “As a Usenet discussion grows longer,” he argued, “the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Those using Nazism to analogize everything from abortion to the war in Iraq automatically lost the argument. This shopworn trump card signaled that one side had lost its imagination – its ability to come up with a convincing argument, or even a convincing accusation.
Such musings can be found well before Rush Limbaugh and company. One conservative commentator, when faced with the specter of a Clinton or Obama presidency last year, used fascism’s moral brush to taint the entire Democratic Party. Jonah Goldberg, in Liberal Fascism, published by Doubleday, claimed that fascism was always “a phenomenon of the left.” Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were fundamentally inspired by it when promoting New Deal and other public policies. Kennedy’s contribution to fascist aesthetics was to represent “a national yearning for ‘renewal’ and ‘rebirth,’ appealing to American idealism and calling for common sacrifice.” Hilary Clinton, the “first lady of liberal fascism,” drew “her vision from the same eternal instinct to impose order on society, to create an all-encompassing community.” Bill epitomized the “fascistic” forging of a “paternal bond with his ‘children’” in the same way Hitler created a bond with the German Volk. Obama is just the latest victim of this type of thinking, but it could just have easily have been Hilary. In fact Hilary might have been an easier target.
However, we must also be clear that Bush and Cheney were also routinely compared to Hitler – hence Godwin’s Law. A thread runs through this type of discourse: fear of too much government power where it doesn’t seem to belong. We can divide those who make such comparisons into two broad groups – a group who uses the comparisons for shock value, and those who actually believe them. Right now it’s difficult to separate which is which. However, it’s clear that there has always been an undercurrent of conspiracy theorizing in American politics which lends itself to fantastical accusations. Sociologist Peter Knight has traced this to America’s strong myths of individualism. In a country where a big state is seen to deprive people of their autonomy, the modern military industrial state provokes “a kind of low-level everyday paranoia that sees a hidden hand and a hidden agenda everywhere” he writes in his 2002 book Conspiracy Nation. Timothy Melley’s earlier book Empire of Conspiracy details a widespread problem of “agency panic”, where people are afraid of losing their sense of self in the face of modernization, technology, and a changing economic and social environment. Certainly America is seeing some big changes right now which lends itself to the sort of panic and mad accusations that Knight and Melley examine. If we adopt political commentator Andrew Sullivan’s suggestion, we might issue an annual award for “dumb Nazi analogies”. Comparing Obama to Hitler would no doubt clinch the prize for Limbaugh and his followers. However, there will be many more prize winners to come before this style of discourse runs out of steam.
David B. MacDonald is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph and is the author of Thinking History, Fighting Evil: Neoconservatives and the Perils of Analogy in American Politics.
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