The Left trivializes real totalitarianism.
The grotesque banalization of Hitler and Hitlerism proceeds apace. The American Left’s discourse is replete with comparisons of President Donald J. Trump to Adolf Hitler and constant evocations of a dangerous “fascist” threat to democracy supposedly coming from an altogether illiberal Right. Kamala Harris labeled Trump a fascist and Nazi sympathizer in a CNN town hall meeting in October, and she and the mainstream media continued to pile on until the November election.
When Trump held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, a little over a week before the election, many Democrats, and the increasingly hysterical talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, compared that rally to a meeting of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in that same venue in 1939. Completely disregarding the impressively multiracial character of the MAGA supporters gathered to hear Trump, as well as the large contingent of Orthodox and Hassidic Jews also in attendance, the media incessantly identified Trump with Hitler and “fascism.” Not only was the deep-seated evil that was National Socialism trivialized beyond recognition, and not only was fascism crudely (and absurdly) identified with any opposition to a hard Left agenda, but crucial distinctions between fascism, National Socialism, and democratic conservatism were elided in a deeply misleading manner.
This drumbeat continues to this day. The Trump/fascism/Nazism elision is commonplace in leftist discourse. An article in the Harvard Political Review from January attempts to give scholarly cover to this type of defamation: “Trump Rhetoric Echoes Hitler.” The author takes it for granted that Trump is a racist anti-Semite, and that he hates immigrants tout court. The fact he has built a large and varied multiracial political coalition is passed over in silence, as is his warm relationship with Israel. Trump, it is said, “is unfit to serve as the president of a nation founded upon the celebration of racial, ethnic, and cultural heterogeneity.” While it is true that the Founders loathed chattel slavery and declared that “all men are created equal,” dogmatic multiculturalism was not their vision of American self-government.
Just the other day Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, bemoaned the fact that the country was in the process of being “stolen by fascists and Nazis.” Even though a storm of criticism was directed his way, Walz has since refused to apologize. He even had the chutzpah to say he did not have Republicans in mind.
Examples of this reductio ad Hitlerum, as Leo Strauss once suggestively called it, are legion and are likely to continue for a very long time to come, thus compounding the damage. As Dennis Prager (himself Jewish) argued in an insightful syndicated column published on election day, immense moral and civic damage has been done to our country by leftists insisting on “calling Donald Trump a fascist and a Nazi and declaring him ‘Hitler.’” Prager points out that “if Trump is Hitler, then Hitler was Trump. Hitler was nothing worse than a German version of Trump—not the instigator of World War II and the creator of the Holocaust; just a German Donald Trump.”
The core of National Socialism was a morally insane anti-Semitism and pseudo-scientific racism that, in the end, justified genocidal mass murder, limitless war, and contempt for all decency and moderation. Hitler equated patriotism with lupine imperialism, what Ernst Renan called “zoological” race wars. He recognized no limits above the will of the totalitarian Führer and the self-assertion of the German Volk. He was a nihilist through and through. Trump doesn’t remotely belong to such a perverted and monstrous moral universe.
The defamation of American conservatives committed to the preservation and sustenance of a constitutional republic is accompanied by, and culminates in, the trivialization of the monstrous evil that is National Socialism. What is sacrificed is nothing less than the truth and the capacity for measured civic and moral judgment on the part of those who hurl such slurs, and those who hear and accept them.
The indiscriminate use of “fascist” and “fascism” does serious damage to historical understanding. As Paul Gottfried has pointed out in two fine books on fascism and anti-fascism, respectively, endless confusion has also been caused by conflating fascism, National Socialism, and conservative Catholic corporatist regimes and movements in such places as Franco’s Spain, Dollfuss’s Austria, and Salazar’s Portugal in the 1930s onward. Fascist Italy only adopted (increasingly draconian) anti-Semitic policies after Mussolini turned to an alliance with Nazi Germany after the debacle in Ethiopia in 1935-1936; for a good decade or more, Jews had a disproportionate presence in the Italian Fascist party. Mussolini did not initially share Hitler’s anti-Semitic obsessions.
Mussolini first favorably invoked the notion of totalitarianism and the totalitarian state in a speech in 1925. But he failed to achieve that aim since he was hemmed in by the considerable moral authority of the Catholic Church, which under Pope Pius XI did not hesitate to denounce the fascist idolatry of the state and the propagandizing of children in ways that undermined the Christian virtues, and by the continued existence of the monarchy under King Victor Emmanuel III. Moreover, after the fall of 1943, Mussolini became an out-and-out puppet of his Nazi masters. In Austria, Dollfuss, an autocrat but a devout Catholic and a fierce critic of both Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, was murdered by Nazi thugs on July 25, 1934 at Hitler’s behest. In Portugal, Salazar detested Nazi “paganism” and the idolatrous cult of the state and “race.”
Despite massive help from Italy and Germany during the Spanish Civil War, Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War, and took in 20,000 to 35,000 Sephardic Jews with historic links to Spain who were in immediate danger from the Nazis. After the war, he distanced himself from the Spanish Falangists (the Spanish fascist movement) and governed as a Catholic conservative. Although 15,000 people from the Loyalist side were executed after the Nationalist victory in the Civil War, and many more imprisoned for an average of seven years, Franco governed as an authoritarian, not a totalitarian, and even paved the way for the eventual restoration of constitutional monarchy in Spain. These distinctions matter. Lumping together all these regimes, movements, and leaders under the amorphous category of “fascism” confuses far more than it illuminates. The truth is far more complex than the “fascist-Hitler-Nazi” slogan.
One could argue that progressives and ideological leftists have never gotten either fascism or Nazism right. Imprisoned by deforming Marxist categories, they have falsely identified the collectivism of both with “late capitalism.” In the 1930s, Communists loyal to Moscow labeled German Social Democrats “social fascists” and identified the entire Western democratic world with fascism, much as Hitler saw “perfidious” Jews everywhere. Non-Communist progressives, too, have often conflated conservative critics of “progress” and “social emancipation” with fascism, a tendency that has morphed into an aggressive, lawless, and neo-totalitarian “anti-Fascism.”
The best conservatives and conservative-minded liberals have done much better. A self-declared “democratic conservative” such as the French political philosopher Raymond Aron saw Nazism as at once nihilistic and revolutionary. He saw defenders of liberal and bourgeois civilization as the true conservatives. In 1937, the former mayor of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning, who briefly confused Nazism with a visceral and vociferous patriotic conservative movement, warned conservative-minded Europeans that the Nazi revolution was a “revolution of nihilism” (the title of his once-famous book), and that Hitler was nothing less than the “voice of destruction.” Charles de Gaulle saw in Hitler a totalitarian “Moloch” who forgot human beings had souls, and thus inherent dignity. National Socialism combined, he thought, elements of fascism with satanic racism and moral nihilism.
Responding to the Munich fiasco, Churchill warned on October 5, 1938 that
there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.
Churchill rarely spoke of fascism, but on numerous occasions he freely compared the evils of Communist and Nazi totalitarianism, something that progressives rarely do. In his “Finest Hour Speech” of June 18, 1940, he tellingly spoke not of the defense of democracy or “human rights” but rather of the “survival of Christian civilization.” That morally estimable civilization was threatened by “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” Churchill could recognize the “revolution of nihilism” when it reared its ugly head far better than the vast majority of his contemporaries.
Let me end with a warning to some on the New Right, especially the young who are tempted to summarily dismiss, and even attack, old guides and heroes such as Churchill. In my judgment, this dismissal is not informed by a real understanding of the man and the circumstances in which he acted. The real Churchill is not Bill Kristol (“it is always Munich 1938”) nor the advocate of progressivist “anti-fascist” crusades, as some New Right talking heads facilely suggest today. He was a consummate defender of what is true and noble in Western civilization and a conservative of the first order. He remains a trustworthy guide to coming to terms with the twin totalitarian evils that are Nazism and Communism and their contemporary epigones, neo-paganism and cultural Marxism.
