Stephen Soukup, Why the ‘Nazi’ Slur Has No Power

October 26, 2024 James Fetzerblog

Stephen Soukup

The accusations against President Trump fall on deaf ears because the political left has spent the last several decades ensuring that no one takes such allegations seriously.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Donald Trump is a fascist, a Nazi even. And you don’t have to take my word for it. The entirety of the political and media establishments is saying as much. The Atlantic says so. Vice President Kamala Harris says so. Even Hillary Clinton says so. The closing argument of this election, it seems, is that nothing matters except that Donald Trump is Hitler reincarnated.

The problem for the Democratic candidate and her supporters is that nobody cares. This “case” against Donald Trump won’t sway a single vote.

To be clear, it’s not that nobody would care if they had reason to, but they don’t have a reason. The accusations against President Trump fall on deaf ears because the political left has spent the last several decades—and the last couple of centuries, in some cases—ensuring that no one takes such allegations seriously.

For starters, the left has a “boy who cried wolf” problem. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to Democrats when they prattle on about Republicans being fascists because they have done so for almost as long as anyone can remember. Various wags on social media have insisted that Democrats have compared “every Republican since Reagan” to Hitler. In truth, it goes back even further than that, to the dawn of the modern GOP. As Steven Hayward noted ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s famous convention speech, even he was “Hitler”:

• Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.”
• Civil rights activist Roy Wilkins: Goldwater’s election “would bring about a police state.”
• California Governor Pat Brown: Goldwater’s acceptance speech “had the stench of fascism…. All we needed to hear was ‘Heil Hitler.’”
• Jackie Robinson: “I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
• San Francisco Mayor John Shelley: The Republicans “had Mein Kampf as their political bible.”

None of this is to say that a wolf will never, ever appear on the political scene. Rather, it’s to say that because of the left’s fecklessness, if one does, no one will ever recognize it as such.

A second problem, which predates even the six-decade-old “wolf” matter, is the left’s general abuse of the language, which also makes it hard for voters to take it seriously.

In his 1946 essay titled “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell noted the intimate and undeniable connection between the decay in the use of the English language and the decay in the effectiveness of the pronouncements made in that language.  Poor usage reflected poor thinking; poor thinking reflected poor usage.  Each was both a cause and a symptom of the other, and each compounded the other almost interminably.  Language, Orwell wrote, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,” and the “slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”  Nowhere did this symbiotically destructive relationship make itself more obvious than in politics.  “The present political chaos,” he continued, “is connected with the decay of language.” He continued, noting that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Ironically, the people who appear to have understood Orwell’s admonition best were those who took it not as a warning but as a roadmap.  The left in particular understood Orwell’s point innately and understood that language could be manipulated and harnessed to sow confusion and induce political disorder. This is, in part, what the Harris team is trying to do—to sow disorder by manipulating language and using it to confuse voters. Trump is not a fascist in any serious sense of the word, and yet they insist that he is specifically to foment chaos. They aren’t out to “save democracy” from Donald Trump but to save their hold on power from the political opposition. That’s a legitimate political end in itself, yet because of the “slovenliness” of their language, they can’t even grasp that, much less make the case for it coherently.

A third problem the Democrats face in their effort to get anyone to take them seriously in their crusade against Trump is that they are trying to make a moral argument, but they are incapable of doing so. They lack the knowledge of morality necessary to understand their argument against him, much less to articulate it. Not only do they not know what it is they find morally reprehensible about Trump, but they can’t even explain the moral failings of the fascists to whom they compare him.

To be fair, this is a failing not specific to the contemporary left. It is, rather, a characteristic of the left specifically and of society more generally since the Enlightenment. As the inimitable Alasdair MacIntyre put it, today, thanks to the moral chaos unleashed nearly three centuries ago, “we inhabit the language of morality is in [a]…state of grave disorder.”

What we possess… are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts that now lack those contexts from which their significance is derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality; we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

As a result, moral pronouncements become mere expressions of feelings and sensations, which are elevated above objective reality and traditional conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, etc. In short, words like “fascist” and “Nazi” come to mean nothing more than “I don’t like this.” The Democrats don’t like Trump, but they lack the moral language to explain why. In turn, they resort simply to calling him the names they associate with other things they believe they don’t like. Trump, therefore, is a Nazi, Hitler-esque—just as Mitt Romney was, just as George W. Bush, just as Reagan and Goldwater were, just as all Republicans are. The left doesn’t consider the implications or the meaning of the comparisons they use, largely because they don’t understand them. They know only that they are comparing two things that they don’t like.

Even if Donald Trump loses next month’s election and disappears from the public stage, the talk of fascists and Nazis will not disappear. It will continue—and will continue to be the left’s insult of choice—either until moral understanding is fully restored or until it finds a new, more menacing name to call its opponents.