Welcome friends!
I suppose you read about the elderly conservative multibillionaire Tom Perkins who wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal the other day in which he claimed that Occupy Wall Street political activists and other progressives are like latter day Nazis? Indeed, according to Mr. Perkins “progressive radicalism” is the natural descendant of Nazism. Oh my gosh! No, no; I didn’t mean oh my gosh we’d better start drafting people to fight against this new threat to our existence! I meant oh my gosh what a load of c__ p! It’s funny but it’s also a little weird, isn’t it? Well, I suppose I might as well say a few syllables on the subject. Everyone else has.
Of course, as many others have pointed out, the first thing that jumps out at one about Mr. Perkin’s statement is just how utterly preposterous it is. Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if the guy is actually familiar at all with the historical phenomenon of Nazism or if he was just using the N word as a sort of generic slur. After all, I don’t think it’s any big secret the actual historical Nazis were enthusiastically supported by people pretty much like Mr. Perkins himself, which is to say the wealthy industrialists and financiers of the time not only in Germany but other countries as well, such as Henry Ford here in the good old USA. Yes, these economic and social bigwigs apparently saw the fascists primarily as a means to combat the encroaching Red Menace (by which I mean communism, not the type of “socialism” that appears in the term “national socialism,” which was a rather different beast indeed). Nor do I think anyone could seriously describe the historical Nazis or their supporters as progressives or liberals in any sense. They were not really proponents of the working man. At least I don’t think anyone would have expected to see much in the way of unions or strikes or anything of that nature in the Third Reich. Not unless they wanted a jackbooted kick to the head. And I certainly don’t think anyone could claim they were motivated in any way by any sense of egalitarianism. Their philosophy was your stereotypical elitist Ayn Rand / Friederich Neitsche / American conservative claptrap about the Great Man (and Great Woman I suppose) struggling valiantly against a sea of worthless moochers and takers. Poor people, working people, and just average people like you and me were basically cannon fodder and units of production. I suppose the Nazis may have tried to promote some sense of social cohesion and groupthink as a means to consolidate their political control but it was hardly the sort of thing one might hear from progressive activists here in the US. It was more like everyone needs to get in line and follow the big shots because Germany is number one, everyone is against us, and the only way we’ll ever succeed is if everyone shuts up and does what they’re told with no further questions. When was the last time you heard a progressive activist in the US talk like that?
But I digress. Delving into the utter inaptness of Mr. Perkin’s remarks is not really a very interesting subject to me. I don’t usually waste my time on such laughable nonsense. No, I’m really more interested in why conservatives apparently feel compelled to keep saying things like this. Let’s face it, in the past several years American conservatives have gotten into the rather bad habit of saying all manner of outlandish things, which often seem to involve Nazis for some reason. Perhaps you recall shortly after the financial crisis of 2008 conservatives were already painting President Obama as a Nazi because he proposed some new financial regulations to prevent similar economic meltdowns in the future. If you recall the news stories at the time I think the actual claim was that the prospect of additional regulatory oversight of Wall Street shenanigans was the moral equivalent of the Nazis invading Poland during WWII. And then even further back we had some conservative blowhard or other talking about “liberal fascism” or some such rot. Make no mistake about it. This isn’t a one off by any means. The idea that liberals and progressive are like Nazis has been a consistent theme in conservative thinking (or at least talking) for some time now.
But why? Well, two main possibilities come to mind. One is that contemporary conservatives are just very attracted to ludicrous histrionics and overblown rhetoric and consider saying outlandish things an appropriate way to motivate their overly excitable and apparently rather ill informed base. The other is that there is something so unique about the mindset of wealthy conservatives in this country they honestly see themselves as about to be victimized by latter day Nazis in the guise of liberals and progressives. Let me discuss both of these possibilities in turn.
The case for a conservative attraction to overblown rhetoric seems fairly strong to me, especially when one considers the way they’ve gotten into the habit of blowing everything and I mean everything out of proportion. You know what I mean. The president is a foreign Muslim radical who is determined to undermine the Constitution! That type of thing. One presumes they just don’t think they’d get very far saying anything reasonable about anything. In this context the default characterization of anyone who disagrees with them may well be that they are Nazis. After all, who really likes a Nazi anyway? Here’s an example from an actual exchange in Congress. Non-conservative, “The tax rate on the profits from investment income seems totally incommensurate with the tax rate on wages, which we think may raise some distributional concerns particularly in the long run.” Conservative, “You’re a Nazi.” (That wasn’t a real exchange by the way. Just a bit of humor to lighten the tone. But it might have been real, don’t you agree?)
Moving up a level in terms of potential substantive content is the possibility conservatives feel liberals and progressives are like Nazis because they don’t share conservatives’ hatred of government or more accurately hatred of government insofar as it does anything beyond looking after the interests of wealthy conservatives. If you recall the Nazis didn’t mind big government at all. Mind you, they were famous for their antipathy to democratic government, the type we have here in the US. Unfortunately, the distinction between different forms of government seems to be pretty much lost on modern American conservatives. Anyway, you see what I’m saying, right? If you set aside the bit about different forms of government you could say liberals and progressives are like Nazis because they appreciate the need for government. That at least some conservatives may be thinking along these seems likely to me because when conservatives aren’t calling people Nazis they’re calling them commies, which again is kind of funny if you think about it in a historical context. It would probably come as a big shock to the old timers to learn one can be both a Nazi and a commie. But it does make one look for the commonality, which again I suppose would be that both the Nazis and the communists saw a role for government. So that just brings me back to a theme I’ve discussed in many of my previous posts, which is that I think this argument or really insinuation I suppose is probably the biggest and most dangerous load of utter BS I’ve ever heard in all my life. I really feel a little silly having to explain this but there’s a big difference between the form of democratic government we have here in the US and the totalitarian governments of the Third Reich and the Stalinist USSR. If you go about glossing over this rather significant fact and prefer to talk about government in the abstract then I’m sorry to have to tell you but you’re not doing anyone any favors. You should think about the impact you might be having on the feeble minded who may take what you’re saying at face value rather than appreciating it for the outrageous rhetorical flourish it is and I presume you mean it to be. And if we’re talking about the proper role of democratic government then I think we’re talking about something I’ve discussed many times before. Distributional issues involve what amounts to interpersonal conflicts of desire and, yes, we need government to resolve those sorts of conflicts if we’re going to resolve them in an ethical manner. The question is not or at least should not be which solution generates a smaller government according to some particular metric. I mean, if you really want to minimize government just let people shoot it out on the streets. You don’t need any government at all for that solution. Ask someone from Somalia. The question is and should be how can we resolve the issue in an ethically satisfactory way and whatever size of government that solution requires is apparently the size of government we need. In this case the real source of conservatives’ concerns seems rather obvious. Under our current distributional arrangements they are the recipients of a vastly disproportionate share of our economic resources and they’d like to keep it that way. So the solution that brings that about is naturally the solution they would like to convince other people involves not behaving like a Nazi or a commie, the proper size of government, and so on. The other solution, the one where we change something up to get a bit more resources flowing to some other people, is what they would like to convince everyone is what a Nazi or a commie would do. The size of government in that case would obviously be totally wrong. In other words, it’s different when I do it.
Moving up to the final level of potential substantive content is the possibility conservatives are not just talking in a particularly flamboyant way but are expressing what they really feel: they are besieged by the modern equivalent of Nazis who are about to break all the windows in their various mansions in a replay of the historical Kristallnacht pogrom and perhaps even pack them off to murder camps in the countryside. Sound pretty far fetched? I mean, we’re talking about some of the most economically and politically powerful, privileged, coddled people in the entire country and hence world. Ironically, however, that’s what I think makes this last possibility somewhat plausible. You see, the most salient feature of conservatives in this country must be their massive sense of entitlement and self worth. Remember according to the conservative social philosophy the distribution of resources in a market place and especially the particular market place we have here in the US is imbued with great ethical significance, so the fact they are multibillionaires implies to them that ethically speaking they are many, many, many times more important than average schmoes like you and me. They’re Very Important People and no place more so than in their own minds. That presumably is why they consider it perfectly appropriate we should allocate to them sufficient economic resources to allow them to indulge their every passing whim while other people suffer the various ills of relative economic deprivation and do things like sleep on the street, go without necessary health care, be driven to desperation and drug use and crime, witness the lives of their children and loved one being destroyed by unwholesome environments they are too poor to escape, and so on. Given this overall mindset I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to suppose many conservatives consider what would appear to most average people as some relatively trivial financial setback for someone in their situation, say a small decrement in their vast wealth from a change in the tax rates or what have you, as the moral equivalent of what would seem on the surface to be a much more drastic problem for people like you and me, such as being dragged off to a murder camp in the middle of a forest by a bunch of angry baboons.
Well, I just don’t know the answer. I’ll keep an eye on this issue and see if I can make any headway. Not that I think it should take any attention away from more serious questions such as for example what to do about the incredible wealth and income disparities that have developed in this country over the past several decades. But it is an amusing question, don’t you think? Do rich conservatives really see Nazis everywhere or are they just talking funny? How could one ever tell? I feel like I’m back in my introductory epistemology class. Well, maybe if I can get a few more Nazi sightings in different contexts I might be able to piece it all together. I’ll keep you posted.
References
What in the world: Comparing progressives to Nazis and free speech in the UK. January 27, 2014. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-25922096.
Billionaire apologises for Nazi comment in bus row. January 28, 2014. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25930215.
