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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8322 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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So much of the rhetoric right now is that Trump's rally in MSG was or was like a Nazi rally. Only looking superficially at social media, I am not seeing a thesis or high level argument except plain assertion and vague comparison that the Nazi's also held rallies. I don't think it's controversial to say that part of the recent messaging is a renewed "Trump is a Nazi" message, partly sparked by a controversal claim that Trump supposedly said he wanted generals like Hitler had or that he admired them or something.

Campaign rhetoric? sure. But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi? Can somebody help me understand the claim? Not necessarily the veracity, but what the substantative argument is. I am not a Trump fan, nor do I buy into the hype around him, so I'm not here to defend him. Neither am I particularly a student of history. My understanding of WWII is general. I am on the fence about voting Trump. Yet, as a non-TDS sufferer, I really do not understand what the Trump is a Nazi claim is trying to convince me of. Can anyone lay out the argument and why Trump is Hitler sufficiently captures a real claim about the dangers of his presidency. (Again not looking for veracity, I'm trying to understand what the claim means.)

I will start by shooting some low hanging fruit of my low-information confusion.

  • Trump is clearly not a 'literal' member of the Nazi party.
  • It does not seem like Trump wants to invade or conquer European neighbors.
  • Trump does not seem to hate Jews.
  • If the claim boils down to white supremacy, why is the better comparison not with America's own racist history (in other words, I would grok what a 'Trump is KKK' argument was getting at better here.)
  • Was Hitler particularly and uniquely motivated by closing a broken border?
  • Is the argument that any mass deportation rounds up to Holocost level evil?
  • Am I supposed to understand it as 'Hitler' is just secular for 'the devil' and it simply means 'Trump is Evil' without any more substantative depth intended than if someone called Obama 'the devil'?

Short answer: Twitter delenda est.

Direct comparison between Trump and Hitler is silly, which is why even partisan outlets are resisting the urge. What they’re doing instead is quoting the individuals who are drawing those comparisons. The most prominent ones appear to be a state senator and Hillary Clinton. Higher-ups, such as the actual Kamala campaign, prefer to call him a fascist, which is much more defensible. “Hitler” is shorthand for “charismatic fascist,” so our high-heat, low-light excuse for Discourse uses it.

But since you want the steelman, I guess…

Recently, I’ve seen Trump supporters encouraging others to “take him seriously, not literally.” If one applies that standard, why argue over details? He’s obviously a populist with a strong sense of national character. He encourages modern forms of autarky and is skeptical of international cooperation. His supporters deserve to be rewarded and pardoned and his enemies ought to be locked up. There’s the bit where he blames shadowy interest groups for any setbacks. He selects for a real cult of personality. And above all, he cheerfully bulldozes norms so long as he’s winning.

Those are really the big ones. Drain the swamp. Lock her up. Stop the steal. I just want to find 11,780 votes](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript). Anything to get results.

So when you’ve got a charismatic populist with a dedicated base desperate to recover the glories of a bygone era, and he keeps hinting that maybe they can suspend normal procedure just this once, for a good cause…maybe you take that seriously.

A lot of this, as with every Republican nominee since 1932, is just that Everything I Don't Like Is Fascist Hitlerisms.

The steelman is that anti-immigration is a major component of Trump's interests, that the necessary steps for achieving those interests will involve putting a ton of people in extremely bad circumstances, and that when things get fucked up in the process quite a lot of people would die unintentionally or 'unintentionally'.

  • Exact numbers are messy, but when we're talking immigration we're necessarily talking about a lot of people. The official numbers for illegal undocumented immigrants (eg, not TPS enrollees) are only 11-12m, but this is broadly believed to be an undercount, with more skeptical takes being closer to 20m. There are around 800k TPS enrollees almost all of which are past the point where it's temporary, a larger-but-unknown number of refugee-applicants of varying levels of honesty, and a tiny number of really sketchy green card or naturalization or refugee cases (probably <10k?).
  • A large portion of Trump's claim is 'sending them back': charitably, to reenter a line or waiting list for lawful immigration that will be made moderately more accessible after enforcement of immigrant law returns to any level of credible effort; less charitably, by flipping the bird after.
  • Rounding them up is, alone, a big issue. TPS enrollees and refugees officially are supposed to keep their location on file, but enforcement is kinda lax and they definitely aren't going to have a lot of incentives if there's broad-scale deportation going on using that file. By definition, undocumented immigrants don't. There's a lot of trouble any time law enforcement gets involved in anything, but it scales up real quick.
  • Some number will 'self-deport', but this is likely to be a pretty small fraction. A more sizable group might take the L after getting caught -- trade a flight and a cleanish record for not kicking up a fuss -- but at best they'll be a minority, and more likely there will be direct efforts to jam up the system as much as possible.
  • Which matters because the system isn't built for high throughput, and several portions have Constitutional guarantees. Even if you avoid the question of whether non-citizens have certain relevant due process protections (which is itself a big question), you at least have to separate citizens from non-citizens with enough accuracy and due process. Some of them will have minor citizen children, so that's even more fun.
  • And even when you're absolutely sure you want to deport them, and you have all the physical infrastructure to actually bus or fly them out, you actually need a place to put them. In many cases, we're talking whole percents of country populations, often from countries that don't necessarily want or have the infrastructure to take them back.
  • So now you've got 5m-25m people that you're trying to kick out or are attached to people you're trying to kick out. You probably don't want to just have them wandering the streets after you catch them, but this is larger than the entire existing American prison system, possibly by an order of magnitude.
  • Well, we actually do know how to hold a whole bunch of not-especially-violent people without having to imprison them: set specific geographic areas aside for them with fences and limited in-and-out. It's not pretty, though.
  • Except, uh, we don't know how to do that well or safely. WWII Internment had no small number of rough edges, and it was much smaller, even after adjustment for general population size. We don't have good numbers for what sorta fatalities are happening in Uyghur 'reeducation' camps in China are, but I think a lowest plausible estimate is in the hundreds, and while I'd like to think that American open-air prisons would do better, I'm not hugely optimistic on them being perfect.
  • And, uh, we'll also have a large number of people newly removed from the mainstream population, not especially liked even by their home countries, and definitely not liked by the US government's leadership. Shame if something were to... happen to them.

This doesn't work, in a wide variety of ways. We've seen that it doesn't work, and at step one Trump gets slapped with APA problems, and it's going to keep going that way. Everything after step six or so just rolls around on the assumption that the Evil People are Going To Do The Most Evil Thing Possible, because mumble mumble someone said bad genes somewhere. In the actual real-world, in the incredibly unlikely chance that a Trump administration manages to get any of the big TPS status revoked, it'll be disruptive, but in the slow trickling sense.

But it's not incoherent or made up. It's just wrong. Probably with a bit of hyperbole because they see the plausible cases as Bad Enough. And those probably aren't really 'wrong'. You can do the QALY assessments, but napkin math puts 10-50m QALY on the table, sometimes pretty luridly.

((Though they may not be honest.))

You may recognize that this makes any effort to enforce immigration law Nazi-level, not just despite but because of Democratic efforts to make even trivial efforts to enforce the law so costly and disruptive. If so, congratulations, here's your Encyclopedia Brown merit badge.

My guess would be (assuming some level of competence on the part of the Trump team, I know) that they'd lean into the self-deportation -- if you crack down on illegals working/driving/transacting business in an effective way (which is theoretically possible, federally) then American Life becomes less attractive. Also it's not clear how much Trump cares about effectiveness of deportation per se -- being able to claim to have taken action and being cock-blocked by California or whatnot is probably fine with him.

Yeah, and I think conservatives are underestimating how hard even that limited approach is going to be -- there's a lot of people who know about past TPS rollbacks getting APA'd, but there's fewer who know about states just banning use of eVerify or firing people for their immigration status, or the extent that a lot of funding to support immigrants is laundered through various indirect grants or other organizations to make it hard to trim.

Trump taking whatever attempt, successful or not, and calling it is definitely plausible.

The other potential takeaway is that the media lied about Hitler the same as they lie about Trump.

This rigamarole has gone on forever. Repeat from 2016 onwards:

Anti-Trump: "He's like the nazis! Who were bad!"

Pro-Trump: "He's not like the nazis! Who were bad!"

High minded, mentally elevated and euphoric: "He's like the nazis, who were good."

Hitler was good at public speaking, holding rallies and a lot of other stuff. Being as good as Hitler, to the point of it warranting comparison, is a compliment. Having a 'Hitler' that wants to deport the immigrants, secure the borders, kill the drug dealers, clean the streets of crime and in any other way protect the rights and privileges white coding people care about, and uphold their preferred political order, is good!

The problem here is that people are so religiously captivated by the mythology of Hitler that they can't get over it when the comparison is made. Hitler occupies the 'devil' portion of the western brain. You can't be like the devil and not evil in some way or another. That's just definitionally true. Like being more like Jesus or MLK makes you definitionally good.

Since most people are unable to recognize their true religion, for whatever reason, we get pro-Trumpsters contorting themselves around meaningless concepts and baseless associations in order to defend their chosen one. 'Fascism' 'Hate' 'Holocaust' 'Hitler' '1939'. None of it matters, none of it tracks. It's meaningless nonsense. You'd have a better time deconstructing someone calling Trump a doodoo head.

But what you’re talking about sounds a bit more like Napoleon or maybe Caesar or something of that sort. The point of a Hitler comparison is the negative bits — the camps and the invasion of other countries. At worst I’d call Trump a potential Putin or Orbán, and at best a Napoleon. I definitely expect him to make a bit of noise

The point of a Hitler comparison is that Hitler is Satan. Satan is obviously bad to everyone who shares the western religion so the negative association is not to anything specific, it's just definitionally evil to be like Satan. Saying someone is like Napoleon or Caesar is not the same, since those two are not the antagonists of the ruling religion.

If you want to make an earnest comparison between Trump and Hitler I'd stop you are the part where Trump is Trump and Hitler is Hitler. If you feel the need to invoke mythology and shared religious gestalt to get your observations across I'm not super interested, but would prefer 40K lore as the medium.

I think it's more like Trump is not a nazi, the argument is that he condones those around him who invoke fascism. It's like the dog whistle concept.

‘Trump is Hitler’ might be meant to invoke the Holocaust- the people who say it would not correct you if you believed that- but more as a desirable side effect than the thrust of their rhetoric. No, it’s meant to say Trump is going to overthrow democracy and build an authoritarian regime. This doesn’t seem to be true, but the supporting evidence for it is stuff that the people making the argument will give you.

It’s meant as a thought terminator. What they mean is that Trump is evil and therefore if you even consider voting Trump, you’re evil too. Nazi has never really had a definitive definition, nor has fascism, or racist, sexist, bigotry, and words that end in -phobic. They’re not supposed to. That’s not what those words are for. Orbán is fascist, Trump is, Hitler is, Mussolini is, so is Putin. What specifically do they all share in common? Name 3-5 policy positions that all 5 men and the movements around them have in common that aren’t shared by neo-liberal politicians. What are we talking about? But since there’s no set of positions that could be declared as defining fascism, it’s basically a sneer meant to stop all thought. You don’t have to think about what he wants to do, or what Kamala wants to do — he’s a fascist, so she has to get your vote unless you’re a fascist. Your grocery bills don’t matter. Building things in America doesn’t matter. You must accept the premise, and then act on it.

It is also meant to incite and justify violence against him and his supporters.

The media reports on events that happen in New York City differently than they report on events that happen elsewhere. A Trump rally in Michigan or Western Pennsylvania might as well be in American Samoa or Guam. It’s different when Trump brings his ilk to defile Madison Square Garden. There are more Jews than Trump voters in Manhattan. The people who live there don’t even have cars. It probably does feel like Nuremberg to them.

Is Trump supposed to be antisemitic? Who's making that claim and based on what?

I find the claim that Trump is antisemitic confusing. I try to visit enough different forums that I get an idea of the breadth of opinion. The places that approve of Hitler often call Trump the Zion Don and think that he is owned by Jews. For example: https://communities.win/c/ConsumeProduct/p/199OTqPFyM/why-havent-you-voted-for-zion-do/c

It’s not going to go well for Jewish Americans if we start having ethnic purges. They have a sixth sense for this kind of thing. If Puerto Rico can be a floating pile of trash, so can Brooklyn.

Trump is, if anything, pro-Jew. I accept that American Jews may be sensitive to potential ethnic troubles. But specifically worrying about Trump is a false positive.

Aren’t the pigeons keeping the trash down?

I understand the fear, though I’m not sure exactly which end of it is worse. Trying to scaremonger Jews about a potential Hitler for political points is extremely dangerous. I can’t imagine anything scarier to a Jew than invoking the Holocaust in relation to a candidate for president. Whether or not it’s true, and especially if it’s not, this is like telling a rape victim that the guy down the hall is a rapist. You’re bringing back all the trauma of what the original event means. I mean obviously if it’s actually true, then a warning is warrented, but if it’s not, it’s extremely cruel and terrorizing millions of New York Jews who now believe that they need to prepare to flee because Hitler is coming back.

By that same token, though, I imagine many Jewish Americans are not sure about Kamala not listening to the Free Palestine crowd.

Is that the real argument, that trump will bring ethnic purges? And is this just extrapolated out of his border views?

I think that’s what it ultimately boils down to. Trump started his campaign promising to deport illegals. Then there was the Muslim ban. Now Vance is saying that Haitians on Temporary Protected Status are basically illegal and should be deported. The next step is to look into canceling green cards. Then revoking naturalized citizenship. Couple that with relaxing civil-rights laws, and you see where this is going.

Whether or not Trump himself wants to do all these, a sizable chunk of the population does. That is the demographic that attends Trump rallies.

Then there was the Muslim ban.

It wasn't a Muslim ban.

It’s about creating a strong unconscious distaste for Trump by associating him with the most universally distasteful political “thing”. Its Cue->Response, pure animal psychology. My dog doesn’t leave the yard because she will get zapped; my sibling gets nauseous smelling cinnamon rolls because it reminds them of long car rides; the subject doesn’t vote for Trump because when his name is said by the TV the tone gets grim and they hear the word Hitler. I think that’s it. Vance weird, Trump Hitler, say it over thousands of trials across different contexts and it will stick. There’s no thinking required at all. How did Voldemort and the N-word become verboten? The same process: the word is said (cue), there is an immediate stimuli associated to it (response, the verbal response of others), this occurs over iterations until you are now afraid to utter the word.

But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi

Truly believing Trump is Hitler would lead to the moral prerogative to commit illegal acts. Clearly, the vast majority of Dems do not believe he is Hitler, or even Hitler-lite, because they aren’t storing weapons and organizing resistance networks. “The resistance” political meme is like Star Wars cosplay, whereas if they really believed he was Hitlerly it would be like the IRA. You can draw a comparison to abortion. How many people really believe that abortion is murder? The same amount of people spending every weekend protesting it and being jailed in doing so. If the store down the street were massacring children by the dozens every month would you really be watching football on the weekends?

The valence of 'people thinking it is murder' is actually non-zero, given the bombings and the murders of abortionists.

But I think that in of itself is an inaccurate measure, because it is very rare that people are strong enough of conviction in their beliefs to kill for them. Even Islam, who certainly puts in clear terms the valor of dying for the faith, only a very few are actually suicide bombers.

In both cases, "if you really believed X, you would Y; you don't Y, therefore you don't really believe X" is an insincere rhetorical tactic. Factual belief X does not in fact necessarily imply strategy Y, all the more so because, in cases like these, strategy Y would most likely be counterproductive.

In the "Trump is Hitler" case - it may be worth the reminder that the spread of violence was a factor in Hitler's rise, as one fellow's ACT review noted. If you really think Trump is Hitler, "let's not recreate the circumstances that allowed Hitler to seize power" seems like a sensible move!

In the abortion case, it's fairly straightforward - is bombing abortion clinics an effective way to reduce the number of abortions? No? Then maybe it's a bad idea. And this isn't even considering that many pro-lifers have a deontological commitment not to kill, or even to to take actions that plausibly risk killing. They're pro-lifers: being against killing is the point! Some make exceptions around cases like criminals or in war, but nothing that would apply here.

"You're not fighting this the way I think you ought to fight it" is a bad faith dismissal, that's all.

Your link seems to be broken.

Campaign rhetoric? sure. But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi? Can somebody help me understand the claim? Not necessarily the veracity, but what the substantative argument is. . . . Can anyone lay out the argument and why Trump is Hitler sufficiently captures a real claim about the dangers of his presidency. (Again not looking for veracity, I'm trying to understand what the claim means.)

At the risk of being glib, Orwell already explained this: The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.”. They're just screaming "ORANGE MAN BAD" in the most powerful imagery they can think of.

To start, the idea that Trump is the next Hitler is obviously crazy, overheated political rhetoric. Trump is nothing like Hitler, historical fascism was a movement born out of millions of angry World War I veterans and nothing like it exists or could exist today.

Part of the issue is that American education stinks and so there is simply no broad frame of reference for strongman leaders other than the good leftwing/progressive guys (FDR, Lincoln) and Hitler. You can't compare Trump to a Salazar, Pinochet, Sulla, Hidenberg, Caesar, Augustus, etc, because people simply don't know history well enough.

However, there is a bit of a "woke more correct" element to the Nazi accusations. Historically, communism/progressivism/leftism was an alliance between the intelligensia and aristocrats with the lowest classes. Fascism was renegade aristocrats and a lower-middle-class alliance. Second, Trump's base actually does want him to be much more of a "dictator" than Trump himself wants to be, but sometimes he gives signals as if he is going to play along. Trump's base actually wants him to act alike a real executive in control of the government -- they want him to fire employees and close departments (contra civil unconstitutional civil service law), they want him to ignore unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings, they want him to take strict and harsh measures that are morally beyond the pale by the standards of the current establishment. Overall, the wishes of Trump's base do pose an existential threat to the current post-New Deal, soft-socialist expertocracy. Thus you can see that the left has a working definition of fascism as being: "An alliance of a strongman with the lower-middle class that poses an existential threat to socialist (soft or hard) bureaucratic state." By that working definition, you can seen how Trump does match the pattern.

Ultimately, this is a case of Scott Alexander's worst argument in the world. You rhetorically group A and B together, when A is something with really terrible connotations, in order to have those connotations rub off on B.

  1. Nazism was a movement of a strongman leading the lower-middle class in order to become dictator, invade Poland, start a world war, and genocide six million Jews.
  2. Trump shows strongman tendencies, and he is a lower-middle class populist leader.
  3. Ergo, Trump has smiliarities with Nazis. Therefore, we can call him Nazi and then all the other things associated with Nazism (killing millions of people) get associated with Trump.

MSNBC played footage of Nazis from their 1930's rally in MSG while covering Trump's rally. Coverage of the event has conveniently ignored other events at MSG, including a bunch of DNCs.

Here's what no one is saying: Madison Square Garden was the home to the original WWE (WWF). Trump also appeared on WWE. Trump loves Kayfabe. Therefore Trump is a professional wrestler.

I don't want to be uncharitable, and I admit I didn't look hard, but superficially, yes that is the only justification for the comparison I saw. It felt very "Hitler also ate toast!" to me.

The inherent issue is that pretty much all national-level politics resembles Fascism at most levels these days.

The larger the Federal Government grows the more influence it has on every aspect of life. The tighter it gets tied in with large private corporations and favors their interests (this is the closer definition of Fascism, if you ask me). The more it does favors for those it prefers and makes life difficult for those that oppose it. And the government is constantly attempting to expand and solidify its own power. So fascism looks a lot like what any 'normal' government does as it expands its own scope of authority.

I think the factors that would make a given party the most "Nazi-like" would be:

  • Emphasis of the superiority of some identifiable subgroup of the human population and based on said superiority, insist that said group has an inherent right to rule. This needn't even be race-based, but its easy to default to that.
  • The intentional oppression, especially the internment or imprisonment, of dissenting groups solely on the basis of their dissent.
  • Extreme Nationalism to the point of paranoia that any adjacent nations are looking to attack them and thus justification of pre-emptive invasion or similar actions. I directly differentiate this from extreme isolationism where they will vigorously defend their borders against incursion, but I admit these lines get fuzzy.

Safe to say there are no real identifiable Nazi-like parties with national sway in the U.S., to me.

This is everyone's reminder that George Orwell, writing in 1944 before we even finished defeating the Nazis, argued that there was no clear definition of the term fascist and that the term had been used so widely and to describe so many fundamentally different things that it had already lost any real meaning; https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

We love our floating signifiers, don't we folks?

But as I said in my other comment, I (perhaps wrongly) don't think of Hitler's defining characteristic as having been a fascist dictator, but has having been a fascist dictator who started WWII and the Holocaust. If the Hitler comparison is just a fascist dictator claim with only a ... following it, I think that's disingenuous.

I'm not defending fascism. But if the argument isn't that he'll use fascism to commit specific atrocities comparable to Hitler's, but only that fascism is the atrocious end in itself, the specific Hitler comparison feels weak to me. There have been other fascists and dictators in history too.

I think the argument they want to make is that Trump is a charismatic populist that will lead his people down a dark path with his "violent rhetoric".

This article is from a historian who thinks Trump is fascist. He points to these specific things:

  • Exalts the Nation and Often Race Above the Individual

Donald Trump claims immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation,” a turn of phrase used by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. He also vilifies racial or quasi-racial groups: Nazis spread libels about Jews, Trump falsely spreads baseless rumors about Haitian immigrants, “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” warns his followers that “Your children are in danger. You can’t go to school with these people [immigrants], these people are from a different planet.” In his first campaign, he promised what he described as a “Muslim ban.”

There are plans to operationalize these views, including the creation of mass detention (concentration?) camps to facilitate mass deportations, which Trump has made clear will include at least some immigrants currently in the country legally.

  • Associated with a Centralized Autocratic Government Headed by a Dictatorial Leader

This one is almost too easy: Trump says, “‘You’re not going to be a dictator are you?’ I said ‘No, no, no, other than day one.” And later, “I only want to be a dictator for one day.” Please scroll up to see how other grants of ‘temporary’ dictatorial powers to fascists turned out. It is a claim he has reiterated, rather than softened.

  • Severe Economic and Social Regimentation

Trump also proposes to radically restructure the US economy through an across-the-board 20% tariff on all goods entering the United States, discouraging trade. That’s actually a very traditional fascist economic policy: fascist governments tend to favor ‘autarky‘ – closed, self-sufficient economic systems (Adam Tooze in his book Wages of Destruction goes in to extensive detail on Nazi dreams of autarky) though they don’t generally achieve autarky because it turns out that it is a terrible economic system that doesn’t work very well. Still, massive across the board tariffs certainly seem to count as severe economic regimentation.

  • Forcible Suppression of Opposition

Trump has said that there is an “enemy within” which he would handle with military force. Asked to clarify who he meant as the “enemy within” he has clarified that he means political opponents like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. Asked to back off this rhetoric, he has instead doubled down on it, expanding his ‘enemies’ to include the press. He’s also threatened members of the January 6 Select Committee, declaring “they should be sent to jail,” and is now on social media threatening to prosecute anyone he claims ‘cheated’ against him, keeping in mind that Trump falsely claims he was cheated in the last election, a point on which no court in the land agrees.

Note as well how the Italian fascists suppressed political opposition not through state action but through state inaction – by refusing to stop their squads of violent thugs who were intimidating and murdering opponents. Likewise, Trump has promised repeatedly to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists, “on day one”, effectively a promise of impunity for his most violent supporters.

I think this is all kind of ridiculous, and if these four items are the mark of Fascism, then I could easily make a comparison to the Democratic party.

  • Exalts the Nation and Often Race Above the Individual

DEI, Affirmative Action, celebrating immutable traits over individual accomplishment, etc.

  • Associated with a Centralized Autocratic Government Headed by a Dictatorial Leader

Which party would like to give power back to the states on issues like school choice, abortion, etc? And which party in contrast has been encouraging centralized power? Which party wants to remove the electoral college and pack the Supreme Court the minute they lost control of it?

  • Severe Economic and Social Regimentation

Which side wanted vaccine passports and to shut down "non-essential businesses?" Which side is currently arguing for price ceilings?

  • Forcible Suppression of Opposition

Which side is currently prosecuting a politician under "novel legal theories?" Which side has been calling for censoring political opponents on social media?

It seems to me that Fascism (and in the downstream, Nazi-ism) has features that has always been acceptable in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Being able to compare your political enemies to Nazis is just a matter of who has control of the talking heads at this time.

OK that's all very fair. I guess what confuses me (or I understand now) is that Hitler accusation mostly just equals fascist accusation?

Like it seems to me, as a historically ignorant normie, that there have been lot's of fascists and dictators in history and active in the world today. When I think Hitler, sure, it's bad that he was a dictator, but his two biggest sins seem to be WWII and the Holocaust. A lot of what's notably bad about him being a fascist dictator vs. one of lot's of dictators in history is his usage of his fascist dictatation to commit those two sins.

So is the implication that Trump is Hitler tied to the idea that he will do things like the Holocaust and WWII, or just object level being a fascist dictator and Hitler was one also. Because I feel like the former is disingenuous.

I mean, yeah, those couple of oopsies did kinda cast fascist dictatorships in a negative light for a lot of people, I think.

I think it's the classic Motte/Bailey.

Devereaux's citations for defining fascism are an online dictionary and Eco's points of ur-fascism. Neither are a serious analysis of what fascism is. Devereaux writes as an academic, but he didn't think to look at a single academic definition of fascism? He's a historian, and he didn't make any historical survey?

The post is lazy. It should not be taken seriously.

What really irked me was that he ended his two month hiatus early just to post that.

I think this was a coordinated October Surprise that was likely concocted on some Journolist style forum somewhere. It's targeted at low information voters who it's authors hope will not look into the claims in the way that you are here. There was an accusation by Hilary Clinton that Trump was trying to re-enact a 1939 Fascist rally at the same venue. There was also The Atlantic article that said Trump said he wanted the type of generals that Hitler had. Prior to that there was also their article that Trump spoke like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.

Am I supposed to understand it as 'Hitler' is just secular for 'the devil' and it simply means 'Trump is Evil' without any more substantative depth intended than if someone called Obama 'the devil'?

Basically. I believe it to just be a blatant ad hominem. Many on the left have been trying to label Trump as a fascist for years. There's probably also some element of the left that has Antifa sympathies. If you label your enemy a fascist successfully, then you can do anything to destroy them without guilt.

It's all selective and out of context quotes. I listened to an MSNBC clip that was just a gish gallop of gibberish. All the hoaxes in one run on sentence, "fine people", "bloodbath", "dictator on day one", "enemy within", "jail his political opponents". They only reason they compare him to Hitler is because Hitler is the only fascist dictator they don't like. Stalin, Mao and Castro are all heroes in their book. That leaves pretty slim pickings for fascist to compare him to, so you are left with Hitler even if it's a really poor fit.

This may be the week I finally have to admit I don't understand a large portion of anti-Trump sentiment, at least as it manifests on Twitter. For me, the last straw was the reaction to the Washington Post's decision to not endorse a candidate for president, despite the fact that any reader who is paying attention at all knows that the editorial board endorses Harris, a fact reflected throughout basically all of their election coverage, and I am comfortable saying that the publication of an endorsement would literally have persuaded 0 voters to change their vote.

the twitterati need to punish people for defecting even if their particular instance of defection produces no harm in order to send a message to all the other potential defectors.

The three main theories would be (1) that accusations of blatant partisanship are actually starting to hurt the self-perception of some of those involved; (2) that they are trying to build up a defense because they are expecting a backlash against anti-Trump media; and (3) that some PR advisor told them about a significant pool of people that is unreachable by traditional media messaging because they think the media is blatantly partisan, and they need to take steps to raise the weight that those voters assign to media reporting.

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