{"id":84578,"date":"2016-01-06T07:35:23","date_gmt":"2016-01-06T15:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=84578"},"modified":"2016-01-06T07:35:23","modified_gmt":"2016-01-06T15:35:23","slug":"is-trump-hitler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=84578","title":{"rendered":"Is Trump Hitler?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried writes<\/a>: Lately I\u2019ve been looking at the nasty stuff that the neocon-Republican establishment has been throwing at the Donald to bring down his poll numbers. Some of it is so ridiculous that it points not to any failing in a controversial presidential candidate but to the narrow twilight world in which the establishment\u2019s lackeys are comfortably nestled together. An utterly self-defeating attack has come from that decrepit \u201cconservative\u201d icon, George Will, who in his nonage has given up wearing his once accustomed bow-tie but continues to be an insufferable bore. George has warned ad infinitum that Trump is \u201cno true conservative.\u201d If he were, he would be rallying to the established positions of the established Republican Party and perhaps divvying up his fortune with Jeb Bush, who was Will\u2019s favorite candidate for president, as long as Jeb showed signs of life. What is more, Trump by leading an insurgency against the GOP establishment might contribute to \u201cthe destruction of the Republican Party<\/a>.\u201d Since that party and its current leadership are the true guides to what is \u201cconservative,\u201d Trump is in fact destroying conservatism, which is presumably dependent on that living oracle, the RNC. Needless to say, George misses or pretends not to see that most of the Right despises his living oracle and may be supporting Trump precisely because he may bring about what Will conjures up as a nightmare. His nightmare is the hope of others.<\/p>\n

An even dumber strategy has come from Jonah Goldberg, who has just announced<\/a> that \u201cno movement that embraces Trump can call itself conservative.\u201d Apparently, Jonah\u2019s glaringly leftist positions on social issues, including gay marriage, in no way conflict with his right to determine the nature of conservatism\u2014or his right to call Trump on TV \u201cthe bane of humanity.\u201d<\/a> Jonah has also reached for some bewildering historical analogies in his diatribes against the Donald. Indeed his historical parallels<\/a> are so obscure as to leave his probable readers running to Wikipedia for enlightenment.<\/p>\n

Okay, let\u2019s give Jonah the right to belabor his strained comparison of Trump to Mussolini. Other establishment journalists are using it, and his readers may have heard of the interwar fascist leader who fell into Hitler\u2019s clutches. This doesn\u2019t mean of course that there is any substance in the comparison drawn (the last I heard Trump was not replacing the Constitution with a corporate national state). But at least Jonah\u2019s likely readers, who are GOP junkies and for the most part culturally illiterate, might have encountered il Duce\u2019s name somewhere, perhaps on a quiz show or in an undergraduate course on twentieth-century history at Jonah\u2019s alma mater Goucher College.<\/p>\n

But how does the average reader of Jonah\u2019s pap deal with such scare figures as Huey Long and (I\u2019m kidding you not!) Father Coughlin? In a recent column Jonah warns that by advancing Trump, we may be giving prominence to a dangerous populist like the interwar Louisiana Senator or the anti-Semitic demagogue Father Coughlin. Now I\u2019m not here to defend either the flamboyant Long or the Michigan priest who slammed Wall Street and Jewish capitalists in the 1930s (before going back to being a New Deal Democrat). But I can\u2019t imagine that most under-eighty Americans, or perhaps anyone but aging Jewish liberals who attend Bernie Sanders rallies or subscribe to Commentary<\/span>, would have heard of Jonah\u2019s villains. Perhaps that is the group that Jonah is reaching out to.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve encountered even dumber historical comparisons coming out of conservatism, inc., for example, by Goldberg\u2019s frenetic companion-in-arms Glenn Beck. This yap show host, with a pleading voice that is perpetually about to crack, has had pictures projected on to a wall behind him of Hillary Clinton and German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. Beck\u2019s viewers were urged to look at these juxtaposed pictures, to understand why American democracy is now in danger. It would surprise me if Beck, who\u2019s been ranting against Trump for several months now, hasn’t added a photo of the Donald to his Rogues\u2019 Gallery. Once again I can\u2019t see how this linkage of current GOP villains to dead historical figures, whom one\u2019s audience is not likely to have heard of, can assist the GOP cause. I won\u2019t dwell on the by now minor problem that the historical figures we\u2019re supposed to boo have generally been misrepresented.<\/p>\n

In view of these clumsy assaults on Trump, I must compliment the Washington Post syndicated columnist Richard Cohen for comparing Trump to someone whose name we would know, namely Adolf Hitler. Cohen started the \u201cTrump is like Hitler\u201d routine<\/a> as early as April, 2011, before this comparison had taken off in the national press. He\u2019s had to work hard to make this comparison sound plausible. And certain obvious difficulties remain, for example the impossibility of finding anti-Semitism in Trump\u2019s background or the absence in his rhetoric of anything resembling the Nazis\u2019 expansionist foreign policy. I don\u2019t even know whether Trump can speak German with Hitler\u2019s Upper Austrian accent. Although Cohen\u2019s view of two parallel lives may not convince all of us, among certain readers even paranoid fantasy can pass for truth.<\/p>\n

It make no difference if I, as someone with an impoverished imagination, can\u2019t think of anything that would make Trump and Hitler seem similar, except for the facts that both talked about unemployment and threats to the homeland, shared the same gender and had hair on their heads. Cohen\u2019s comparison can catch on, because his readers know who Hitler was, that is, a very evil man who killed lots of people and, perhaps even worse, made politically insensitive remarks. If a journalist wants to pummel Trump with poisonous darts, then at least come up with a usable historical comparison. Don\u2019t bring up liberal villains who aren\u2019t even featured on the History Channel. Just go for the big H.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried writes: Lately I\u2019ve been looking at the nasty stuff that the neocon-Republican establishment has been throwing at the Donald to bring down his poll numbers. Some of it is so ridiculous that it points not to any failing … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29752],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-donald-trump"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84579,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84578\/revisions\/84579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}