Why Trump/Hitler Comparisons are Unfair

[uke2se]

Trump/Hitler comparisons are , of course, complete nonsense. Hitler was a career politician dedicated to an ideology (National Socialism) and an established party structure (the NSDAP) to promote it. The closest Trump ever got to ideology was "Make America Great Again", and the GOP is no substitute for a real political party.

"Make America Great Again" is actually an ideology. Trump has shown us what it is. Here's what we can glean would be in a Trumpist manifesto:

- Democracy is only good when I win, therefore it's better to have the illusion of democracy than actual democracy.

- Money belongs to the rich.

- Protecting the environment costs too much money.

- Brown people are icky and shouldn't be anywhere near me. Preferably not even in the same country.

- Black people are thugs.

- Muslims are completely alien to my world view and should be treated as brown people.

- Authoritarian leaders are easier to deal with because they flatter me. Democratic leaders don't, so I'm not going to play with them.

Substitute spelling errors as suited.

You might say that this isn't an ideology but simply what Trump thinks. I see clear policies there, and they are clearly derived from a Trumpist ideology.

 

[The Big Dog]

Yep.

The Trumpists aren't going to play nice, and this is the future of the USA we're talking about here. Roll up your sleeves and fight dirty, or you'll have a one-party Trumpist country in a couple of years.

Amen. Nothing moves the needle like comparing American politicians to Hitler because he is cracking down on criminals.

 

[Upchurch]

Amen. Nothing moves the needle like comparing American politicians to Hitler because he is cracking down on criminals.

Misdemeanors. He's cracking down on people who have committed misdemeanors, and sometimes not even that, if they are seeking asylum.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

The constant need to hold rallies alone is strongly reminiscent of Mussolini/Hitler.

 

[Fudbucker]

Only because you're not reading the posts is my guess.



Stupid questions get ignored in my threads, sorry.

"Mainstream publications..."

Srsly?

I'm always suspicious when people dodge questions that have obvious answers.

And of course you know what mainstream means. Acounts of the holocaust, like Britannica's, not the American Nazi Party's take on it. Do you agree Britannica's account is an accurate representation of what happened?

 

[Craig4]

Utter nonsense.

Hillary never took the high ground, and she was im,ediately aware that her "deplorables" comment was a complete mistake.

Bernie might have been able to take the high ground, but Hillary - whose husband, you may recall, was William Jefferson Clinton - never had the opportunity or brains to take it.



Anyone who opposes him should. They're the ones with all the guns, remember?



Given his current approval rating being the same as both Clinton and Obama at the same stage of his presidency, I think he seems to be going fine with independents and swinging voters.



All I can say is go back to page 1 - Nazi comparisons are the worst possible choice.

And it really is unfair to Adolph - one of the things I meant to put at the start was public speaking. Trump is a buffoon, while Hitler was mesmerising and didn't need to rely on three-word chants.

It's got to be a Nazi comparison with powerful, emotional images and high production values. Simply calling Trump a Nazi won't do.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-nazi-salute/

This image with the audio of the girl crying, then some Sieg Heil audio with the sound of stormtrooper boots marching, maybe racists quotes. It practically writes itself.

ETA: And don't forget to add the clip of the head of CBP saying they are just following orders.

 

[Lothian]

I am not sure it is fair to compare the most evil, derranged, racist, psychopath the world has ever known with Hitler.

 

[llwyd]

Yep, he is much more like Mussolini. Despises liberal democracy and the postwar Western alliance but not fanatic and energetic enough to cause an actual genocide. In any case, the best return to roubles ever spent.

 

[Craig4]

It's fine if you make the case, honestly or not.

 

[The Don]

Threads that suggest that President Trump is the same or worse than Hitler or Mussolini or Franco or some African dictator or Papa Doc or whoever may be entertaining rhetorical devices for the person who starts the thread but IMO completely misses the point - each authoritarian dictator seems to have their own signature style and you can cherry pick from any and give the impression that President X is as bad as dictator Y.

At the moment, despite the supine GOP, President Trump and his Administration are not in a position to implement whatever policies they want. As damaged as the checks and balances are by a legislative branch where gerrymandering and voter suppression result in a 7% advantage for one party and a judicial branch whose ranks are being stuffed with unqualified partisan hacks, they are currently (just) working.

What is worrying for me is that despite all the rhetoric used against President George W Bush (Fascist) or Obama (Communist) there was never any real prospect of US democracy being unpicked or US society being fundamentally changed. The current administration isn't in a position to do that (yet), but President Trump is acting like that's what he wants to happen and that is worrying enough.

IMO it doesn't matter whether President Trump is worse than Hitler (though IMO he's several orders of magnitude less bad) but what does matter is:

• His relentless attack on the free press and his unconditional support of and from FoxNews
• His repeated racist attacks on blacks and Hispanics and his scapegoating of them for many of the US's ills
• His seeming desire to rule by fiat, bypassing the legislative and judicial branches
• His impulsiveness and apparent lack of consistency when it comes to major policies
• His apparent constant demand for adulation
• The fact IMO that he is not the cause of all of this, he is merely a symptom. 40%+ of the US electorate are happy with his performance and this is the kind of person that they actively want as their President

 

[Craig4]

Yep, he is much more like Mussolini. Despises liberal democracy and the postwar Western alliance but not fanatic and energetic enough to cause an actual genocide. In any case, the best return to roubles ever spent.

That's probably fair. Trump just doesn't have the organizational skills to be as good at being evil as Hitler. That doesn't make him less like Hitler in a moral sense.

 

[Brainster]

We're allowed to point out when current events parallel those of history, but only when that history isn't of late 1930's Germany?

It would help if you could convince everybody else to stop doing this with every president. Google ObamaHitler and you'll get this revealing Slate article by Jamelle Bouie:

Nothing in this attack makes sense, but—in choosing Hitler as his point of comparison—Weber has revived an erstwhile tradition of American politics: Comparing the president to Adolf Hitler. This was a part of life during the George W. Bush administration, and it picked up steam with Obama’s arrival on the national stage. Of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of examples, here are a few of my favorites.

Of course, he only focuses on the comparisons of Obama to Hitler after that, but he makes a very fair point at the end:

I should say that, for the most part, I don’t think any of these are sincere. I’m not sure that anyone who calls Obama “Hitler”—or who did the same to George W. Bush—is thinking much about their analogy. Instead, they’re reaching for the most evil name they can imagine, and attaching it to their chief political opponent.

Have you seen the photoshops with Hillary (or George W.) wearing a Hitler mustache? I have. I don't recall Bill getting much of the Hitler treatment by comparison (probably got more the Stalinist label). Reagan certainly got the unfavorable comparisons, and Nixon probably was considered more like Satan himself.

That's the point. Everybody acts like it's the end of the world when the other party gets elected. Hell or some environmental catastrophe is around the corner. Untold numbers of criminals will cross our border, or one saintly woman will arrive carrying five babies who will cure cancer, the common cold and bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth in our society (the other two merely become Supreme Court Justices). The future as always, lies somewhere between and probably very far between them.

I can understand why it's useful for the political parties to characterize each other as amazingly evil with bad intentions. "Red meat" keeps the base in line. But I would hope that at some point, real skeptics would apply the skepticism to their own side and recognize the hyperbole for what it is. Like Diogenes, I search in vain.

I don't think that the Democrats are the second coming of the Bolsheviks and I don't think the Republicans are the second coming of the Nazis. And basically the differences between the parties 100 years from now will seem as amazingly petty and bizarre as would the political arguments today have seemed to a citizen of 1918.

 

[The Atheist]

I'm always suspicious when people dodge questions that have obvious answers.

We're both in the same boat then - I'm deeply suspicious of people who ask stupid questions, especially when the answer is right in front of them.

Do you agree Britannica's account is an accurate representation of what happened?

Nope. I haven't read it, so I'm not going to agree with it. And Brittanica? Have I gone through a time warp to the 1970s? Surely, you mean Wikipedia?

Anyway, I have to confess to never having read a single encyclopaedia article on the Holocaust and have no intention of ever doing so.

I don't think that the Democrats are the second coming of the Bolsheviks and I don't think the Republicans are the second coming of the Nazis. And basically the differences between the parties 100 years from now will seem as amazingly petty and bizarre as would the political arguments today have seemed to a citizen of 1918.

Extremely well-written post from every angle.

Thanks!

 

[The Great Zaganza]

The problem with the Hitler comparison is that it is so easy to strawman.

Trump is a populist demagogue, so there is no avoiding similarities to other leaders who came to power using the same tactics.
It's a silly slippery-slope argument to claim that Trump is Hitler - it's even worse to deny the right to talk about the potential for Trump to further slip into autocracy and xenophobia.

 

[Foolmewunz]

The problem with the Hitler comparison is that it is so easy to strawman.

Trump is a populist demagogue, so there is no avoiding similarities to other leaders who came to power using the same tactics.
It's a silly slippery-slope argument to claim that Trump is Hitler - it's even worse to deny the right to talk about the potential for Trump to further slip into autocracy and xenophobia.

Yep! And a couple of more "Yeps".

The problem is handing paleo-conservatives a chew toy that they can use for distraction. There are more parallels to various tinpot dictators around the world than there are to great democratic leaders, that's for certain.

You can go through a whole check list of items where Trump has similarities with Hitler but then you get to that "Homicidal Maniac Who Wanted to Take Over the World and Murder All the Mudbloods" and you do, fairly have to check the "No" box.

You hand this to conservatives who, let's face it, don't have much to argue their case, and you present them with yet another opportunity to straw man the position and avoid discussing the horrid policies they support. It might be handy if we concentrated on some other excess-riddled regimes. Learn more about the Khanate, Caligula, Nero, Montezouma.... etc... And then realize that what we're fighting is Trumpism. It's a new variation of highly ignorant oligarchical plutocracy.

 

[Foolmewunz]

I'm always suspicious when people dodge questions that have obvious answers.

And of course you know what mainstream means. Acounts of the holocaust, like Britannica's, not the American Nazi Party's take on it. Do you agree Britannica's account is an accurate representation of what happened?

Oh, do stop! You're not seriously suspecting TA of being a holocaust denier? Nazi hugger? Did someone slip you some Paranoia Flakes for breakfast?

 

[McHrozni]

There are many comparisons between Trumpism and Nazism. There are few comparisons between Trump and Hitler.

That's true, but still a Godwin.

There are many just as relevant comparisons with any of the following:
- Chavism
- Orbanism
- Edroganism (?)

And probably more, many more. These are just the ones active today in various countries (Venezuela, Hungary and Turkey). All use the same approach of dividing the country into two parts, "ours" and "the others" and rule exclusively for the benefit of their own favored group to deteriment of all others. They all claim someone else is to blame for the ills of their favored group and that they themselves have all the answers.

It's always a lie, they have little to no answers, but their favored voter group are the people who are unwilling or unable to listen to reason when hooked up. Once in power they begin to abuse state resources to control the media and send down a favorable picture of themselves that their target audience gobbles up while the rest of the country shakes their heads in disbelief. The rest of the country tries in vain to convince their chosen demographic, they try to use democratic to bring about change, but is stomped down by the increasingly heavy boot of authoritarianism. Venezuela is the most further advanced, followed by Turkey, Hungary and USA is the last.

By contrast, Nazis had a fairly large share of actual popular support. They didn't seek to divide Germans into two halves but to unite all Germans (even Germanics) against an array of foreign enemies - Jews, Slavs and French, mostly. Of course there were also German enemies, socialists and communists, German Jews and more but they were always deep in the minority, the "us vs them" mentality was directed outwards, not so much inwards as with these four.

I find Chavez a better comparison to Trump than Hitler. Sure, it's an imperfect comparison since there are crucial and painfully obvious differences between the two, but he's more similar to Chavez than to Hitler. Whether or not that's a good thing remains an open question.

McHrozni

 

[Andy_Ross]

"They didn't seek to divide Germans into two halves but to unite all Germans"

"Of course there were also German enemies, socialists and communists, German Jews and more"


You refuted yourself in the same post.

 

[Upchurch]

It would help if you could convince everybody else to stop doing this with every president.

The thing is, I don’t make the comparison with every president. I haven’t even made the comparison with any other president. I’m not making this comparison out of knee-jerk tribalism and, just because others do, it does not mean that every such comparison is unwarranted hyperbole.

Besides, and this is not directed at Brainster’s post specifically, I’m not even suggesting that Trump is the same or worse than Hitler. I’m suggesting that he is using a very similar tactic: single out a powerless minorities in society, vilify them far our of proportion to anything they could actually have done, make their “crimes” as a people the source of all the nation’s woes, and make them, as a people, illegal. Granted, he didn’t start any of that into motion, but he did bring it from the political racist fringes into official White House policy and ramped it up.

My point is that sometimes such comparisons are necessary if we’re going to prevent the mistakes of the past from happening again. You know, “never again.”

 

[McHrozni]

"They didn't seek to divide Germans into two halves but to unite all Germans"

"Of course there were also German enemies, socialists and communists, German Jews and more"

You refuted yourself in the same post.

No, you misunderstand. Trump, Chavez, Orban and Erdogan seek to have 50% plus one vote, anything beyond that is a burden. Of course they don't go quite as far since one needs to have a margin of error built in, but their reach falls well shy of 60%.

Two examples from the past several months:

Orban - 49.77%, twisted electoral system to be sufficient for a supermajority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_parliamentary_election,_2018

Erdogan - 52.59%, with severely slanted playing field, some support was also recieved by allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_general_election,_2018

Trump is in the same boat as these two. Chavez won greater percentages in part due to having the fortune of ruling during an oil boom and in part because democratic process in Venezuela was compromised more and more severely than in Hungary or Turkey, but he never tried to win over the opposition.

Hitler on the other hand worked to be geniunely popular with everyone. It didn't work with everyone of course, but he tried to be the Chancellor of all Germans (excluding Jews whom he didn't consider as human, let alone German). He failed of course and he had many who were too vocal killed obviously, but his core intent was different, which in turn also made him far more powerful.

I'm not saying this to show these clowns are somehow worse than Hitler, they aren't. I'm saying this to show there is notable difference between them. Truth to be told totalitarians are worse than mere authoritarians to begin with.

McHrozni