This Is How The Nazis Got Elected

I hadn't meant to start a series on how the progressives are Nazis without ambition, but once I got that mental model in my head, I see evidence of it everywhere and it's clarifying historical things for me.

To recap my analogy, if you change whites and "whiteness" into Jews and Judaism and you change people of color, women and LGBT into Germans, the analogy pops out.  Further, the economic policies of Obama/Hillary/Bernie and Mussolini/Hitler/Peron are nearly identical. For example, the Nazis called for universal health care and free education.

Where it falls apart is that the progressives lack the ambitions of the Nazis or the Italian fascists. They are quite content to simply beat down the opposition at home and leave other countries alone. Unlike the Nazis, they don't want to exterminate, they want to re-educate. Essentially, they want to obliterate the culture of "whiteness" and "patriarchy," whatever those are at the moment.

Here are three data points from the last couple of days, couched in terms of my analogy. Three out of about twenty that I saw.

1. A New York Times editorial asked, "Can my German children be friends with Jews?" The author answered the question in the negative.

2. A German woman was fired from a prestigious position for suggesting that Jews might differ between themselves in experience and outlook. She asserted that not all Jews are alike and you don't always have to hire Germans to achieve diversity.

3. The Commandant of the Luftwaffe Academy received an award for a now-famous speech in which he excoriated the Jews at the Academy for an incident where German cadets suffered racial insults. It turned out that one of the Germans staged the attack and the Jews were innocent of all charges. The Luftwaffe Commandant did not recant his speech and asserted, in essence, that the Jews still needed to hear it.

How The Nazis Gained Power. The German culture at the time was primed to accept the notion that the Jews were evil and caused all kinds of problems. It didn't matter that it was all nonsense, it only mattered that many people believed it to be true and anyone dissenting lost their jobs, were beaten up or imprisoned. News outlets didn't confront Nazi politicians with their atrocities and demand the Nazis account for them.

When the white supremacists, all couple hundred of them, marched in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue, any conservative not deemed sufficiently critical of them was branded a sympathizer and hounded incessantly. It went on for weeks and is still being used as an example of pervasive racism on the right.

As far as I can tell, no progressive politician has been confronted with these and asked to distance themselves from them. I don't see where anyone is even considering it. The whole notion of, say, the CBS Evening News, asking Elizabeth Warren if the Air Force dude was wrong to yell at the students is practically inconceivable.

These things go on every day. These aren't tiny bands of deranged extremists like we saw in Charlottesville, this is the New York Times, Apple and the Air Force Academy. These are large, mainstream organizations going full-progressive-Nazi with no repercussions from the media or the popular culture. That's because we've internalized the lessons of the progressives and these events are perfectly natural to us. And that's how Nazis win fair and free elections.

Poor Goebbels would never get hired these days. He'd be utterly redundant. Maybe he could make a living writing for academic journals.