Nuremberg on the Hudson

On Sunday at a brunch in Budapest, a Dutch colleague overheard two Americans fretting about the Washington Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate this year. The woman griped about the scandal of this decision, and said the newspaper’s supposed capitulation to Trump makes it easier for authoritarians to take power. Her husband just mumbled assent, either because he agrees, or because he just wanted to eat his breakfast in peace. 

My colleague took this exchange as a sign that Americans are losing their minds late in this election cycle. He doesn’t know the half of it. With Kamala Harris’s campaign running out of steam, and facing the prospect of a Trump restoration, the American Left has gone full Hitler. As I wrote last week , Harris herself has said repeatedly that Trump is a fascist—a message that has been picked up by her Democratic surrogates and magnified by the mainstream media and in social media. 

I regret to inform you that the Left’s ‘Trump=Hitler’ fanaticism is growing more intense with each passing day. Pay attention: God only knows which madmen somewhere in the left-wing fever swamps the Democrats and the media are pushing past the psychological breaking point. We are watching the American regime have a nervous collapse in real time, with consequences likely to last far beyond next week’s election. 

The left-wing cable news channel MSNBC was one of many who likened Donald Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday night to a Nazi event. An anti-Trump former national security official captured the fevered mood among liberals with this alarmist tweet:

Well. It could be pointed out that at the Trump rally, there were Orthodox Jews wrapping themselves in tefillin, the gear they use for prayer, as well as Israeli flags flying from the rafters. This is quite a contrast from the atmosphere a few miles north, at the progressive enclave of Columbia University where, earlier this year, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations turned so ugly that the campus rabbi urged Jewish students to stay off campus for their own safety. Besides, if Hitler had even given a speech as rambling and goofy as Donald Trump did, he wouldn’t have been able to muster enough brownshirts to conquer a hot dog stand, much less half of Europe.

Still, the insane outburst of Nazi obsession on the American Left tells us something important not only about Kamala Harris, as I noted last week, but about the mindset of the US elite. It is a perfect example of what the French intellectual Renaud Camus calls “the second career of Adolf Hitler.” It’s a phrase he coined almost two decades ago to describe how Europeans routinely invoke Hitler’s evil legacy to delegitimize any politicians or ideas that threaten their power and ideological hegemony. In Europe, at least, it works: fear of being tarred as latter-day Nazis cows most politicians of the Right, and moves many European voters to reject them, out of fear that they will be complicit in the return of the Hitlerian scourge.

It is worth returning to Camus to better understand what is happening in America now:

This posthumous career of the Führer is … no less monstrous than his career while alive, but its historical and geopolitical consequences are almost as vast, if not more so. Indeed, everything happens as if Europe, and of course France, having suffered from the Hitlerian cancer, had been and continued to be operated on over and over again by surgeons so fiercely resolved to eradicate the evil that they did not refrain from removing vital organs indispensable to the patient’s survival, as soon as they were suspected of contamination. It is in this way that France, paying an exorbitant medical bill for a relatively brief period of her history, has been driven more or less consciously to will her own undoing, through the successive withdrawal of all the functions that are necessary for a nation to persevere in its being.

In Hungary, where I live, the Orban government is routinely condemned by European Union politicians and the media as “fascist.” Hungary finds itself constantly smeared as some sort of Magyar Bavaria of the 1930s. This has no relationship to fact, as any visitor can tell after spending only a day in the country. They might conclude the same that many Hungarian conservatives do: that a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the policies of globalist left-wing elites. A fascist is someone who, no matter how democratic their own politics, votes against the interests of Brussels.

Camus understands that the Hitler smear serves not only as a cheap attack on one’s political opponents, but also—and more consequentially—to paralyze electorates in the face of threats to their national existence. For example, to avoid the taint of Hitlerism, one must not object to mass migration, even though the huge numbers of migrants from non-European countries and cultures brings violent crime, religious fanaticism, and even social disintegration. There is no price too high to pay—even national suicide—to prevent the return of Hitler.

It is understandable why the invocation of Nazism is so emotionally powerful in Europe. But why should it matter to Americans? The United States has no history of fascism, of course, and indeed hundreds of thousands of Americans died to free Europe from Nazi occupation. And yet, it cannot be denied that more than a few American elites really do believe that Trump is a clear and present fascist threat to democracy.

Take the freak-out that the Dutchman overheard at breakfast. The American couple were in a swivet over a trivial fact: the failure of the newspaper in the U.S. Capitol to tell people how to vote this year. As someone who used to write newspaper endorsements as a member of an editorial board, I can testify that newspaper endorsements matter not one whit. Polls repeatedly show that the media are among the least trusted institutions in America. Endorsements serve only as an expression of elite opinion, nothing more. 

So why the meltdown over the Post’s decision, which was ordered by the newspaper’s billionaire owner, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos? At least two columnists at the paper resigned in protest, and Beltway elites are reacting as if Bezos is an ink-stained Neville Chamberlain. 

One of those columnists, the bellicose neoconservative Robert Kagan—whose wife Victoria Nuland was a key architect of America’s aggressive Ukraine policy—had previously written that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” He now sees the Post ownership’s refusal to endorse Kamala Harris as the journalistic equivalent of ratifying Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland. 

It is telling that one of the most important intellectuals behind George W. Bush’s failed invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan regards Donald Trump, who has emerged as an opponent of America’s so-called “forever war,” as the real threat to world peace. But then, the Democratic Party, which used to see Kagan and his lot as the great villains of American politics, have now joined forces with former vice president Dick Cheney, the mastermind of those invasions. Cheney and his daughter Liz, a Never-Trump former GOP Congresswoman, have endorsed Harris. 

What’s going on here? Members of the American establishment—including both Democratic and Republican elites—have been running things for so long that they take any meaningful dissent from their worldview as an unacceptable repudiation of democracy. After Trump’s 2016 election, the Post adopted the pompously histrionic motto “Democracy Dies In Darkness.” Bezos—whose subsidizing of the money-losing newspaper guarantees the jobs of its staff—has apparently decided, sensibly, that the stakes aren’t so high. 

So what? The paper’s news and opinion pages are filled daily with anti-Trump reporting and commentary, so much so that it has become an unreadable Pravda-On-The-Potomac to anyone who doesn’t share the crazypants view that Trump is Hitler 2.0. Does it really matter that on the irrelevant matter of a presidential endorsement, the Post has decided to stay silent?

Yes, it does—as a condensed symbol of the elites’ loss of power and influence. Though Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office as a return to normality after the turbulent Trump years, they have governed as militant progressives. 

Biden and Harris opened the southern U.S. border to an unprecedented influx of unvetted foreigners—at least 10 million that have been counted, though that number is surely higher. You have a problem with that? You’re a Nazi.

Under Biden and Harris, the DEI mentality has overtaken the U.S. government, as well as most public and private institutions, including universities and corporations. The New York Times—nobody’s idea of Der Stürmer—reported last week that Harris herself took an active role to inject race and gender into the operation of government agencies. The U.S. is now more divided and anxious along race and gender lines than ever, with even the U.S. military facing a steep recruiting crisis connected to its DEI policies.

Lo, it turns out that most Americans hate this stuff. Nazis, the lot.

Under the Biden-Harris government, and their progressive allies in liberal cities and states, crime has soared as police have declined to enforce law and order out of fear of being racist. Once-beautiful American cities have become cesspools of homeless drug addicts. The media suppress accounts of black mobs ransacking convenience stores and assaulting Asians, Jews, and others, but anyone with an X account can see every day video of these events. Hey, you’re a Nazi if you notice—and Elon Musk is now the Dr. Goebbels of Silicon Valley.

Donald Trump is doing exceptionally well for a Republican among black voters, especially black males. And why shouldn’t he be? Law-abiding black people suffer the most from black crime. Besides, under the first Trump administration, wages for black men rose substantially. They have stalled out under Biden-Harris, perhaps because mass migration takes jobs away from unskilled black laborers. 

Yet Barack Obama recently chastised fellow black men for failing to support Kamala Harris, suggesting that they are a pack of sexists. Hey, Hitler didn’t like women either. 

You get the point. Battered by inflation and skyrocketing housing costs, 52 percent of American voters say they are worse off financially than they were before Biden-Harris took office. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction[. Yet when asked if she would have done anything differently over the past four years in government, Kamala Harris said “not a thing comes to mind.” 

It doesn’t require fascism to explain why Trump is doing so well. In fact, if not for Trump’s unique weaknesses as a candidate, the Republicans would likely be looking forward to a massive landslide victory next week. But fascism is what Team Harris and her supporters have turned to, given that nothing else has worked. 

The gibbering fanaticism of the Democratic elites and their Never-Trump fellow travelers would be amusing if it weren’t so potentially serious. Donald Trump was shot on the campaign trail, and the Secret Service foiled what looks like a second assassination attempt. If you really believed that America was about to fall to Nazism—after all, Hitler was elected!—then you would be sorely tempted to stop it by any means necessary.

If Trump should survive the campaign and take office, that won’t be the end of the matter. The New York Times recently published an essay by two professors of government at Harvard (naturally), calling for a mass mobilization of civil society to “defend democracy” with mass public demonstrations in an attempt to deny Trump power. Of civil society leaders, the academics asked, “What are they waiting for?” 

These professors, from America’s most elite university, publishing in the country’s most influential newspaper, are in effect calling for a color revolution to overturn potential results of a democratic election. To save democracy, they are prepared to destroy it. Yet Trump, you see, is the real fascist. 

As one notable Nazi-era politician wrote, 

in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie… .

The author of that insightful passage is—you guessed it—Adolf Hitler. 

As we can see now, watching the ructions of the American ruling class, what is sometimes true of the broad masses can also be true of the narrow elites. As Renaud Camus presciently noted, Hitler’s posthumous career as a psychological and political stick with which to beat those who objected to the Left’s dominance gave birth to

a totally imaginary world, a world that was sentimental and sanctimonious, unctuous and unforgiving, tyrannical and impotent (tyrannical towards its own, impotent in what concerned others), and that took upon itself to paper over the guilty real world, which was suspected of virtual, potential, or possible Hitlerism. This imaginary world then went about severely scolding the real world every time the latter humbly sought to remind it of its reality, be it only by raising a finger to ask a little question or by simply revealing its suffering. 

American regime liberals saw Trump’s joyful, raucous, at times goofy (Hulk Hogan as flag bearer) Madison Square Garden event as a revived Nuremberg rally. It is to be hoped that on Election Day, American voters will return them to reality, telling the ruling class, and its hireling Hitler, “You’re fired!”