Existential elections against ‘fascism’ and ‘Hitler’ are bad for democracy

For Democrats, the use of an insult comedian as a warm-up act at former President Donald Trump’s political rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden was heaven-sent. They had already blasted the event in advance as somehow a rerun of a 1939 rally of the pro-Nazi German American Bund. But some of the tasteless and offensive jokes uttered by Tony Hinchcliffe about the island of Puerto Rico and a wide array of ethnic groups seemed to justify the claim that the Trumpist extravaganza was a hate fest that justified the assertion that, as so many Democrats have been arguing, a vote for Trump is a vote for “hate.”

And that is the way the election is being framed in much of the corporate mainstream media.

While I can’t understand the reasoning that led to Hinchcliffe’s appearance at the rally in the first place, I think focusing so much on this framing of the election is a mistake for supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris for five specific reasons.

One is that it’s unlikely to persuade anyone to vote for Harris who is not already part of her left-wing base.

While Trump’s alleged incredible awfulness seems so obvious to half of the country that already hates him, his supporters have long since tuned out what has been a nonstop series of similar bouts of liberal outrage about something he or a supporter might have said.

Hypocritical outrage

They view such episodes as profoundly hypocritical since similar outrage is rarely directed at anything like that said by Harris or her backers. For example, her latest instance of validating antisemitic smears uttered by left-wing haters of Israel was ignored by the same media that treated Hinchcliffe’s bad jokes as front-page news. As liberal comedian and hyper-partisan Democrat Jon Stewart has pointed out, outrage about edgy jokes is never a good look for those seeking public support.

It also hasn’t escaped Trump supporters that it’s not just their candidate who is accused of being haters or fascists but everyone who votes for him. It’s not dissimilar to the Democrats’ partisan congressional investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that seemed mostly focused on transforming a genuine disgrace into a vast conspiracy on the part of Trump and most Republicans. Trump voters are not wrong to think that as much as the “bad orange man” is being targeted by the left, so are they because of concerns about illegal immigration and the impact of racist woke ideologies that treat all those who are not part of certain groups as “white” oppressors.

Since 2016 when Hillary Clinton called Trump voters “deplorables” to this week when President Joe Biden called them “garbage,” the contempt for Trump backers on the part of their political foes has been painfully obvious. The realignment of American politics as Democrats have become part of the credentialed elites, Wall Street and the very poor while Trump’s GOP has become the defender of the interests of working-class voters is the most underreported political story of the last decade. It is best illustrated by the party’s respective stands on illegal immigration—which hurts working people the most while benefiting major corporations—which is usually ignored or downplayed by the liberal corporate media that tries to cast the election as one between fascism and democracy.

Trump has a record

The second reason is that it is unpersuasive because Trump was already president. Whatever you may think of his administration, it didn’t round up opponents or prosecute them, or in any way validate the claims about him being a threat to democracy. He was himself undermined by an undemocratic conspiracy/hoax about collusion with Russia for which the Democrats and corporate media outlets such as CNN and hosts like Jake Tapper were never held accountable.

By contrast, in the last four years, the fidelity of the Biden-Harris administration and its allies to democratic principles has been called into question. They have engaged in banana republic tactics in which they have done everything they could to bankrupt and imprison their leading political opponent. They also colluded with Silicon Valley oligarchs and social-media platforms to suppress dissenting views about policies to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues as the Twitter files—opened to the public after Elon Musk purchased the platform—revealed. And Attorney General Merrick Garland treated parents who protested the imposition of Marxist woke teachings by local school boards as “domestic terrorists.”

Third, the attempt to portray the Trump Madison Square Garden rally as reminiscent of 1930s Nazism is simply unsustainable.

What happened at the Garden

According to witnesses, no neo-Nazi speakers were among the huge throngs inside and outside the Garden. Thus, to assume it was like the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., is simply a slander of people who are, whether you agree with them or not, Trump supporters. The claim that other speakers were just as bad as the comedian seems to be based not so much on worries about hate speech but an assumption that all those who dissent from liberal orthodoxy are not merely wrong but racist.

The fact that many Jews were there—waving Israeli flags and being embraced by their fellow Trump supporters—also undermines the “Nazi” smear.

Moreover, the accusation was ahistorical.

For a century, the Garden has been New York’s largest indoor venue. It has hosted rallies and events for every political faction and cause imaginable. That’s especially true in the pre-World War II era before the advent of television, when mass rallies served as an essential way to influence public opinion. While the Nazis rented it for their despicable cause, so did Democrats and Republicans.

Far more memorable than the Nazi event were those held by the Jewish community to rally support for Zionism in that era. Among the most historically important of such gatherings were those sponsored by those Jews seeking to bring attention to the cause of rescue of European Jewry during the Holocaust. Two sold-out performances of a pageant called “We Will Never Die” (written by famed author/Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht) at the Garden helped galvanize efforts to force the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to a belated effort to save Jews during the Shoah.

Yet according to Democrats, the only thing that ever happened at the Garden prior to the Trump rally was one held by Nazis, thus also erasing decades of basketball and hockey games, boxing matches and 150  Billy Joel concerts. While that might seem right to regular readers of The New York Times, it makes sense to virtually no one else.

Inappropriate analogies

The fourth reason is something that most Jews—liberals and conservatives, Republicans as well as Democrats—once held as a matter of principle. Inappropriate Holocaust analogies are never to be tolerated.

To refute the claim that Trump and his voters are fascists or Nazis doesn’t serve as an argument for anyone to vote for him.

Yet liberal Jews who have prioritized their partisan interests over those of their community, have joined in the “Nazi” mudslinging. They have provided a permission slip for the sort of promiscuous use of Nazi analogies that ought not to be tolerated because they cheapen the memory of the Shoah and often ignore real contemporary threats to Jewish life. Those who never stop talking about Charlottesville and the myth that Trump called the neo-Nazis “very fine people” often don’t seem to notice that hundreds, if not thousands, of Charlottesville-like antisemitic rallies have taken place in America since Oct. 7, 2023, sponsored by the political left that Harris is, with difficulty, still trying to include in her electoral coalition.

Antithetical to democracy

Last and probably most important, this kind of deliberate polarization of the electorate is antithetical to democracy.

Democracy is about more than just voting. It means being willing to accept those results and be able to treat political opponents as wrong on policy but ultimately well-meaning.

Indeed, there is a lot of blame to go around for the breakdown of American democratic culture.

After Trump won in 2016, he was labeled an “illegitimate president” and subjected to conspiracy theories and harassment based on lies that are still believed in certain precincts of the left. Rather than act as a loyal opposition to him, Democrats and their media cheering section chose to behave as a “resistance.”

The reaction of many Trump supporters after the 2020 election, in which he lost to Joe Biden, showed that they were willing to play the same game. Though there was good reason—such as the suppression of damning stories about Biden family corruption in the last weeks of the campaign by Internet moguls and the mainstream press, as well as the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic—to say that the election wasn’t entirely fair, there was no excuse for the Capitol riot or Trump’s erratic behavior during that period.

Four years later, the willingness of Democrats to label their opponents as fascists and/or Nazis who should be treated as beyond the pale is a sign that we have gone a step further down the road towards the crackup of our system.

Suffice it to say that once you start using those labels, just about anything, including violence and/or assassination, becomes imaginable and even justifiable. And it begs the question of what Democrats will do if they lose to a candidate and a party that they continue to insist will inaugurate a new Third Reich or something like it.

It’s no good to issue empty calls for unity or a lowering of the temperature of discourse while employing Nazis analogies about your foes. It further divides an already fractured society and possibly sets in motion events after the election with unknowable consequences.

As much as some on the left seem to relish dystopian fantasies about a potential “Civil War” with Trump supporters (as a popular movie along those lines that came out in the spring of 2024 was called), my sense is that the vast majority of Americans want no part of such ideas. Whether they support Trump or Kamala Harris, only extremists (who seem omnipresent on the Internet) are interested in the politics of rage. Most of us would prefer to live in peace with our colleagues and neighbors, even if we disagree about the election and much else. That’s an important point to remember in the coming weeks, no matter which candidate you support.