3 thoughts on “Get More Smarter on Tuesday (July 21)”

1. Both sides don't do this:

   The National Review’s Kevin Williamson drove a steamroller over the line between argument and "Godwin's Law" in an article titled “Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism,” which became available on the conservative magazine’s website on Monday.

   It is not a model of clarity. It bounces between criticism of Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ trade policies and quotes from some of Sanders’ least thoughtful supporters. Yet, as the title of the article suggests, Williamson does come to a bold conclusion — Bernie Sanders is a literal Nazi who is leading a literal Nazi movement in the United States.

   Williamson lays this thesis out in one paragraph:

   In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics. The incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes holding that the current economic woes of the United States are the result of scheming foreigners, especially the wicked Chinese, “stealing our jobs” and victimizing his class allies is nothing more than an updated version of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “yellow peril” rhetoric, and though the kaiser had a more poetical imagination — he said he had a vision of the Buddha riding a dragon across Europe, laying waste to all — Bernie’s take is substantially similar. He describes the normalization of trade relations with China as “catastrophic” — Sanders and Jesse Helms both voted against the Clinton-backed China-trade legislation — and heaps scorn on every other trade-liberalization pact. That economic interactions with foreigners are inherently hurtful and exploitative is central to his view of how the world works.

   There are a number of oddities that can be noted in this paragraph. Kaiser Wilhelm II, for example, abdicated the throne in 1918 — one year before Adolf Hitler joined the Nazi Party and seven years before the publication of Mein Kampf. So it is not at all clear why Williamson brings up the World War I-era leader in a paragraph arguing that Sanders embraces the poisonous ideology that drove much of World War II.

   The crux of Williamson’s paragraph laying out his Sanders-is-a-modern-day-Hitler theory, however, appears to be that Sanders’ opposition to open trade relations with China marks him as an adherent to the philosophy of government that murdered six million Jews and millions of others that the Nazi regime deemed undesirable. Williamson leads up to this point by noting that many of Sanders’s supporters describe the senator (as Sanders also describes himself) as a socialist. And Sanders, Williamson claims, is also a nationalist. Therefore, in Williamson’s calculation, Sanders is a “national-socialist.”

   Both sides don't criticize each other in the same way or with the same level of rhetoric, nor is it done by those with the most visibility and power and audience on each side. Only one side does it with the level of hate and vitriol and ignorance we see in this article and that is the Republican/Conservative/Tea Party side.

   When our side whines about it without noting this truth, they let the other side cloud the issues for everyone. That's not ignorant. That's stupid.

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   1. What a disgusting and cynical manipulation of the words nationalism and socialism that also happen to have been appropriated by the Nazis as the name of their party. Truly silly exercise in semantic gymnastics. It's the stupidest thing I've a ever read.

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   2. Good job, Zap. The right wing is noticing that Bernie Sanders is pulling bigger crowds than their candidates, even accounting for Donald Trump's bizarro math.  They are pushing back in the tried and true ways – with ugly name calling, fake story-generating, and "divide and conquer" tactics aimed at Bernie's supporters.

      I wonder if the current crop of persistent hecklers at Sanders events are paid. I've noticed some trolling of his websites, by people who say things like, "[The audience] is all white – what is this, a KKK rally?" The real "Black Lives Matter" people are posting Bernie's videos on their Facebook page, and talking about disproportionate police violence coming down on people of color.

      Apparently, the approved conservative talking point is to equate socialism with Naziism.  It shows complete ignorance of history -nobody who lived through WWII has any doubt that Bernie Sander's democratic socialism is no kin to Hitler's National Socialism.  But for very low information voters, just throwing the S word out there is all that's required. Klingenschmitt, of course, is promoting this "Socialism = Naziism" meme, too. Pisses me off. 

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