Playing the Hitler Card

by John L. Olsen

When anyone criticizes Donald Trump by a reference to Adolf Hitler, a common response is amused contempt. “Everybody does that and it’s silly” is a typical reply. This is arguably forgivable, but deeply unfortunate – because when the subject is Donald Trump or his expressed intentions, “playing the Hitler card” is entirely legitimate. His oft-repeated promise to “get retribution” upon those who have opposed him after he is re-elected President, characterizing the Press as an “enemy of the people”, and, certainly, declaring that he will be a dictator “on Day One” (of his new Administration) are distinguishable from Hitlerian comments only by being expressed in English. To draw parallels between the political milieu in Germany in the early 1930s and that in America today is not only valid; it’s practically obligatory for clarifying and contextualizing the language and expressed intentions of Donald Trump – and those who have declared allegiance to him. ?And that is sorely needed. Why?

Because American Democracy is on life support. The values, principles, and beliefs that animated a group of British colonists to construct a new nation, built upon a political and administrative system unique in human history, are, and have been for some years, under attack - not from an enemy nation, but from within - from American citizens – in what is, in a very real sense, a civil war.

Who are these assailants? I believe that they are mostly Americans who have discarded all allegiance to the American Constitution and the Rule of Law, replaced by fealty to an inexplicably charismatic demagogue who tells them what they want to hear. Many of them, most perhaps, are affiliated in some sense with the movement called “MAGA – Make America Great Again”, the brainchild of Trump (or one of his “brain trust”). Some are extremist Evangelical Christians. Many of them resent immigrants, especially Spanish-speaking ones. Most feel cheated of recent American economic prosperity. And all of them reek of perceived victimhood, felt alienation, resentment on many levels, and a galloping hostility to much of what used to be American Values.

But what has all this to do with the “Hitler card”? We’re getting to that. It’s a matter of our cultural, intellectual, and emotional climate. A very similar climate of simmering resentment and asserted alienation fueled, in large part, the emergence and growth of National Socialism. ?And it was wrapped in a hyper-nationalist, jingoistic intolerance not materially different from that proclaimed by the speakers at MAGA rallies – and from the rabble-rousing rhetoric of Donald Trump. One of the most serious – and, to me, greatly worrying – aspects of this intensifying “civil war” is that it has enlisted the efforts of a handful of Americans who swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, domestic and foreign” – members of the Congress of the United States. Is that notably different from how things transpired in 1930s Germany? No, it is not. The “Reichstag Fire Decree” and the so-called “Enabling Act” of 1933 were wrought by elected members of the German government – not all of whom were Nazis.

The ”National Socialist revolution” was not the doing of violent insurgents wielding armed force. It was the product of a few cynical, self-serving, and appallingly stupid actions by a very few German politicians, together with one aged, senescent President and his son, taking advantage of what the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher called “a political vacuum”. And if Donald Trump’s vision of America prevails, it will not be by violent revolution either. It will be the fruit of incredible political naivete, collusion by Congresspersons, the rabid desires of a few dozen American billionaires, and the wholesale refusal of mainstream America to fight for the values that Trump and his ilk publicly and repeatedly have resolved to replace.