I'M GOING TO TAKE TIME out to disagree with two people I greatly admire.
Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart each took time on their respective programs to reprimand Democratic Representative Steve Cohen for a speech he gave on the House floor Tuesday night.
Both Maddow and Stewart are "reality-based" people.
Each of them, in their own way, fights a noble battle for reason, civility, and small-t truth in public discourse.
So I was at first surprised, and then intrigued, when they both exhibited a sort of knee-jerk response to Cohen's remarks.
This is what Cohen said:
They say it's a "government takeover of health care"—a Big Lie: just like Goebbels.
You say it enough—you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie—and eventually, people believe it.
Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing.The Germans said enough about the Jews, and the people believed it, and you had the Holocaust.
You tell a lie over and over again.
And we've heard on this floor: "government takeover of health care."
Stewart responded, in part, by saying:
You may be right.
Republicans may be lying about health care reform. But if your point is to say that they're lying, why do you have to go Nazi on them?
You know there's already a perfectly good word for liars: liars.
He, of course, said it funnier—but those are his words.
Maddow's most revealing remark was:
Nothing is just like Goebbels.
Nothing is like the Nazis.
Nazi Germany is not available for analogies.
I would very much like to know where these two people learned that comparisons to Nazi Germany are always and irrevocably taboo.
I can tell you where I came close to learning it—when a college professor walked out of a class in graduate school because a student made such a comparison in a discussion.
But neither that kind of dramatic reaction, nor the reactions that Maddow and Stewart had on the air this week, makes a position true.
There are several separate issues tangled here, so bear with me while I get rid of the relatively unimportant ones, and find my way to the center of the matter:
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Is it generally a good thing to call someone a Nazi, particularly if they aren't?
No.
Putting a Hitler mustache on George W. Bush or Barack Obama lies somewhere between childishness and seriously objectionable political rhetoric. -
Was Nazi Germany an astounding low point, morally, in modern history—far worse, taken as a whole, than anything that is remotely going on in America today?
Absolutely.
In case you're wondering, the only reason I didn't use the word "evil" in the above description has to do with the fact that some people assume that word must have supernatural overtones, a question I'll address in a moment. -
Did Representative Cohen in fact do what Stewart, Maddow, and a whole lot of other people accused him of—say that the Republicans either were or were like Nazi's.
No.
He didn't.
And I'm not just nit-picking here.
What he said was that their use of a particular political technique was "just like" the person who is most famous for perfecting that very same technique.
The use of the big lie—the repetition of a false idea, over and over, in order to get people to believe it in spite of any facts to the contrary—is widely known to have been consciously perfected by Goebbels as a political tactic.
He is the paradigmatic case.
This was not a case of smear-tactics or false equivocation.
Cohen didn't say, "You guys are just like the Nazi's."
He made an analogy between their use of one particular political tactic and the paradigmatic historical case of the very same tactic—and then pointed out where that tactic had led before.
Which is to say, he drew a very tightly defined lesson from history.
There is a difference. - Was he right about the tactics they were using?
Yes.
I won't go into this in detail again, but there are about five possible levels of government involvement in health care.
Here they are, from left to right:-
Government takeover of healthcare—the socialist option, in which the government takes over, and runs, all the hospitals and clinics; all doctors and nurses work for the government, etc.
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A mixed system—where people have a choice between doctors who work for the government and private doctors. Government hasn't taken over health care in this scenario, it simply provides an alternative system which people can choose.
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A single-payer plan—in which healthcare is completely private, but is paid for by the government (Medicare for Everyone).
- The Democratic health care reform—in which some regulations and aid are put in place to protect consumers and encourage private insurance companies and private doctors and hospitals to work better as a free market.
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The old status quo—in which insurance companies ripped people off, many couldn't afford care, and many others were constantly worried about losing it.
Republicans have been consistently doing their best to convince the public that Democrats passed number one above, when they know full well that that is not the case, and they have been consistently saying that it will kill jobs when they know it won't do that either.
They have been doing that by repeating these lies over and over for political reasons—a tactic famously perfected by someone whose name begins with a "G".
They have repeated lies about a government takeover, about job losses, about death panels, about virtually every aspect of health care reform.
Whatever else you think of Cohen's remarks, you can't claim he was inaccurate. -
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So, why is it that his remarks—which were true, pertinent, reasonable, and aimed at a tactic, not a person—why are those remarks taboo?
The answer to this question lies at the heart of the matter.
Both Maddow and Stewart are convinced that any analogy to Nazi Germany is completely taboo because they share a kind of superstitious attitude toward the Third Reich with many other American intellectuals.
We have been taught to believe that the Nazis were not only wrong, dangerous, and evil on a scale that has not been seen elsewhere in recent history, but that they were Evil with a capital "E"—in an at least quasi-supernatural way.
We have put them on a pedestal: even if it's a pedestal of evil.
This is a mistake.
Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the gang were evil, but it was human evil—evil of the sort that we ourselves could fall prey to—not some supernatural, incomparable, superhuman form of evil which can never be repeated.
Like other great human evils, the particular evil of the Nazis:
- the racism,
- the willingness to lie to oneself and others,
- the authoritarianism,
- the use of scapegoats,
- the constant appeal to nationalism as a method to hide what they were really doing,
- the constant appeals to anger and fear, and
- the threat of violence if they didn't get their way...
...all this evil probably took its particularly virulent form because of the pathology of a few leaders.
But it could not have created the colossal damage it did create without the cooperation of thousands of ordinary humans who had been convinced that the ends justified the lies.
The evil of that chapter in history is the same, human, evil which we all can fall prey to, any day of our lives.
It was not supernatural, it was not unique, it was not in some way completely different from anything that has or could happen in America.
It could happen anywhere.
It could happen in the Democratic Party, in the Republican Party, or on cable television.
And one way to stop it from happening here, to nip it in the bud, is to call attention to the parallel when American politicians, pundits, and propagandists start using the same tactics the Nazi machine used.
This is not the same thing as calling them Nazis.
It is a matter of calling attention to the complete and utter discredit of the tactics in question, and of the natural setting and use of such tactics.
It is a matter of calling our attention to history, in order that history might not repeat itself.
Analogy is the fundamental tool of all human thought.
To say that any subject is unavailable for analogy is to censor any lessons we might learn from that subject.
I'm sorry Rachel, and Jon.
As much as I admire your work, you called this one wrong.
No subject is ever unavailable for analogy.
