Click here for the previous part of this series.
Racism vs Anti-Semitism
In continuing his characterization of American racism as the source of Nazi anti-Semitism, D'Souza writes, "I have to say in its outset that, in its sheer volume and vehemence, the racism of the Democrats and progressives outdistances not only Italian fascist racism, which was marginal, but also German anti-Semitism. Only the vile anti-Semitism of the Nazi era matches the racism of the Democrats."[1]
Putting aside the matter of conflating progressives and Southern Democrats (addressed earlier), the statement has some bit of truth to it – it's true that Italian fascist racism was mild, that pre-Nazi German anti-Semitism was mild, and that Southern racism was seriously voluminous – but at the same time, it belies a tremendous ignorance on D'Souza's part when comparing anti-black racism in the U.S. between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and Nazi anti-Semitism.
In some ways, Southern racism and Nazi anti-Semitism shared similarities. For instance, they both relied heavily on caricature and stereotyping, and they both had the belief of white supremacy at their roots. However, the goal of Nazi anti-Semitism was always the elimination of the Jews – either by their mass expulsion or their extermination; the technique was frankly less important than that they be gone.
In contrast, for most Southern whites, and certainly for the power establishment, elimination of Southern blacks was never the goal, for the simple reason that the elimination of African Americans would cause the economic collapse of the South due to a lost supply of extremely cheap labor. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's really not. D'Souza himself claims (rightly) that intent is an important component of determining whether genocide has occurred. The intent of Jim Crow, segregation, and all its attendant honors was never extermination of black people – it was what the sociology Michael Mann called "exemplary violence," i.e., violence designed to keep a people in line, rather than to erase them from the earth.
Please note that none of this is meant to excuse any aspect of racism against anyone or to suggest that one people's suffering is worse than others. The experience of African Americans and European Jews have some areas of overlap, but mostly they don't and aren't terribly comparable. D'Souza has decided to engage in a direct comparison, so I have to engage that comparison on the basis of the facts.
In taking issue with some scholars who have suggested that racism was more of an American problem and less of a problem of a particular party, D'Souza decides to compare the words of 19th and 20th century Democratic racists and the Founding Fathers. E.g., he quotes from Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and then rights, "Jefferson isn't even sure that blacks originally constituted a race" and only suspected – he did not know for sure – that black people were less intelligent than whites.
In addition, D'Souza adds, the Founders didn't sponsor government-enforced segregation or found the KKK – all that was 19th and 20th century Democrats. Except that D'Souza leaves out a pretty important distinction of many of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson included, that distinguished them undoubtedly as racists: They owned other human beings.
Much of D'Souza's commentary on Democratic racism that follows is unobjectionable, but he does pose an interesting question: "What does white supremacy offer that might convince white Southern voters to keep reelecting the Democrats?"[3] The answer, he suggests, is that white Southerners, e.g., fought in the Confederate Army despite not owning slaves because they wanted to maintain his superiority as a member of an "aristocracy of color."[4]
Does that seem like a convincing argument to force a man to put his life on the line? While we might argue that the average Southerner who did not own slaves or have an economic interest in its maintenance was nevertheless racist in his/her attitudes, we have to also consider factors such as conscription, patriotism, etc. D'Souza's explanation here is overly simplistic.
D'Souza last point of comparison in the chapter is between the SA and the KKK. D'Souza suggests that, around 1890, the KKK waned in its power due to the withdrawal of patronage from the Democratic Party on the basis of the newly enacted black codes that provided a legal framework for Jim Crow. However, D'Souza ignores that the KKK had its largest membership in its history after World War I.
D'Souza further suggests that a key similarity between Southern Democrats and the Nazis is that they both suppressed their terrorist wings – respectively, the KKK and SA – once their political goals had been established. As just noted, the KKK actually expanded after this point in the U.S. Regarding the SA, D'Souza uses Reichskristallnacht as the touchpoint for his comparison.
Oddly, D'Souza points out that the Röhm putsch of 1934 was designed to eliminate the SA as a violent organization, even though Kristallnacht was four years later. This is an excruciatingly avoidable timeline errors on his part. In addition, D'Souza ignores that the Nazis regularly employed public violence against Jews during the war to accomplish some of their dirty work.
The P Word
In the next chapter, D'Souza turns to the topic of eugenics, as evidenced by his quotation from the founder of Planned Parenthood and conservative bête noire Margaret Sanger. Amusing is his assessment that Hannah Arendt's phrase "banality of evil" refers to the evil act, rather than the evil person. Arendt's chief point, in fact, was that Adolf Eichmann, who ran the so-called Jewish desk within the Gestapo and was largely responsible for the mass deportations of Jews to death camps, was to all appearances an absolutely ordinary person and not the devil incarnate. Nevertheless, he committed tremendously evil acts.
Much of the first section of the chapter is dedicated to comparing the Holocaust to abortion generally and Josef Mengele to Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell specifically. This is frankly far less interesting than the comparisons that follow: between Southern plantation slavery and concentration camps run by Nazi Germany, in which D'Souza extends the plantation metaphor to the African-American ghetto of today; and between early 20th century American eugenics and Nazi euthanasia.
In this latter comparison, D'Souza finally begins to contextualize the word "progressive" a bit and, notably, claims that Theodore Roosevelt "only became an ardent progressive when he quit the Republic Party, after two terms as president."[5] Still, D'Souza says, this was "soft" progressivism vs. Woodrow Wilson's (i.e., a Democrat's) "hard" progressivism. "So," he continues, "I am not indicting all progressives, only left-wing progressives who are the political and spiritual ancestors of the ones we have now."[6]
There's a lot to unpack in these claims. First, there was a president between Roosevelt and Wilson – Taft. Notably, Taft was more conservative than Roosevelt. So now, after pages and pages of banging on about how terrible progressives are, D'Souza has decided, seven chapters in, to redefine his term and separate progressive from left wing – precisely because not doing so would require him to denounce two Republican presidents nearly universally recognized as being progressives.
Second, D'Souza is not incorrect in comparing left-wing progressives of a hundred years ago to those of today as "ancestors." However, this assertion undermines his previous assertion that the racist KKK and Southern Democrats were the ancestors of the contemporary progressives. Does it seem likely that both could be true?
Here, D'Souza turns to a short history of American eugenics, which he ties to the 1924 Immigration Act (see previous blog entry on) and the institution of laws barring interracial marriage. Although it's true that eugenics was a widely embraced cause by progressives, the barring of interracial marriage and, as argued above, the 1924 Immigrant Act were conservative and, in the latter case, Republican endeavors.
A history of the international eugenics movement, of which the American experience was a part, is beyond the scope of this review. There is one point worth making, however: When D'Souza cites Hitler from Mein Kampf on the purpose of marriage being procreation and not love, i.e., "the increase and preservation of the species and the race." D'Souza says that traditionalists would never support that viewpoint, but is that really true?
To answer, I'd direct D'Souza to the catechism of his own Catholic Church: "The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring."[7]
D'Souza goes on to claim that the historian Richard Hofstadter was largely responsible for associating Social Darwinism with the right and laissez-faire via Spencer and William Sumner. Why not Hayek and Adam Smith?, D'Souza protests. Sumner, he says, was "virtually unique" in connecting capitalism to Social Darwinism, but of course, he wasn't – Spencer had written the same, and he was far more influential than D'Souza gives him credit for – not to mention being a mainstay of classical liberalism.
He concludes the chapter by linking eugenics back to abortion and, by extension, Stephen Douglas's campaign slogan of "Choice" to the pro-choice movement of today. If that seems like a compelling argument, I'd like to show you a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
To be continued
[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), 2241.
[2] Ibid., 2271.
[3] Ibid., 2300.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 2652.
[6] Ibid., 2571.
[7] Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Two, Section Two, Chapter Three, Article 7, paragraph 1601, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c3a7.htm
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