Same Biscuits, Different Tin
As I noted in the first blog post in the current series, D'Souza has been peddling his nonsense about the current-day Democratic Party bearing responsibility for the sins of its past iterations. In the fourth chapter of The Big Lie, all D'Souza really does is extend his false equivalence of the Democrats with racism to fascism generally and National Socialist specifically.
I recommended some key points to bear in mind during this discussion, which bear repeating here:
- Would anyone characterize the white supremacist Democratic Party from Jackson to George Wallace as progressive? Why or why not?
- Did the Confederate States favor a strong centralized government?
- Were the Southern Democrats socialists or syndicalists?
D'Souza begins the argument here by definition the idea of Lebensraum as found in National Socialism and then comparing it to the Indian removal policies of President Andrew Jackson. "[T]he Left loves to depict Hitler as a right-winger," he writes, "but notice here how he allies himself completely with the pro-slavery and Indian removal policies of the Democratic Party. Hitler would be far more at home with [Jackson] or Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun than [with] Lincoln."[1]
On the matters of racial prejudice and the potential benefits of ethnic cleansing, there's nothing controversial about this statement. However, the fact that Southern Democrats, on the one hand, and Nazis, on the other, shared certain qualities does not make them equivalent. But what were the philosophies of government of Jackon, Calhoun, Lincoln, and Hitler? Jackson and Calhoun were both pro-states' rights. Jackson famously opposed the creation of a national bank. Calhoun was known for his support of nullification, i.e., rejection of federal law by individual states.
Lincoln, the first Republican president, believed in a strong federal government – strong enough literally to use force to prevent the secession of individual states. Hitler (obviously) believed in a strong central government. Note that this does not mean that Lincoln was therefore a Nazi. It merely means that the two men preferred strong centralized government.
D'Souza seems to want to seize on a single facet of National Socialism, find it elsewhere, and then proclaim that the philosophy found "elsewhere" is the equivalent of NS. It's really a form of genetic fallacy, laid even more bare by the fact that D'Souza refuses to apply the large government comparison or, indeed, even acknowledge that Lincoln-era Republicans favored big government.
D'Souza spends several pages detailing the crimes against humanity enumerated by Jackson and his army during the Indian removal and Trail of Tears before concluding, "This, then, is the genocide perpetrated by Andrew Jackson and his progressive Democratic successors."[2] There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that the perpetrators in this case were Democrats; however, is it really correct to refer to them as progressives?
Remember that, among the American presidents we consider to have been progressive, we include Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. Wilson was famously racist (as noted by D'Souza elsewhere in this book), but Roosevelt famous hosted Booker T. Washington at the White House, which, for its time, was remarkably open-minded. Is Roosevelt comparable to Jackson in his views on race? Is he comparable to Hitler? Apparently not, since D'Souza references this very meeting in his book.[3]
Redefining "Progressive"
D'Souza closes the chapter with a comparison of slave plantations and Nazi concentration camps that is actually well researched and argued, although it does little to advance his argument. He turns in the next chapter to demonstrating how American racism (as practiced by Democrats) influenced Nazi racist policies. Among the American racist policies that D'Souza mentions is the 1924 Immigration Act, although interestingly, D'Souza does not mention that this law was signed by a Republican president, Calvin Coolidge. Moreover, the legislators who sponsored the act, Albert Johnson and David Reed, were also Republicans.
Again, this says nothing about racism and the Republican Party. Rather, D'Souza says that it was progressives who passed the law, not acknowledging that the act received broad bipartisan support. I.e., the act says more about racial policies in America in the 1920s than about either party.
Humorously, D'Souza tells his reader that he did not know that the American (Democratic) racism had influenced Nazi racism, only that the one had preceded the other. Now, of course, he knows differently. In making this statement, he commits himself to the post hoc fallacy that follows. Also amusingly, he attacks historian James Whitman for purportedly denying the Democrat/progressive influence on the Nazis but suggesting that Trump and his administration, in embracing voter ID laws, might be attempting to roll back voter protections, which were at the heart of Jim Crow. The argument D'Souza employs here amounts to refusal to accept his personal definition of "progressive" is akin to lying.
In turning now to Nazi Germany, D'Souza sets out two questions: 1) Was Nazi anti-Semitism left wing or right wing; and 2) What caused Nazi anti-Semitism? Taking the second question first, it's worth noting that no small amount of ink has been spilled on this topic, and the answer is still essentially unsettled. There's no question that race was a core concept of National Socialism and that a racial hierarchy existed according to their worldview. Within this view, Jews were actually not inferior so much as an anti-race – a race that actively sought to destroy other races, the "Aryans" most of all.
This is a crucially important point about Nazi anti-Semitism: Jews are objectionable definitionally. It matters not what they personally believe or don’t believe. This is why Hitler denounced both capitalism (primarily banking) and communism, both of which he identified with Jews, in Mein Kampf and other materials – not because of anything inherent in their content so much as that he saw them as obverses of the same coin with which the Jews sought to destroy the Aryan race.
It's also clear that this was not a matter of religion for the Nazis, which is why they did not exempt Jews who had converted to Christianity or who were atheists from anti-Semitic legislation. However, there is little question of a continuum in the history of anti-Semitism between religious anti-Semitism in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, not to mention in the teachings of Luther, and the later "racial" anti-Semitism that NS embodied.
What's truly curious is that D'Souza chooses to examine Götz Aly's writing on this topic, given Aly's long association with the political left. However, it becomes clear that he does so because Aly's thesis that the Nazis did not see Jews as inferior but as highly successful and thus a threat to the German people on a primarily economic basis. There's much to be said about this thesis, not the least of which it is, in my opinion, neither entirely false not true. However, after developing the topic of "Jewish" finance capitalism vs. "German/Aryan" productive capitalism, D'Souza proclaims, "It should be obvious from the argument above that, for Hitler as for others, anti-Semitism is to a large extent rooted in anticapitalism."[4]
This is an overstatement of the point, to say the least. It is 100% accurate to state that race, and thus anti-Semitism, was at the heart of National Socialism. However, it is very inaccurate to subsequently claim that anti-Marxism was not a nearly as important facet of NS. To suggest that Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in hostility to capitalism and ignore the pervasive trope in Nazi propaganda of Judeobolschewismus is to truly miss the point.
Instead of identifying anti-Marxism with NS, D'Souza instead attempts to link Marxism to anti-Semitism. This is admittedly not a quantum leap in some sense, although it's a curious tack to take in taking about anti-Semitism, Marx, and Nazis. To make his point, D'Souza chooses to excerpt Marx's "On the Jewish Question." Although it's difficult to imagine his reader does not know this fact, D'Souza does omit that Marx was Jewish himself, although it doesn't detract from the anti-Semitism of the essay, nor does it address the fact that Marx felt that, by being an atheist, he had effectively eliminated his own Jewishness.
To be continued.
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[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), 1561.
[2] Ibid., 1777.
[3] Ibid., 2250.
[4] Ibid., 2191.
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