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Although experts agree that the current Literally Hitler frenzy is about getting progressives to the polls, our Democratic friends have been playing the Hitler card in every presidential election since 1948, when the headline at the New York Times screamed:

PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL

That was a speech President Truman delivered in Chicago on October 25, 1948. I guess it must have been a close race. Fast forward 76 years and the Democratic Party is reprising the same line, in another close race for the presidency.

Obviously, the Nazi card makes sense because, back in the Age of Mass Media, we were all taught that Adolf Hitler was the worst thing since John Milton dispatched Satan in Paradise Lost:

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition;

Hitler = Satan. Get it? Mind you, back in 1933 all the best people were either socialists or fascists. The FDR National Recovery Act copied the corporatising model of Italian Fascism.

But that was then; this is now, peasant.

Of course, it’s odd that our liberal friends — who don’t believe in God and the Devil, nor in Heaven and Hell — would make politics into a religious affair. But I don’t claim to understand the sophisticated complexity of the knowledge and faith of our betters.

All I know is that when your political movement is falling apart it is never because you have bad ideas and a bad candidate and you have wrecked the economy with your spending and your debt and your regulation. Not at all. It’s all because the other guy is evil. Clearly Donald Trump carries the Mark of Satan.

Here is how we mark evil in the modern world.

  • If you don’t fall into line on DEI you are a racist.
  • If you don’t fall into line on feminism and abortion, you are a sexist.
  • If you don’t fall into line on LGBT rights you are a homophobe.

And if you are a feminist who doesn’t go with men in the women’s bathroom you, J.K. Rowling, are a trans-exclusive radical feminist.

Now, I believe that instead of cowering in fright from liberal pejoratives, we need to fight back, as in: “So’s your father.” However, I believe that insults only work against men. If it’s a woman, you need to say: “I can’t believe you said that.”

If insults and complaints are not your thing, there is the deep philosophical answer to the Literally Hitler canard. You can reply:

“Of course. But if college president Woodrow Wilson hadn’t sent the doughboys to France, and if the Treaty of Versailles hadn’t imposed reparations on the Germans and the Germans in the 1920s hadn’t already developed a welfare state and resorted to inflation to keep the checks coming, and  if the Fed hadn’t botched the Crash of 1929 by letting thousands of banks fail all over the world, why then we would never have had a Hitler and youse guys would have had to blame your regime failures on some other monster.”

And don’t forget to add, just for fun: “It seems to me that every disaster in the world these days starts with some clueless college administrator.”

Here’s what we know. With the rise of the internet the old Age of Mass Media when the rulers curated the news and the history is disintegrating.

Now we have the Age of Talk-Back, when nobodies can use the internet to push narratives, stories, histories, even conspiracy theories that challenge the regime Narrative.

There are “tells” all over the place about this. For instance, if you go to Google’s Ngram, you find that “fact-check” didn’t exist before 1984, and didn’t really take off until 2000, the year that the Internet really took off.

Then there are the cast-offs of Mass Media like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson and Bari Weiss thriving in the true network of the internet and breaking out of the Overton Window.

Then there is Trump. In The Revolt of the Public, first published in 2014, Martin Gurri prophesied what he called the Fifth Wave, the new world after the end of “the industrial I-talk-you-listen mode of information.” He called it a “revolution in the relationship between the public and authority.” The public used to be “a sheep in need of a shepherd.” Authority was infallible institutions, from government to corporations to mass media to performing arts. But now the public had become an actor, and the authority was losing its authority.

In the second edition published in 2018, post Trump, Gurri noted that the elite of the Mass Media Age experienced the new world as “a ‘worldwide crisis’ driven by ‘illiberalism’ and ‘populism.’” Gurri now writes for Bari Weiss’s the Free Press.

There’s only one way to describe this dreadful world: Literally Hitler.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Public Domain