Tag: Hitler

The trouble with necessary counterfactuals. Or, Hitler and Art School

Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna

I’ve become fascinated by a specific kind of counterfactual argument that is often made, but is constraining and damaging in deliberation. Let’s call it the “necessary counterfactual.” It’s structurally unstable, but people tend not to see that, and often find it compelling. And its weaknesses are hard to explain.

Just to be clear: I’m not arguing the counterfactuals are always bad—they’re inescapable in policy deliberations, whether personal or “political.” Any causal argument implies a counterfactual (if I say that you feel sick because you ate a party-size bag of knock-off chocolate-covered fried bananas, I’m implying that you wouldn’t feel sick if you hadn’t).

The problems arise when the connections are asserted and assumed to be so necessarily connected that all dissent or disagreement is delegitimated.

For instance: When confronted with an expansionist and aggressive leader (Hitler) decision makers (the French and British) chose appeasement. Appeasement didn’t work; therefore, it is obvious that maximum aggression would have worked. We are now in a similar situation (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq), so it is obvious that we must do what would have worked then, and engage in maximum aggression.

Here’s the structure of the logic:
In [Situation Z], policymakers adopted [Policy A], and [Policy A] went badly; therefore, the correct policy must have been [Not-A]. [Policy B] is not-A; therefore, it is obvious that [Policy B] would have worked. We are now in a situation similar to [Situation Z]; therefore, it is obvious that we must adopt [Policy B], since that would have worked the prior time.

The “logic” is something like this:

A –>B; therefore ~A –>~B.

(A led to B, therefore not-A leads to not-B.) Appeasement led to failure; therefore, not-appeasement would have led to success.

What makes the “logic” of this kind of argument so troubling is the degree to which it assumes necessary consequences and necessary implications—the way that it shuts down reasonable disagreement.

This kind of “logic” ignores several important points:

1) That A didn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that this not-A would have worked.

That sentence has a lot of negatives (which is probably why it’s hard for people to grasp). But my point is that this way of thinking assumes two false binaries that are falsely assumed to be necessarily connected.

There are plenty of events/policies other than maximum aggression that might have prevented Hitler’s coming to power, starting WWII, engaging in the multiple genocides: his getting into art school, von Hindenburg and von Papen refusing to work with him, the Reichstag growing a spine and refusing to pass the Enabling Act, anti-Nazi parties making a coalition, one of the assassination attempts working, a treaty that wasn’t as punitive as the Versailles Treaty, the US joining the League of Nations, economic policies that would have meant the Great Depression didn’t happen, Germany refusing to back Austria’s play in 1914, a different response on the part of the French in May of 1940, Napoleon III not taking the bait and declaring war in 1870…

2) Evidence isn’t proof.

Counterfactuals are generally supported by telling a story about what would have happened had the other course been taken. That maximum aggression would have worked with Hitler is argued through the telling of a compelling narrative. But that it’s compelling doesn’t mean it was likely, let alone guaranteed.

One narrative is that a military response to Hitler’s remilitarizing the Rhineland would have led to a military coup that would have removed Hitler from power. But the only evidence that a coup was even considered are things said in self-serving and jaw-droppingly dishonest post-war memoirs on the part of Nazis military leaders, who lied about everything else (such as the Wehrmacht’s participation in genocide), so why suddenly decide they’re being honest about that coup plot? Particularly since there is no other supporting evidence. A military response, which Hitler thought was likely, wouldn’t have stopped him from regaining that territory (they were going to get it anyway in a few years), and it wouldn’t have persuaded him to change his mind about his long-term plans. What might have made a difference would have been a more successful response to the Nazi invasion of France, and there are counterfactuals about what would have been better responses, but even a compelling counterfactual is still a counterfactual.

3) Assuming best case counterfactual scenarios isn’t even evidence.

Richard Ned Lebow makes this point quite neatly in Forbidden Fruit. Counterfactual narratives often make one major change, and then assume that there are necessary consequences of that change, all of which are the consequences most favorable to the argument. So, a military response to Hitler’s actions in the Rhineland would have successfully deterred him, there would have been a coup, it would have been successful (a very weak link in the chain of events), the Nazi military leaders would have put in place a non-aggressive, non-expansionist, and pacific government that would not have tried to refight the Great War.

There are other stories one might tell that are also plausible: it might not have deterred him from invading Czechoslovakia; it might have increased anti-war sentiment in France and Britain; there probably wouldn’t have been a coup; it was very unlikely that a coup would have been successful; Nazis would still have been Nazis.

4) Policies have to be politically available.

Many scholars argue that going to war over the Rhineland was not politically possible for France or Germany. It would have seemed to be a repeat of the Great War, which was (in the 20s and 30s) often narrated as a massive overreaction to a minor incident with no real importance.

5) That A didn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a not-A that would have worked, one which must be our current choice.

I’m not making some argument about history being determined, or non-contingent; I’m making a point about argument, but I’ll get to that. I’m saying that history is contingent and options are contextual. For instance, there are counterfactuals that I’m persuaded would have prevented WWII, at least in terms of the form it took. I’ll mention two: if Hitler had gotten into art school; if the Franco-Prussian War hadn’t happened.

If we follow the logic of the necessary counterfactual, then the implication of the first is that we should let everyone into art school. Or maybe just all Nazis? Or something.

What are the policy implications of the second counterfactual? Don’t go to war against Bismarck? That’s probably pretty good advice, but unlikely to be useful, and certainly not something that might have helped people trying to figure out what to do about Hitler. Or Vietnam.

So, counterfactuals about the past, even very plausible ones, don’t necessarily determine our current policy choices. We’re not in the realm of obviously correct decisions, but in a world of deliberation.

The problem with necessary counterfactuals is not that they’re counterfactual, but that they’re presented as necessary at every step—this is necessarily what would have happened, and that narrative makes it clear what is necessary for us to do. My point is about how they shut down potentially useful disagreement. My crank theory is that’s exactly why people are drawn to them—they don’t actually reduce uncertainty, but they make us feel less uncertain about the past, present, and future. The narrative about obvious choices is comfortable, since it ends the need to acknowledge uncertainty and risk.

And, obviously, I’m not just talking about Vietnam. Or Hitler. There are a lot of discussions right now about what went wrong such that we have a political party that simply refuses to hold its members accountable, that is openly pursuing competitive authoritarianism and abandoning democracy, and the question is: what should opponents of authoritarianism do now? And that question means thinking about how we got here—it involves counterfactuals. And it should. But what won’t help is swearing fealty to a necessary counterfactual. I mean, it might help people feel less uncertain, but it won’t help figure out our various options.








What should opponents of authoritarianism do?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]

People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:

DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.

Things that, as far as I know, have worked in the past under similar circumstances:
-have a big tent, make alliances, work together on the shared goal of saving democracy, make some compromises if necessary.
-try to crack the hardshell of the informational bubble that Trump supporters are in. Just try getting the information in front of them. If you have Trump supporters in your social media, post double-checked facts about Trump, ICE, and so on.
-make it personal; show how they’re supporting someone who is hurting people they love.
-you can try to point out that they’re rejecting Jesus, that they hold out-groups to much, much higher standards than they hold themselves or in-group members. (They know, and don’t care, but you can try.)
-you can try pointing out that they don’t really know what’s going on because they get their information from sources that misrepresent the situation. If you tell them something that they don’t want to hear, and they say it’s “fake news,” you can ask them if they get their information from a source that would tell them if it was true.
-support the groups who are filing the lawsuits.
-block walk, make phone calls, put up signs, subscribe to, and otherwise personally help opposition organizations and individuals, even if you disagree with them on many things.
If there are other things that you are aware have worked, do them (and tell others about them).

Here’s what, as far as I know, has never worked under these circumstances:
-violent protests;
-various versions of purifying the in-group (refusing to compromise, insisting on univocality or unanimity in terms of ideology, strategy, or policy), refusing to support anyone who isn’t fully in line with our policy agenda/rhetoric
-talking and thinking about policy disagreements in the pro-authoritarian “right/center/left” binary or continuum (a single axis)
-giving up

I’m open to persuasion about the specifics. But I’ll point out, if your response is that this post shows I’m a centrist/librul/whatev for making this argument, look again at the “what hasn’t worked” list.

Why Was Hitler Elected?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"


Despite the fact that invoking Hitler in arguments is so kneejerk that there’s even a meme about it, a surprising number of people misunderstand the situation. They misunderstand, for instance, that he was elected; he was even voted into dictatorship. So, why was he elected?

I want to focus on four factors that are commonly noted in scholarship but often absent from or misrepresented in popular invocations of Hitler: widespread resentment effectively mobilized by pro-Nazi rhetoric, an enclave-based media environment, authoritarian populism, agency by proxy/charismatic leadership.

I. Resentment

Resentment is often defined as a sense of grievance against a person, but grievances can be of various kinds, including motivating positive personal change or political action. Resentment is grievance drunk on jealousy. It’s common to distinguish jealousy from envy on the grounds that, while both involve being unhappy that someone has something we don’t, jealousy means wanting it taken from the other. If I envy someone’s nice shirt, I can solve that problem by buying one for myself; jealousy can only be satisfied if they lose that shirt, they are harmed for having the shirt, or the shirt is damaged. My jealousy can even be satisfied without my getting a shirt—as long as they lose theirs. Jealousy is zero-sum, but envy is not.

Resentment is a zero-sum hostility toward others whom I think look down on me. Although I feel victimized that they have something I don’t, I don’t necessarily want what they have. I do, however, want them to lose it; I want them crushed and humiliated for even having it. Resentment relies on a sense that others have things to which I am entitled, and they are not. In addition, resentment always has a little bit of unacknowledged shame.

Many Germans (most? all?) resented the Versailles Treaty, and they resented losing the Great War. They resented the accusation that they were responsible for the war, they resented that they lost a war they believed they were entitled to win, and they resented a treaty as punitive as the kind they were accustomed to impose on others.

Certainly, the Versailles Treaty was excessively punitive, but it was, oddly enough, fair—at least in the sense that it was an eye for an eye. Germans didn’t condemn equally punitive treaties they had imposed on others (e.g., the Treaty of Frankfurt or the 1918 Brest-Litvosk Treaty. They resented being treated as they felt entitled to treat others.

The war guilt clause was a particular point of resentment, and yet it was partially true. The notion that one nation and one nation only can cause a world war is implausible—few wars are monocausal—but certainly Germany held a large part of the responsibility. Yet Germans liked to see themselves as forced into a war they didn’t want—they were the real victims and completely blameless. Were the Germans actually truly blameless, I don’t think the Treaty of Versailles would have been as useful a tool for mobilizing resentment.

Sloppy pan-Germanism mixed with the even sloppier Social Darwinism promoted a narrative that victory always goes to the strongest, and that therefore whoever win deserved it. The German defeat in the Great War therefore was a massive blow to German ideology—if the best always win, and the winners are always the best, that loss was stuck in the craw. People who enjoyed Nazi rhetoric resented that they lost a war they felt entitled to win.

Important to Nazi mobilization of that resentment was continually reminding audiences of it—there are few (any?) Hitler speeches in which he didn’t remind his audience of the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, and of the way that other nations looked down on and victimized Germany.

Did everyone else really look down on Germany? The French probably did, but that’s just because they looked down on everyone. Some British and Americans did; some didn’t. But the Germans certainly looked down on everyone. So, like the resentment about punitive treaties, they weren’t on principle opposed to people looking down on others; they just resented when they thought they were being looked down on.

The Versailles Treaty didn’t actually end the fighting. Pogroms, forced emigration, violent clashes, and genocides raged through Eastern and Central Europe well after the war, causing a massive immigration crisis. And, as often happens, people resented the immigrants. They also resented liberals, intellectuals, Jews, and various other groups that they imagined looked down on them.

Resentment is an act of projection and imagination.

hitler smiling at a child


II. Enclave-based media environment

Weimar Germany had a lot of political parties (around forty, depending on how you count them), which can loosely be categorized as: Catholic, communist, conservative, fascist, liberal (in the European sense), and socialist. They all had their own media (mostly newspapers), and many of them were rabidly partisan in terms of coverage but without admitting to the partisan coverage. [The antebellum era in the US was much the same.]

The important consequence of this factionalized media landscape was that it was possible for a person to remain fully within an informational enclave: foundational narratives, myths, premises, and outright lies were continually repeated. Repetition is persuasive. Since factional media wouldn’t present criticism or even critics fairly (or at all), it was possible for someone to feel certain about various events and yet be completely wrong. Germany was not about to win the war when it capitulated.

Sometimes the narratives were specific (e.g.,The Protocols of the Elders of Zion documents the plot of international Jewry ), and sometimes about broader historical events, or history itself. One of the most important narratives was the shape-shifting “stab in the back” myth about the Great War. This myth said that Germany was just about to win the war, and would have, but the nation was stabbed in the back, and therefore had to accept a humiliating treaty. As Richard Evans has shown, just who stabbed the back, or when, or why, or even what back, varied considerably. Like a lot of myths, it was simultaneously detailed and inconsistent.

Another important narrative was a similarly specific and vague narrative about the course of history, as a survival of the fittest conflict undermined by liberal democracy. This narrative typically cast Jews as intractably incapable of patriotism, assimilation, or German identity. German exceptionalism denied the actual heterogeneity of

Of those six kinds of political parties, three were explicitly and actively hostile to democracy, either advocating a return to the monarchy (Catholic) or a new system entirely (fascist, communist). Some “conservatives” parties advocated a return to monarchy, some advocated some other kind of authoritarian government, and some at least seemed willing to accommodate democratic decision-making practices. Only the liberals and socialists actively supported democracy (communists wanted a Marxist-Leninist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas socialists agreed with Marxist critiques of unconstrained capitalism, but wanted reform via democratic processes; “liberals” believed in a free market and democratic processes of decision-making).

What’s important about this kind of media environment is that it undermines democratic practices because it enables the demonization or dismissal of anyone who significantly disagrees. Repetition is persuasive. If you are repeatedly told that socialists want to kick bunnies, and never hear from socialists what they actually advocate, then you’ll believe that socialists want to kick bunnies. That makes them people who shouldn’t be included in the decision-making process at all; it personalizes policy disagreements. Policy disagreements, rather than being opportunities for arguing about the ads/disads, costs, feasibility, and so on of our various policy options (even vehemently arguing) is a contest of groups.

Tl;dr If you only get your information from in-group sources, then chances are that you never hear the most reasonable arguments for out-group policies; therefore everyone who is not in-group will seem unreasonable. Not hearing the arguments leads to refusing to listen to the people.

Repetition coupled with isolation from reasonable counterarguments radicalizes.

Hitler looking at a map with generals


III. Authoritarian populism

One way to misunderstand how persuasion works is to imagine out-groups and their leaders as completely and obviously evil—by refusing to understand what some people find/found attractive about such leaders, we make ourselves feel more secure (“I would never have supported Hitler”), and thereby ignore that we might get talked into supporting someone like that.

Nazism is a kind of “authoritarian populism.” Populism is a political ideology that posits that politics is a conflict between two kinds of people: a real people whose concerns and beliefs are legitimate, moral, and true; a corrupt, out-of-touch, illegitimate elite who are parasitic on the real people. Populism is always anti-pluralist: there is only one real people, and they are in perfect agreement about everything. (Muller says populism is “a moralized form of antipluralism” 20).

Populism become authoritarian when the narrative that the real people have become so oppressed by the “elite” that they are in danger of extermination. At that point, there are no constraints on the behavior of populists or their leaders. This rejection of what are called “liberal norms” (not in the American sense of “liberal” but the political theory one) such as fairness, change from within, deliberation, transparent and consistent legal processes is the moment that a populist movement becomes authoritarian (and Machiavellian).

As Muller says, “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people” (Muller 3). Therefore, any election that populists lose is not legitimate, any election they win is, regardless of what strategies they’ve used to win. Violence on the part of the in-group is admirable and always justified, purely on the grounds that it is in-group violence. The in-group is held to lower moral standards while claiming the moral highground.

Authoritarian populism always has an intriguing mix of victimhood, heroism, strength, and whining. Somehow whining about how oppressed “we are” and what meany-meany-bo-beanies They are is seen as strength. And that is what much of Hitler’s rhetoric was—so very, very much whining.

And that is something else that authoritarian populism promises: a promise of never being held morally accountable, as long as you are a loyal (even fanatical) member of the in-group (the real people).

In authoritarian populism, the morality comes from group membership, and the values the group claims to have—values which might have literally nothing to do with whatever policies they enact or ways they behave.


IV. Charismatic leadership/agency by proxy

Authoritarian populism needs an authority to embody the real people. It’s fine if they’re actually elite (many people were impressed by Hitler’s wealth). Kenneth Burke talked about the relationship in terms of “identification”—they saw him as their kind of guy. They imagined a seamless connection with him. In charismatic leadership relationships, the followers attribute all sorts of characteristics to their leader (which the leader may or may not actually have): extraordinary health, almost superhuman endurance, universal genius, a Midas touch, infallible and instantaneous judgment, and a perfect understanding of what “normal” people like and want.

In general, people engage in intention/motive-based explanations for good behavior on the part of the in-group and bad behavior on the part of non in-group leaders and members, and situational explanations for good behavior on the part of the non in-group and bad behavior for the in-group.

So, if Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) give a cookie to a child (good behavior), then it shows that Hubert is good and generous (motive/intention), but Chester only did so because he was forced by circumstances (situational).

If Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) both steal a cookie from a child (bad behavior), then it was because Hubert didn’t see the child, the child shouldn’t have been eating the cookie, he had no choice (situational explanations), but Chester stealing the cookie was deliberate and because Chester is evil.

One sign, then, of a charismatic leadership relationship is whether the follower holds a leader to the same standards of behavior as non in-group leaders, or if they flip the intention/situation explanations in order to hold on to the narrative that the in-group is essentially good.

What we get from a charismatic leadership relationship is a fairly simple way of understanding good and bad—it reduces moral complexity and uncertainty. Since our group is essentially good, we are guaranteed moral certainty simply by being a loyal member. And that is what Hitler promised.

Because Hitler is like us, and really gets us, then we are powerful—we take pride in everything he does; we have agency by proxy.

But, because we identify with him, then our attachment to him means we will not listen to criticism of him—criticism of him is an attack on our goodness. Our support becomes non-falsifiable, and therefore outside the realm of a reasonable disagreement about him, his actions, or his policies.

Charismatic leadership is authoritarian. But oh so very, very pleasurable.



Sources:

There are still lots of arguments among scholars about Hitler, the Germans, and the Nazis, but nothing I’m saying here is either particularly controversial or something I’ve come up with on my own.

While it is a mistake to attribute magical qualities to Hitler’s rhetoric, and to attribute the various genocides and disasters to him personally (as though his personal magnetism was destroyed agency on the part of Germans), it is also a mistake to think the rhetoric was powerless. Germans elected him because they liked what he had to say.

There was a time when scholars were insistent that Hitler’s rhetoric wasn’t that great (an argument that Ryan Skinnell’s forthcoming book will show was an accusation made at the time, one that completely misses the rhetorical force of Hitler’s strategies), but that was partially a reaction to the immediate post-war deflecting of German responsibility for the war, the Holocaust, the various genocides (the argument was that Germans were overwhelmed by Hitler’s rhetoric, or secretly hated him—neither was true).

There are many excellent biographies of Hitler, the ones written after the opening of the records captured by the Soviets are the most useful. Kershaw’s writings are especially readable, but Volker Ullrich’s and Peter Longerich’s biographies have been able to take advantage of more recent research (If I were asked to recommend just one biography, it would be Longerich’s). Richard Evans’ three-volume study of Nazism (coming to power, in power, at war) is thorough and makes clear the enthusiastic participation of various other leaders.

Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction is a compelling and detailed analysis of the economy under the Nazis, and Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War shows the considerable support Nazis had throughout the war. There are a lot of books about the media and Hitler, but I think the best place to start is Despina Stratigakos’ Hitler at Home. Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished is a powerful discussion of the aftermath of the Great War.


Liberalism and appeasing Hitler

Prime Minister Chamberlain announcing "peace for our time"
From here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SetNFqcayeA

I’m going back through a really smart book about why Liberals (in the British sense) supported appeasement of Hitler and Germany, and came across this really good description of Liberalism:

“Liberalism postulated the rational and ‘progressive’ nature of the historical process. Besides success, it upheld pragmatism, tolerance and compromise as the principal political virtues. At the core of the liberal outlook stood the ‘idea of limits.’ It abhorred excess and extremism; it believed that ‘absolutist’ thought of any sort assured at least failure if not perdition. All problems and conflicts were seen as soluble with the application of reason; and reason, Liberals believed, ultimately did prevail. Reason, in fact, suffused all and was identified with reality.” (3)

UK Liberals don’t correlate exactly to the Democratic or Republican Party in the US–they’re closer to centrist Democrats, Libertarians, or libertarian-oriented Republicans. And the point that the Morris book makes is that Liberals supported appeasing Hitler for very different reasons from Tories (the British conservative party). Like the Tories, they largely sympathized with the Germans regarding the punitive Versailles Treaty, disliked the French, and underestimated Hitler, but they did so for different reasons, especially regarding that last point.

They argued that Hitler had outgrown Mein Kampf, and dismissed the racism of Nazi ideology because, as Morris says, they “refused to believe that a ‘civilised’ nation of 70 millions could subscribe to it, let alone base domestic and foreign policies upon it” (7). They argued, over and over, the Nazism was really about economic issues and problems:

“Nazism was seen as the German version of Fascism, a socio-economic ideology of bankrupt capitalism. It served, and was subscribed to by, a coalition of economic ‘losers’–industrial and financial barons intent upon preserving their profits and economic empires, the unemployed and Lumpenproletariat seeking security and work, an the lower middle classes desirous of retaining their assets now imperilled by big business and political instability. Thus perceived, Nazism was an ideology of class war. [….] race doctrine was ignored or regarded as mere camouflage designed to conceal the ‘real’ (economic) motivations of the regime and its backers. ” (10-11)

If politics is war, what kind of war?

Hitler looking at a map with generals

In May of 1943, Adolph Hitler had to face that the Nazis could no longer hold Sicily. Hitler, relunctantly and uncharacteristically, agreed to an evacuation of the Nazi troops from Sicily to the Italian mainland, but was told that the evacuation would be difficult because several of the ferries that might take the troops to the mainland had been destroyed. Hitler told his generals, “the decisive element is not the ferry, but the will” and “Where there is a will there is a ferry” (137). In another discussion with his generals in December of 1942 about the situation in the Stalingrad encirclement—100,000 troops were surrounded by Soviet forces and quickly starving and freezing to death—he was told that some of the troops were simply dropping dead of exhaustion. He deflected the question of whether there should be a fighting retreat (or even a set of strategic small retreats) to the question of medals. The connection seemed to be that soldiers were dying because they weren’t sufficiently motivated to continue living, something medals would help. He clearly believed that the will could conquer anything, from freezing to death to getting across a strait.

This belief, that the will could triumph over everything, meant that he fired anyone who didn’t seem to him to have sufficient will. This belief in the power of the will was a narrative: people of a certain kind (good people with sufficient will) can triumph over anything, including the lack of a ferry, or starvation and freezing temperatures. Hitler’s decision-making about war was always within that narrative.

Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means. If war is politics, then politics is war, and figures ranging from Mao Tse Tung to Steve Bannon have made exactly that argument. Of course, they don’t mean it is literally war, but that the stories we tell about politics are the same stories we tell about war. Many people have argued that we shouldn’t think of politics as war, and I don’t entirely disagree, but I have a different question: what kind of war? What story of war are we telling that we think is the story of politics?

Is the story about groups who are destined to go to war, who cannot possibly co-exist, or about groups who have conflicting material needs that might be negotiated? Is the story that our group has already is already under attack by an enemy determined on our extermination, and so we are in an extraordinary situation in which we are unconstrained by normal notions about moral behavior? Or, is the case that we are bargaining with another group about material goals, and threatening to go to war will enhance our bargaining situation, and so we have one narrative for the people bargaining (this is all a bluff), and another for the general public (we need to go to war)?

Not all wars are the same, not just in that they have different costs and causes, but they are very different kinds. There are limited wars, oriented toward very specific goals, or intended as one of the pressures brought to bear while bargaining. There are total wars, wars of extermination, preventive, pre-emptive, proxy. There are a lot of kinds of wars. So, if we are saying that politics is like war, whether we imagine war as limited and temporary violence or as extermination of the other matters tremendously.

Democracy is a method of government that can withstand passionate fighting among partisans, but when politics is seen as a war of extermination of all but one political position, then democracy is exterminated. This book is an attempt to persuade readers of that claim, but also to explain how and why it is that we move from seeing conflict and disagreement as beneficial to requiring extermination. That part of the argument is more complicated.

By “politics,” people usually mean the policies that are enacted by political figures, and the rhetoric we have about those policies. And, perhaps paradoxically, or perhaps not, the kind of political discourse—that is, rhetoric—we have about whether to go to war can help or hinder effective deliberation about war, whether and how to go to war, how to conduct it, whether to continue it. That is, if we see political discourse itself as war, then what kind of war we think it is (a war of extermination, bluffing, strategic) constrains or even prohibits effective political deliberation about whether we should go to war.

The argument I will make in this book is that how we think about discourse (which I’ll call rhetoric) and how we think about war are mutually inflecting. Take, for example, Hitler. Hitler thought about rhetoric as a kind of war—a war of extermination of opposition points of view that he would win through a combination of seduction, trickery, intimidation, jailing, shooting, sheer will, and success. That rhetoric worked tremendously well with his base, and reasonably well with the German public from 1933 until 1944. In other words, it worked as long as he was winning; it failed when he wasn’t. Equally important for the purposes of this book, that’s how he approached the deliberations with his generals about how to conduct the war. He bribed, lied to, intimidated, fired, and shot his generals until he had a loyal cadre who would support him completely—the same goal he had about Germans in general. He believed that politics and war should both be approached by having a clear vision of and fanatical commitment to in-group domination, as well as expulsion or extermination of all people not fanatically loyal to that vision.

And, because of those beliefs about belief, rhetoric, and war, he lost the war.

As an aside, I’ll mention that there are lots of other examples of leaders in both business and politics whose insistence on only listening to people with fanatical commitment to the vision led them to disaster, whether it’s the disaster of the USSR, or of Theranos.

We like to believe that evil people, and I think Hitler was evil, know that they are evil. But they don’t. Hitler thought he was on the side of Good. He sincerely believed that the world was facing an apocalyptic battle between Good (Aryans) and Evil (Jews and their stooges and tools). And, because he was on the side of Good, anything he did was good. That’s Machiavellianism—the means (even if they’re actions or policies we would normally condemn as immoral) are transmuted to morally good if our ends are good. But we all think our ends are good. Hitler’s weren’t, but he thought they were.

There is a long battle in western European philosophy grounded in what some (including me) would argue is a misreading of Plato: philosophy is the study of what is, and rhetoric is the study of what people can be persuaded is. Since Plato employed Aristotle to teach rhetoric in his Academy, I don’t think Plato was as dismissive of rhetoric as some philosophers would like to think. But, in any case, there is some justice to the characterization of rhetoric as the study of what and how people can come to believe that a particular way of seeing the world, a restricted range of our policy options, this representation of that group, what it means to be loyal—that is, how people come to believe. After all, we don’t go to war because of what the world is, but because of what we believe the world to be.

And we’re often wrong.

While we aren’t Hitler, we’re all people who engage in self-justification, self-servedness, short-term grasping, and in-group favoritism, and those tendencies don’t help us make good decisions. Those impulses constrain our abilities to listen to others, treat others fairly, imagine other experiences, reflect effectively on our own commitments, reason usefully about our policy options, consider unpleasant data, hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others. This book is about how and why we do that, especially when it comes to the question of war.

Why did British so many political leaders and media argue for getting along with Hitler as soon as he took power?

Ourselves and Germany

In two earlier posts about the British ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, and several despatches he wrote back to the Foreign Office, I pointed out that he correctly understood and predicted Hitler’s goals and actions, and he did so on the basis of public and published statements on the part of Hitler and the Nazis. Anyone fluent in German could have drawn the same conclusions, and anyone not fluent in German just had to have a translator. It’s common for people to assume that Hitler was tolerated by Britain because British political leaders and media were misled about his goals and aims, or engaged in wishful thinking. But, actually, quite a few actively supported him and understood him pretty well. They tolerated (or supported) him because they sympathized with him more than they sympathized with his victims.

I emphasized Rumbold’s report on his May 11, 1933 meeting, and argued that Hitler relied on standard internet asshole moves, like deflection (especially through whaddaboutism), open embrace of an irrational argument, and blue lies. Being an internet asshole means, basically, discourse is about proving your commitment to your group rather than proving your case.

In the last part of his despatch, Rumbold describes Hitler’s reaction when Rumbold pointed out that Nazi persecution of the Jews had alienated a lot of people, just when Germany was beginning to get more sympathy. And the short version of this post is that, as in this meeting, Hitler was open in meetings about his antisemitism—he couldn’t stop himself–, so anyone who met with him had all the evidence they needed to know that he was completely committed to a judenfrei Germany. They just didn’t care.

In his dispatch, Rumbold says that he mentioned that the Nazi treatment of the Jews had resulted in a revulsion of sympathy for Germany, and

“The allusion to the treatment of the Jews resulted in the Chancellor working himself up into a state of great excitement […] as if he were addressing an open-air meeting. “There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from the high schools. There are not enough posts for pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with the rest. If the Jews engineer a boycott of German goods from abroad, I will take care that this hits the Jews in Germany. [….] Before leaving this subject the Chancellor added that the understood that Jews wishing to settle in Palestine must be in possession of the sum of £1,000. If the German Government had required the possession of a similar sum in the case of the Eastern Jews, who had entered Germany since the war, there would be no Jewish question in this country. As it was the Jews had brought every form of disease into Germany and made for the demoralization of the country generally.

[….] My comment on the foregoing is that Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy of the German Government and that it would be a mistake to believe that it is the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty in controlling. Anybody who had had the opportunity of listening to his remarks on the subject of Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realise that he is a fanatic on the subject. He is also convinced of his mission to fight Communism and destroy Marxism, which term embraces all his political adversaries.”

So, Hitler moves from an argument that is rhetorically framed as though it is an issue of fairness “the Jews must suffer with the rest” to an argument rhetorically framed as legitimate self-defense to whaddaboutism to rabid antisemitism of a kind socially acceptable to many Brits. Before I walk through that argument more slowly, I have to point out that the second paragraph of that long quote is the most important for understanding the real lesson of Hitler: how racism is always rhetorically reframed as concerns about dangerous political commitment, social hygiene, and/or reducing crime. What most people don’t know is how important the notion of “executing partisans” (that is, killing socialists) was for justifying mass killings of Jews in what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. Nazis’ political agenda of serial genocides was, in public, always rhetorically framed as exterminating communism.

But, let’s get back to the first paragraph.

We’re still talking about internet asshole. One of the most frustrating things about arguing with someone committed to arguing irrationally is that they appropriate the verbal cues of fairness and rationality, while they’re irrationally arguing for their in-group being entitled to better treatment. But they hide their argument within modifying phrases.

Like all internet assholes, Hitler buried his weakest claims in adjectival phrases—pure German stock, pure-bred Germans—so he has an argument for entitlement rhetorically framed as an argument for fairness. This isn’t fairness as equal treatment across groups, but fairness as an entitled and powerful group being allowed to hold onto its power. It’s “fairness” as “a system that preserves a hierarchy we think is right.” So, it’s “fairness” as “our group being dominant.”

As I said, his most problematic claims are buried.

Let’s be clear: there is and never was any such thing as “pure German stock.” Hitler was relying on Madison Grant’s completely incoherent argument about race. Grant’s argument was that there were three white races: Nordic (what Hitler called Aryan), Alpine, and Mediterranean (what Hitler would have considered non-German speakers in Central and Eastern Europe), and he argued that inter-mixing of these races led to the destruction of a civilization. In other words, like a toddler who can’t stand the peas to touch the mashed potatoes, Grant believed that inter-mixing of races was bad. Yet, by his own narrative, the races were intermixed at various points, since the “higher” race slowly arose from a mixing of the “lower,” and the best civilizations were ones created by intermixing. A longer explanation of how bad his argument was is here.

It’s interesting that Hitler was not “pure German stock” even by his own standards. “Pure German stock” was a blue lie that Hitler sincerely believed, and that he phenotypically violated. His followers didn’t care. Hitler, very clearly not an Aryan, became the political leader to make Aryanism triumph. This isn’t particular to Hitler or his followers. Suckers often join a cult of a person not a Christian because they think he’ll make Christianity triumph or a financially unsuccessful person whom they believe will lead them to thrive financially.

Setting that aside, what his argument assumes is that Jews can’t be pure Germans. And that is the argument that needed to be proven on his side, and he never did because he never could. If a non-Aryan Austrian like Hitler can be a leader of pure Germans, why can’t German citizens be German? Hitler could never make that argument coherently, so he never tried. He just made arguments that rested on the premise that Germans who were Jews didn’t count as German. And that is the first step in politicide, religicide, classicide, or genocide, and people all over the political spectrum engage in it: declare your critics not really German, or American, or Christian, or whatever. They are people who keep us from the goal of a pure community, and so should be eliminated.

We need to stop doing that.

But, back to the May 11 memo, since I really want to post this on May 11.

What Hitler assumes, which is what all racists assume, is a zero-sum contest among races, and that not being dominant means being subordinate—equality is being dominated. But, more important, he assumes that people only look out for their own group. Thus, he can’t even begin to imagine that any non-Jews are objecting to the treatment of Jews, so the protest must be “engineered by Jews.”

As in the other two topics mentioned in the previous posts, he initially denies, then admits, and then deflects the accusation against him.

He denies the accusation by pretending that he is concerned with fairness, but his next argument confirms exactly what he started out denying—discrimination against Jews (since he’s saying “pure German stock” should have preference), and then he threatens retaliation for action that would itself be the consequence of the persecution he denied and then confirmed. It then shifts into a particularly irrelevant piece of whaddaboutism, before he exposes himself as having exactly the views he is accused of having.

The swipe about Palestine is typical. Hitler often made a point to representatives of other countries that their nations often had restrictive immigration regarding Eastern Europeans, especially Eastern European Jews (such as the US 1924 Immigration Act). And Hitler would say that they would do the same thing he was, but they didn’t have to, since they’d never let the Jews in in the first place.

It’s another argument that looks as though it has a point, but it doesn’t have one that is relevant. Britain did have the restrictions he mentions regarding immigration to Palestine, but, as far as I can tell, they didn’t require money to immigrate to the UK itself.

But, Hitler probably often found himself talking to someone who wished Britain did have such restrictive immigration, and so they would sympathize with his desire. Anti-semitic and anti-Slavic prejudices were widespread in Europe generally, including Britain.. And, while these people, ranging from Lord Londonderry to Viscount Rothermere (owner of the Daily Mail), might bemoan the most excessive violence, they wouldn’t empathize with the victims. Like Hitler, they considered various “races” (such as Jews and Slavs) essentially criminal and communist. And, like Hitler, they used the term “Marxism” for all their political adversaries. Thus, like the argument about Germans being victimized because they weren’t allowed to dominate, Hitler’s argument about Jews—as incoherent as it was—would resonate with some people because they didn’t really need the argument to be made; they already agreed.








Hitler as internet a-hole

Eichmann on trial in Israel

In an earlier post, I talked about how Hitler appealed to the sense that some groups are entitled to dominate others—a sense shared by a lot of the major figures of his time, who were, therefore, willing to see him as someone with whom they could work. I mentioned that Hitler also relied heavily on deflection, especially whaddaboutism, that enabled him to normalize Nazi violence and persecution and to deflect his own personal responsibility, and I was using a despatch written by Horace Rumbold (British Ambassador to Germany) of a meeting May 11, 1933.

This is the second post about that meeting.

Rumbold reports

The Chancellor then went on to talk about the recent revolution in Germany, which, he said, had probably been unique, inasmuch as it had been accompanied with the minimum of violence and bloodshed. He maintained that not even a pane of glass had been broken in Berlin. Two printing-presses belonging to the Communist party had been destroyed, and perhaps some twenty people in all killed throughout the country. He seemed to remember that matters had been very different in Ireland in 1921, when the law courts had been burnt down and there had been much loss of life. He added very bitterly that between the years 1923 and 1932, 360 of his supporters had been treacherously murdered and some 40,000 injured.

Hitler insisted that the SS and SA “were in no sense military formations, and that he had forbidden them to indulge in military exercises of any kind.”

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with jerks, and I find this kind of jerk the most frustrating. They’re frustrating because what they’re saying looks like an argument—it has claims, and it has data that are linguistically related to the claims. The data and claims are, however, not logically related to one another. Some of the data is true, or true enough, but not relevant, and the relevant data is false—a deliberate lie, in fact. And then we have claims that might be hyperbole, or they be lies (the idea that their revolution was unique, only two printing presses destroyed, the number of his supporters murdered or injured). The data looks precise (360 deaths, two printing presses) but the important terms are so vague that he actually has a lot of room for equivocation (why only mention Berlin, what does “much loss of life” mean, what exactly is “the revolution”). Hitler doesn’t care that his claims and data are false, and his overall argument illogical. He has no sense of being responsible for what he’s saying or doing. Arguing with him is like trying to play chess with someone who openly pockets pieces and refuses to admit to it. Violating the rules of argument is part of the pleasure.

So, what do you do?

It might be worth engaging with him simply for purposes of trying to undermine his rhetorical effectiveness with third parties—at Rumbold’s May 11 meeting, the only other person in the room is Hitler’s third-rate toady, Baron von Neurath, and Rumbold chooses not to argue. But, what if there are observers to whom you want to expose Hitler’s irrationality and dishonesty?

The rhetorical advantage of being a liar like Hitler is that he has nothing to lose by continuing to lie. If he gets caught in a lie, he can simply claim it was hyperbole—or what is called a “blue lie,” and so it will cost him nothing with his base. The whole point of the charismatic leadership relationship is that it is an irrational commitment to an irrational genius. It is a profoundly religious relationship, in which the leader is worshipped, and so the leader benefits from the kind of thinking common in religions—about claims not needing to be literally true, or empirical facts; they are “true” to the extent that they are consistent with the central beliefs of the religion.[1] The religion of which Hitler is the high priest is the religion of Nazism, and one of the central tenets of Nazism is that Germans are the victims of liberalism, socialism, alien races, and the Versailles Treaty. Because they are the real victims, they are justified in any action they take against the people who have tried to exterminate them. Or who criticize them.

When Rumbold said that there was discrimination against Jews (which Hitler had both denied and bragged about—that’s the next post) and “instanced the names of Professor Einstein and Herr Bruno Watler.” Hitler replied that “Professor Einstein had attacked his Government violently from American soil” and that any English scientist who did the same “would risk molestation in England.” In the first place, no. In the second place, Hitler is equating verbal criticism with attacking, and using that Einstein criticized Nazi Germany as evidence that their prior abuse of him was justified. When arguing with someone like Hitler, this weird warping of time is common—the question was whether Germany was discriminating against Jews, and Hitler said expelling Einstein was justified because Einstein criticized Nazi Germany after being expelled.

So, Hitler’s argument is: there isn’t discrimination against Jews; there is discrimination against Jews, but it’s justified; and, besides, England would do the same (so whaddaboutism based on a hypothetical). Rumbold takes the bait of disagreeing about the last point, making Hitler’s deflection rhetorically effective. They’re now on the issue of whether Britain persecutes people who criticize the government—a point that has nothing to do with whether Nazis do.

This shift is one of the major functions of whaddaboutism—to shift the burden of proof from the weaker case to the other. It’s more or less an admission that a position is indefensible.

Hitler’s earlier whaddaboutism is even more interesting rhetorically. Usually, the whaddaboutism is the kind he engages in about Einstein—it enables the rhetor with a weak case to go on the attack. So, it’s tu quoque—you do it too. He does some of that (the reminder of violence in Ireland in 1921), but his argument about the non-violence of the revolution ends up in whaddaboutism with anti-fascists.

It has the same structure as the argument about Einstein, but without Rumbold saying anything to dispute him:

Hitler makes a false claim (it was unique because it was accomplished with a minimum of bloodshed; there is no discrimination against Jews) that he then contradicts (there were at least 20 people killed; they expelled Einstein); and he justifies this new claim by saying that other people did just as much or worse and therefore this violence was justified. In this case, the violence was the number of Nazis killed and injured during the violence instigated by Nazi groups.

Just as Hitler isn’t responsible for anything he says, so Nazis aren’t responsible for anything bad. It’s never their fault because it is never purely their actions. When it comes to anything bad, then Hitler has a monocausal narrative, and any actors other than Nazis are responsible for the Nazi behavior. Even if deflecting responsibility this way requires some fairly strange time travelling responsibility.

It struck me as very strange when I was reading proslavery rhetors how much they deflected responsibility. They were patient, but about to lose control, and if they did, it would be the fault of abolitionists (or slaves) that they lost control. They genuinely seemed to see themselves as continually exerting heroic self-control that they were about to lose. And nothing was their fault—not slavery, not the conditions of slavery, not the slave codes, not slave rebellions, not even their losing their own tempers and beating slaves. It’s the rhetoric of an abuser.

It makes sense, in its own weird way, that the person who amounts to the idol of an ideology of irrational commitment to the will, violence, and domination would be incapable of making a rational argument. And I think internet a-holes who are similarly incapable of defending their beliefs rationally are similarly commitment to a kind of moral nihilism—there is no morality other than domination. The reason that it strikes me as weird is: why do people who admire domination so much, and who see an irrational argument that silences interlocutors because of how incoherently stupid it is as a victorious domination, whine so fucking much about being victims?







[1] This isn’t a criticism of religion. I consider myself a religious person, and I have beliefs that are not falsifiable or rationally defensible. But, when we start to use that kind of thinking for a political leader, we have created a second God. And I’m not a polytheist.


Why would people like us have supported appeasing Hitler?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

This was going to be one post, but it turned into several. And it’s a set of posts, not about how appeasing Hitler was right (it wasn’t), but about how people like us actively supported Hitler, or actively supported appeasing him.

It’s common for people to express outraged bewilderment at British politicians and figures who appeased Hitler—we claim not to understand how they could have been duped by him, how they could not have seen him for who he really was. We like to explain appeasement either by saying that Hitler was a rhetorical magician, whose persuasive skills were overwhelming, or by saying that the people who didn’t take him seriously enough were fools engaged in wishful thinking. Neither is the case. In fact, many of us would have supported appeasing Hitler. If we try to tell a story of an irresistible rhetor or hopelessly gullible political leaders, then we are the gullible ones.

In other words, this isn’t about Hitler, and it isn’t about Chamberlain. It’s about us.

Hitler, like many manipulative people, didn’t persuade others, as much as he gave them the tools that enabled them to persuade themselves of something they already wanted to believe. Those strategies (and those people) allowed Hitler to normalize Nazi behavior and deflect his personal responsibility for what couldn’t be normalized.

On May 11, 1933, the British Ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, met with Hitler. Hitler had only been in the government since that January, and dictator since that March, but Rumbold already had him correctly sized up. Rumbold described the meeting in a dispatch back to the Foreign Office (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #139) and his description of it shows how Hitler’s rhetoric worked (and, in this case, didn’t work) and with whom.

The meeting was fairly typical of meetings with Hitler—he did most of the talking, got unhinged on the subject of Jews, deflected (especially through whaddaboutism), and lied or exaggerated when he couldn’t deflect. After the Reichstag Fire, the Nazi government arrested anyone considered communist, a category that included labor union activists. Nazi persecution of Jews was well known, as well as violence against communists.

Because he had read Mein Kampf and been listening to speeches by Hitler and other major Nazis, Rumbold knew exactly what Hitler planned. In a memo written not long before this meeting (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #36), Rumbold had summarized Hitler’s philosophy (long quotes from Rumbold are the full paragraphs in italics):

He starts with the assertion that man is a fighting animal: therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacificist and internationalist. Pacificism is the deadliest sin, for pacificism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence [….] The race must fight: a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe today. The new Reich must gather within its folds all the scattered German elements in Europe [….] The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier [….] Again and again he proclaims that fanatical conviction and uncompromising resolution are indispensable qualities in a leader [….] Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations.

He was right, as we know. It’s important to point out that his correct interpretation of Hitler and the Nazis was grounded in evidence available to anyone fluent in German—the public and published statements of Hitler and the Nazis. It’s also important to point out that, while Hitler had very recently (around 1932) begun talking in terms of self-determination rather than conquest, shifted to dog whistles about his racist policies, and took to lying about violations of the Versailles Treaty, he never retracted, apologized for, or even qualified his previous very clear statements about German hegemony, the desire for a pure and militarized Germany, the need for violence, the equation of Jews and communism, and so on.

People do change their minds, of course, and so the notion that Hitler wasn’t the hothead he had been in the twenties isn’t obviously wrong. But he only stopped making all those arguments two or three years before becoming Chancellor, and he never retracted them. When people change their minds, they openly retract what they previous said. He changed his rhetoric, and not his mind. He didn’t change his rhetoric because he wanted to hold on to the base he’d created with his militaristic and racist rhetoric; he’d risk losing them if he retracted those sorts of statements. When a political figure suddenly changes their rhetoric, then we have to figure out which sets of statements s/he meant, and one relatively straightforward one is: they believe the one they’ve never retracted, even if they’re stopped saying it or are saying the opposite.

But, back to Rumbold’s despatch about the May 11 meeting.

Rumbold says that Hitler complained about the “Polish Corridor:”

He only wished that the Corridor had been created far more to the east. (This is the same remark as that which he recently made to the Polish Minister). The result of the creation of the Corridor had been to provoke grave dissatisfaction in Germany and apprehension in Poland, for the Poles realized that it was an artificial creation. Thus a state of unrest was kept alive.



So, what is Hitler doing?

First, he wasn’t a mastermind of rhetoric. Someone genuinely skilled in rhetoric wouldn’t harangue people in small meetings, but he was notorious for that—not only for, as he does in this meeting, doing almost all the talking, but actually slipping into giving a speech. He was highly skilled at one kind of rhetoric—he was good at making a speech that moved a crowd. Even William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for American media, says that he sometimes found himself temporarily moved by Hitler’s speeches, and he knew exactly who Hitler was and what he wanted. Paradoxically (given what we know about Hitler), what came across so effectively in the big public speeches was that Hitler was completely, passionately, authentically, and even irrationally committed to the cause of Germany (the in-group). We don’t expect rational discussions of policy options in large public speeches (although maybe we should); we are particularly prone to the rush of the charismatic leadership relationship. And that’s what Hitler offered.

In one-on-one situations, charismatic leadership works less well—that Hitler was irrationally committed to the cause of Germans wasn’t especially interesting to the British Ambassador. What does work, but only for people who are looking to be persuaded, are the strategies that Hitler uses: projection, whaddaboutism, lying, exaggeration.

Take, for instance, Hitler’s comments about the “Polish Corridor.” The idea that there are “natural” boundaries, which the Polish Corridor violated, is part of Hitler’s racist notions about some “races” being entitled to territory. Of course the boundaries are artificial—that is, made by humans—because that’s what boundaries always are. Poles weren’t worried about the boundaries being artificial; they were worried about German aggression. Hitler’s passive—a state of unrest was kept alive—makes it seem as though Poles were partially responsible for the state of unrest. Were the Poles completely confident about the borders, there would still be a state of unrest because of Hitler’s rhetoric about German entitlement. Poles weren’t apprehensive about the boundaries; they were apprehensive about Nazi aggression. Hitler projects his unrest he creates onto the Poles.

This strategy would work with an interlocutor who believed that states have “natural” boundaries, or that the boundaries set by the negotiations at the end of the Great War were artificial or unfair to Germany. This way of presenting the situation would also work with someone who didn’t really believe that Poles were people who should be considered, or at least not considered as having the same natural rights to self-determination and a nation-state as, say, Germans.

What many people now forget is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed with the Great War, and one consequence was the rebirth (or creation, depending on your narrative of history) of various nation-states that hadn’t existed for several lifetimes. Poland and Czechoslovakia were two of those nation-states. Given the vexed and sometimes violent history of 19th century conflicts over nationalism, language, and oppression, some boundaries had been deliberately designed to keep Germans a minority. Were he talking to the kind of racist who believed that Germans were better people than Slavs, Hitler’s implicit argument about the boundaries would seem reasonable. As it happens, he wasn’t at that moment, but he often was. So, one reason that major political figures argued for appeasing Hitler was that they agreed with him that Germans should be politically dominant in central Europe because Slavs were, you know, so Slavic. They would, therefore, overlook that a state of unrest was kept alive because of German leaders like Hitler, and instead be willing to see the situation—self-determination for Slavs designed to keep a minority German population from dominating—as artificial, with some vague sort of “both sides are at fault” way of framing the situation.

These people wouldn’t necessarily think Germany should take over all the areas previously controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they would be sympathetic to Germany calling a situation artificial if it kept German speakers from political domination. They might object to Germany dominating Europe, but not what they (wrongly) imagined to be racial Germans dominating the political situations in most Central and Eastern European countries.

We now forget (or don’t know) how widespread what we now know are bullshit narratives about “race” were in that era. Race, which even the most respected and cited scholarship on race couldn’t define consistently, was incoherently associated with language, and sometimes phenotype (but only when that was politically useful). Books like Passing of the Great Race (1916) or The Rising Tide of Color (1921) were tremendously popular in the US and Britain, and they were pearl-clutching jeremiads about the danger to civilization from Central and Eastern Europeans—that is, from Slavs and, worst of all, Slavish Jews. That was the whole point of the extremely restrictive 1924 Immigration Act—it was designed to reduce the number of people coming from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe.

Hitler’s griping about the “artificiality” of the Polish Corridor was grounded in the belief that people who self-identified as German (what he would have called “Aryans”) should not be politically dominated by Slavs. And that argument would work with anyone who agreed with the unhappily common premise that politics should not be people from different groups arguing from their different perspectives, but people who have the right point of view being dominant.

So, for our fantasy that we would never have supported Hitler, the important question is: do we believe that ideal political deliberation has people with radically different points of view, people we really dislike and look down on, arguing with one another, or do we think it consists of our in-group being “naturally” (ontologically) entitled to political domination?

If the latter, then we would have loved Hitler, as long as we agreed with him as to what in-group was entitled to political domination.

Just in case I’ve been unclear: if we condemn Hitler, but believe that only our group has a legitimate political stance, and that our group is entitled to domination, then we don’t really condemn Hitler. We would have been open to persuasion to his narrative about the victimization of Germans, since we believe that a group can be victimized simply on the grounds that it isn’t as dominant as it feels entitled to be.

One of the reasons that people supported Hitler–including people shocked that he did what he’d said he would do were he in power–was that they agreed with his premise that there is an in-group that should have all the political power. If we agree with that premise, but disagree as to which group it is, we’re close enough to Hitler that we’re just splitting some very fine hairs.










The Enabling Act and the current coup attempt

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

On March 23, 1933, Adolf Hitler argued that what “the left” had done was so outrageous that Germany should abandon democracy and make him dictator. The elected officials did.

He was supported by the Catholic Party, all conservative parties, and the majority of Protestants. The only parties to oppose him were the Democratic Socialists and the Communists.

Since everyone other than socialists and communists supported Hitler, why is it a talking point among pro-Trump groups that Hitler was a socialist, and therefore a leftist? Because they want to rationalize engaging in exactly the same kind of coup that Hitler managed—we have to abandon democratic practices because “the left” is so bad—while pretending they aren’t doing exactly what Hitler did.

A lot of people reason by identity rather than politics. That is, they engage in the fantasy that good people, and only good people, will enact good policies. So, when trying to decide how to vote, just look for someone for someone who understands you, who is like you. That’s called “identification.” There’s a kind of narcissism in it—or maybe political solipsism is a better word. You just look out for yourself, and vote for someone who will look out for you, and….what, exactly, is supposed to happen? There can’t be a one-to-one relationship of identities (young, old, middle-aged, no kids, lots of kids, a disabled kid) between voters and political figures because there aren’t that many people in Congress (and voting on this basis always hurts the smaller groups). In addition, what are called social groups (not social in the sense of being about socializing, but group memberships that are important for a sense of self, such as having a child who gets accommodations in schools, having a a dog, or being evangelical Christian) don’t necessarily lead to policy affiliation. Not everyone with a dog wants off-leash dog parks, after all.

Good political figures should be able to look out for lots of different kinds of people; that’s what democracy requires. Diversity is a fact.

But a politics of identification assumes that identity is stable and monocausally determines policy affiliation. With unintentional irony, self-described “right wing” media figures throw themselves around about “the left” engaging in “identity politics,” yet that’s what they offer to their audience: the assumption that their identity (being “conservative”) necessarily leads to one political agenda (that is never clearly stated in the affirmative). It’s generally what’s called a “negative identity”—people are “conservative” just because they aren’t “liberal” (and vice versa).

What people call “right-wing” politics should be called reactionary toxic populist nationalism. It isn’t conservative. Conservativism is a political ideology that, although I disagree with it, even I will say is generally internally coherent and principled. Pro-Trump politics isn’t internally coherent or principled—it’s irrational factionalism. Using a private server is terrible, unless it’s a Trump family member. Pornography is terrible, unless it’s a Trump family member. A problematic charity is terrible, unless it’s Trump’s. There are no principles that are applied consistently across groups.

Supporting Trump comes from two sources. First, there’s charismatic leadership. He’s decisive and confident and (they think) successful. People drawn to Trump for this reason believe that politics isn’t complicated, that the right solution is obvious, and that politicians make things unnecessarily complicated because they’re doofuses. They believe that “regular people” (like them) are screwed over by our current political system, and that Trump understands them, and is looking out for them. They know he isn’t a doofus because he says things are simple, he’s confident he can solve them, and they saw him be decisive on a (scripted) TV show. He feels transparent to them.

They believe that because everything he says, and even the way he stands, shows that he is clearly a successful guy who gets them and who knows what needs to be done. And he’ll cut through the bullshit and get it done.

And they only pay attention to information that says that what they believe about Trump is true. They reject any criticism of Trump on the grounds that it is criticism. They believe what they believe is true because it’s what they believe, and anything that says what they believe is false must be false because it contradicts what they believe.

These are people, in my experience, who make the same mistake over and over, and who get scammed. A lot. They’re people who are often good and kind, and who believe that Scripture means what it seems to mean to them, and that people are who they say they are. That’s why they get scammed. They believe that the world is not complicated, but that bad people make it seem complicated, and so they like people who are decisive and confident. Con artists are always decisive and confident (so are a lot of badly informed people).

I have to digress and say that, since I’ve spent a lot of my life arguing with all sorts of people, this way of thinking about the world (it’s all really simple, and people just try to make it complicated, and we can solve this problem that no one else has solved by being thoroughly commitment to this simple solution that, for inexplicable reasons, no one else has ever adopted) is all over the political spectrum. It isn’t just Trump supporters (here, for instance, is a nice discussion of how it’s playing out right now among democratic socialists).

Second, many people support Trump in a purely reactionary way—he is NOT “libruls” (whom they believe to be the cause of all problems in the world. He will (and does) crush them, and, since they think libruls cause all the problems, crushing them will solve all the problems. It’s still toxic populism, in that it’s saying that there are some Americans who aren’t really American, whose views shouldn’t be represented (or even discussed), and who should be excluded from power.

Those two kinds of support—here is a strong, decisive person with excellent judgment who will cut through all the bullshit, and here is someone who will purge our government and culture of liberals and their influence—are the two kinds of support for Hitler.

Am I saying that Trump is Hitler? No.

Am I saying that the people who are supporting Trump would have supported Hitler? That is exactly what I’m saying.


Socially acceptable racism; Or, how “new” racism isn’t new

books about demagoguery

A lot of people make the point that there was a kind of racism—called “old” racism—that was openly biological/genetic, and openly hostile. Then, at a certain point, racist discourse shifted to become more genteel. That distinction between old and new racism isn’t entirely accurate, and the way it’s inaccurate is important. There have always been “genteel” racisms—what might be called “racism with a smile” or “some of my closest friends are…” racism. And those “nice” (that is, socially acceptable) racisms enable the kinds that openly advocate violence, expulsion, and extermination.

In this post, I want to talk about one of them—one that was tremendously popular in the twentieth century. This view accepted that there were “races,” that they were essentially (even genetically) different, that these differences manifest themselves in external characteristics (looks, behavior, cultural practices), but that all of these differences add to the richness of human life. This kind of racism celebrated the essential differences of human races. (Sort of. I’ll get to that.) People advocating this kind of racism often explicitly set themselves off from a similarly biological racism (they weren’t racist) on the grounds that they weren’t that bad.

Take, for instance, Dorothy Sayers, the mystery novelist. In Whose Body (1923), the villain kills a perfectly nice Jew out of spite with a non-trivial amount of antisemitism. The hero expresses no antisemitism, not even when his friend indicates a desire to marry into a Jewish family, and the narrator has nothing negative to say about the victim or his family. In fact, everything we hear about the victim and his family appears positive. He is very good at playing the stock market and therefore wealthy, but not showy in this wealth (for instance, because he doesn’t have a chauffeur, he travels alone to the meeting the murderer has set up). He dotes on his wife and daughter, and is a good family man. He is kind to people.

This all appears positive—he’s smart, successful, modest, and a family man. This characterization is, however, simply the “positive” side of the same coin of rabidly antisemitic rhetoric. For those groups, Jews are: parasitic capitalist, money-grubbing, cheap, tribal (“clannish” is the word sometimes used), and kind becomes “pacifist” or “cowardly.”

Antisemitic rhetoric in groups like the Nazis stuck close to the producer/parasite dichotomy that runs back through readings of Paul’s prohibition about usury. Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons have a useful description of how that dichotomy plays into toxic populism. The short version is that toxic populism presents some group as producers, and the other as parasites, or, in Paul Ryan’s more recent rhetoric, “makers” and “takers.” The in-group is always makers. For many populists, people who make money off of money—financiers, people who play the stock market—haven’t really created wealth (such as through owning land). They’re parasites.

Nazis were populists (authoritarians almost always are, even though their policies actually screw over most of the populace, and especially the middle and lower classes). The notion that Jews were always financiers and stock market geniuses (and bankers) was one of the most important aspects of Nazi antisemitic propaganda. It’s a theme in Mein Kampf, fercryinoutloud. Real money, so this argument goes, comes from agriculture, or perhaps small manufacturing. Being good at the stock market, for Nazis, is a smear.

Similarly, the negative stereotype of Jews was that they can never really be patriots, because they always favor their family rather than their country (for Hitler, an “Aryan” putting his family first is putting the country first). And the stereotype of Jews as cheap was another piece of antisemitic rhetoric. In other words, Sayers, even if her portrayal of a Jew appeared sympathetic (i.e., she was trying to be “nice”), reinforced exactly the stereotypes that resulted in the Holocaust: Jews are good at finance (capitalist parasites), modest (miserly), family lovers (clannish), non-violent (pacifists and cowards). It was racism with a smile.

She was far from alone. After Wyndham Lewis’ enthusiastic paean to Hitler (1931) didn’t go over as well as he’d expected, and his insistence that Hitler was “a man of peace” showed him to have been very wrong, he tried to get back in the good graces of the public with his Jews: Are They Human? (1939). His answer is that they have their own virtues—they’re very loyal to one another and family-loving (clannish), careful with money (greedy and miserly), and so on. Like Sayers, he put it in positive terms, but it was still endorsing the notion that Jews have an essential set of characteristics.

Lewis took Hitler’s claims of wanting world peace at face value, but it’s interesting that he didn’t take Nazi antisemitism at face value. I think it’s because he didn’t really object to it all that much. Lewis and the Nazis didn’t disagree as to the basic character of Jews; they just disagreed as to what should be done about it. So, for Lewis, Hitler’s antisemitism wasn’t especially notable—it was something he could dismiss as a little bit of an overreaction.

What has been a little surprising to me in working on demagoguery, especially when it leads to extreme policies about the cultural out-group, is the number of people who consider themselves “moderate” who endorse the basic narrative behind the demagoguery about the out-group. They just don’t think it should be taken too far.

Germans who agreed that there should be a quota for Jewish doctors, Americans who agreed that integrated schools were just a little too much, Brits who wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one—they could all see themselves as “not racist” (or, at least, not unreasonable in their attitudes toward Those People) because there was some other group less nuanced, less reasonable in their hostility. And, when push came to shove, they might raise an eyebrow at the people who did go “too far,” or perhaps mutter some criticism, but that’s about it. They were often allies, and rarely enemies, of the people who went “too far.”

Thus, that we now have people who say “I’m not racist, but…” isn’t a sign that there is a new kind of racism. It’s an old form, and a very damaging one.