(Come on, they're both holding axes! Do you need me to draw you a map?)
And by "we", I mean conservative commentators. I don't expect any better from liberals. Comparing someone to Hitler is the first and final resort of every left-wing argument. If someone disagrees with you, he's a fascist.
There's really no excuse for us to play this game.
George Will casually compares deporting illegal aliens to the Holocaust. As I asked, did that make Eisenhower a Nazi for Operation Wetback?
Meanwhile at the National Review, Kevin Williamson keeps describing Trump and Bernie Sanders as national socialists. Being a 'Socialist' and being a 'National Socialist', with all that implies, is not the same thing and casually making that association has no credible purpose except to perhaps convince amnesty supporters that they're fighting fascism.
Nazi ideology was an incoherent mess clumsily patched together with militarism. Trying to associate it with anyone who supports protectionism or deporting illegal aliens would make quite a few American presidents "Nazis".
Hitler insisted there was no need: “I shall nationalize the people.” Senator Sanders has a rather wordier version of the same agenda, describing the goal of his campaign as inspiring mass political movement in which “millions of people stand up and loudly proclaim that this nation belongs to all of us.”
I'm no fan of Sanders, but this is a generic stump speech. Snip the "all" and it's a typical Tea Party line.
Is this our current qualification for being a Nazi?
There is a lot going on here. Part of this is traditional xenophobia, the habit of finding aliens to blame during times of political and economic anxiety, which is doubly attractive if those aliens are ethnically distinctive: When was the last time you heard Senator Sanders screaming about our trade deficit with Germany
Clearly Sanders, an elderly Jewish leftist, has a soft spot for Germany, but hates China, because he's a huge racist Nazi. He must be as huge a racist as Ronald Reagan who stood up to dumping Japanese cars in America.
But what about all the German cars?
The argument that protectionism is Nazism is a terrible one. So is the argument that opposition to illegal aliens is Nazism. It essentially positions the nation state as Nazi. And that's where he once again ends up.
We have an intense and necessary interest in what’s going on in Pyongyang at the moment, and what happens in Syria, whether our borders are secure, whether our banking regulations put us at a global disadvantage. But there isn’t a legitimate national interest in having boffins in Washington stand between a fellow in Pittsburgh who wants to buy a pair of sneakers and a guy in Mindanao who wants to sell them to him.
Warfare comes in different forms. Economic warfare is one of them.
The ability of a guy to buy a pair of sneakers in Pittsburgh depends on having a viable economy and a nation state. Without that his currency is worthless and it will cost him a month's rent to pay for those sneakers. If his country doesn't make sneakers or much of anything, he doesn't have the ability to buy. Just to beg.
A nation state must preserve its economy. That isn't something FDR came up with. It's something in the Constitution.
The American proposition embodied in the Constitution gives Congress the "power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" and "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations".
"To preserve the ballance of trade in favour of a nation ought to be a leading aim of its policy," Alexander Hamilton wrote.
