It is with great nausea that I write this at the request of my apparently more masochistic stepfather, but I promised to write on request... It seems that bastion of responsible journalism, the National Review, through its editor Kevin Williamson, has issued an article. After skillfully dismantling the legitimacy of everybody who supports Senator Sanders' campaign for the presidency (we young people are all victims of over-prolonged pubescent angst, and the older supporters are all intoxicated), after mercilessly sparing any of us the burden of attempting to oppose conservative talking points with our tiny, impaired brains which, as every conservative from Thomas Sowell to Antonin Scalia will attest, shouldn't even be allowed to vote, enlightens the world to the sad truth that all of us who are campaigning for environmental sustainability, an end to war, regulation of business, and the rights of labor, are actually Nazis, along with our candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders.
Who knew? By the way, I assume this means each of you reading us here is actually all Nazified and fascist as well. (My endorsement of Bernie's campaign has been read more frequently than any other piece on this site -thank you, btw)
My first reaction (well maybe not my first) to learning Williamson's Truth about myself and my beliefs was "Well, historically, being a Nazi in America has carried awesome perks. Sweet- now I get mine! Do I get a job at NASA like Wernher Von Braun? Free oil from the Bush family, like every single goddamn fascist government in the 1930s? The GOP nomination for governor of Louisiana like David Duke? Major streets named after me in major cities like Charles Lindbergh? There are serious perks to this, come on, cough them up, Herr Williamson!"
Let's just leave my actual first reaction, as a German-American Queer Socialist Woman, to your imaginations.
So, laborious and disgusting though the process will be, I suppose I'll go through the points Williamson offers as proof at this poor substitute for the Nuremberg trials.
First- buying local is Nazi, and support for this movement makes Sanders a Nazi and a xenophobe.
The only hint of truth I can concede this contains is that after experiencing the British blockade in World War 1, many German military theorists and Nazi warmongers did conclude that from a security standpoint it made sense to produce everything needed domestically (or in occupied territories at least) to reduce vulnerability to the Royal Navy. And thus the soft drink Fanta was created as a substitute for Coca Cola-enjoy your next orange soda, and that "Wanta Fanta, it is futile to resist" ad campaign with the dancing girls who could have been taken out of the Bund Deutsche Mädeln takes on a different meaning now, doesn't it?
But seriously, Nazi economics were centered around increasing production of war materials at all costs, and exploiting the labor of the captive peoples they had enslaved. The common progressive goal of supporting local manufacturers (and, full disclosure, I happily drive a secondhand Toyota which still gets 40mpg highway, reducing our oil imports if not auto imports) operates from a somewhat different standpoint: Exploitation is wrong. Business needs to exploit the cheapest inputs available to it to remain competitive, which means going abroad to use slave labor and driving down domestic wages, rather than paying a living wage anywhere. A Socialist model in which we support fairer wages, closer to the selling price of the good or service provided by labor, is thus distinguished from both slave labor models in the view of everybody but Mr. Williamson.
Williamson goes on to suggest that Sanders is tapping into Trump-style racism by pointing out that labor conditions are different and more objectionable in China than in Germany or the Scandinavian countries. Specifically (aside from man in-the-street interviews with cherry-picked nativists), he points out that we have a large trade deficit with Sweden, and another with Germany, but Sanders isn't concerned about them. This is a fundamental and deliberate misreading of our motivation: German and Swedish Workers are generally better treated than their American counterparts, therefore the downward pressure on wages produced by the use of slave labor isn't an issue here! Capitalism needs to develop new markets to keep business sucking more resources out of society than it produces- when your model of existence consists of expropriating value from those who create it, you need to expand or die- the fact that other countries have a strong manufacturing/export sector while still treating their workers with more mercy than we do shows the validity, not the folly, of Sanders' platform.
One note about those interviews- one out of context quote from a self-described Sanders supporter suggests that we blame the lack of good social policy on the presence of minorities. The old tired chestnut that progressivism can only succeed in homogeneous societies is trotted out as a philosophical absolute. Anyone with a modicum of sociological/historical knowledge could however point out that any accidental truth in this prevalent maxim is due to the fact that scaremongering and the politics of division are easier in a racist society. This has been happening in America for centuries, ever since the elites were terrified by the prospect of white laborers joining a major slave riot (which did happen at least once in the early 18th century, New York). Since then, our culture has been consciously and unconsciously designed to produce an investment in white identity, solely based on the idea of alleged superiority over People of Color, to frustrate efforts at building solidarity. The ruling classes do not necessarily have this option in a more homogeneous society, true. That doesn't mean, oddly enough, that people like me support ethnic cleansing, it just means that we recognize the need to work towards addressing Racism just as seriously as addressing Capitalism itself.
Ok, reading on, apparently addressing one's audience as "Brothers and Sisters" is wrong and close to saying "comrades". I happen to address you all as "comrades", or, more frequently, as "Genossinnen und Genossen"- which means "Comrades", but that's beside the point!!!
Let's see here, Williamson hates Brooklyn accents but doesn't suggest the Nazis had one. So I suppose in his twisted worldview, that's an area where Bernie is worse than the Nazis? (Though I admit I find the idea of Goebbels giving the Sportpalast/Totale Krieg speech in a Brooklyn accent to be absolutely bloody hilarious.
Farther down, Williamson says that social policy requires consensus, and class consciousness precludes consensus. Quite the opposite- our existing system fosters division and oppression for the benefit of a comparatively tiny elite- unless Williamson is saying that the influence of the oligarchs on our society is justified (and let's be honest, of course he is), he doesn't have much of a point here. We do have consensus on many core issues- over 60% popular support for public infrastructure spending, socialized health insurance. The American coalition for at least Social Democracy is strong, if only our election system and campaign finance laws would permit it to act.
http://grahamkrueger.blogspot.com/2015/06/designing-perfect-election-system.html
Later, Williamson mocks Bernie for pointing out the disparity between the few token billionaires interested in funding social justice measures and the billions spent to manipulate our every election cycle by the oil and finance industries. Anyone with basic arithmetic skills can see that that is in fact a false equivalency, which Bernie is exposing.
Ok, pointing out that the economy is rigged is somehow the same as claiming that it's the fault of the Jews? Worth remembering that the Nazis made the contradictory claim that not only did the Jews supposedly control the Capitalist world, they also sought its destruction through equally illusory control of the Soviet Union, so logic isn't really part of the conservative playbook here. There's really no relation between pointing out the existence of a capitalist class and its ability to dominate the rest of us, and bizarre and ugly claims that such an arrangement is somehow the scheme of a historically oppressed minority.
There's a paragraph with extremely ambiguous syntax referring to the activities of Sanders' old partners in the Liberty Union Party, most of which happened when he was 7 years old. Do I need to address this? It's worth noting that Williamson's arguments are so ambiguous here that I can't tell whether he's accusing the 7 year old Sanders of supporting Henry Wallace or opposing him.
Apparently, Williamson holds that anyone believing in a system of morality wants to abolish free speech. Yes yes yes, exploitation and destruction are moral issues, that's the point of Socialism- we look at the world, see the forces of oppression and the forces of production, and know that of the two, only one can exist without the other. That's a moral judgment all right. I don't see anything from Bernie about limiting the people's free speech as a result of this knowledge.
Williamson is terrified, admittedly, of our sinister agenda to return America to the dark days of pre-2010 where nobody had any freedom to express anything... Wait, what? Yes, he says that the First Amendment was only realized with the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions, allowing corporations to spend freely on political propaganda, and that therefore Bernie and I oppose freedom of speech.
For someone so apparently concerned with economics, Williamson seems to have no idea of inflation. Nominally Free Speech is worthless if it consists of little blogs like this one against billions of dollars of professional persuasion on behalf of the entrenched system. Corporations are not people, they are one more tool for the owner class to control the rest of us, and there are better ways of ensuring free speech than letting corporations buy every source of information available to us and determine what we hear.
He goes on to critique Sanders for always mentioning diverse causes in his standard stump speech, drawing the conclusion that this means Sanders supporters lack the attention span to remember all of his stances. I would point out that any successful progressive movement is going to have to involve every oppressed group- we do not have the luxury of the Right; the ability to subordinate everyone to the singular narrative of an idealized view of the past: it is awareness of intersecting injuries that makes us Socialists, and which we must depend on to form ever more effective coalitions. Furthermore, as long as he's still on this bloody "Sanders is a Nazi" argument that all the causes he mocks Sanders for enumerating (Women's Rights in the workplace and in our own bodies, solidarity against racially targeted policing, LGBT rights, and many more) were all vehemently and violently opposed by the Nazis. (Women's role was to be confined to the Kitchen, Church, and Childrearing, tens of thousands of Gays were sent to the camps and the Berlin Gay Community, first of its kind
( http://grahamkrueger.blogspot.com/2014/07/madchen-in-uniform-message-from-berlin.html ), was destroyed. As for racial profiling in policing and mass incarceration, well, 12 million deaths, some 8 million of them for their ethnicity, does that sound familiar?
Williamson quotes Hayek- strike three in my book, hell at this point it's strike 15 or so, and concedes in his penultimate paragraph that Bernie may not be a true Nazi but he is like Venezuelan Liberator Hugo Chavez and that's "bad enough". I'll set aside (for the moment) his attack on comrade Chavez. In Williamson's worldview, voting against the Patriot Act every time it's been in Congress translates somehow to a view that the state should control everything. There is no contradiction between an economically regulated and a civilly free society, and that is what Bernie is promising, and why I support him.
Ok, that's the lot of it, I'm sickened which may mean Williamson won, I don't know. But I'd like to think I've poked some more holes in his sludge-filled sieve of an argument, wasting my time and yours. I hope I at least made it entertaining.
Commence your retching, then please donate what you can to Bernie.
https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/lets-go-bernie?refcode=homepage_main_nav
If anything this shows us how far the Right will sink in their repeated attacks to stop any alternative to our current oligarchy from catching the public's imagination- they clumsily attempt to link Sanders with the most evil regime in history, one that would gladly have murdered him along with his family members for his ethnicity and politics.
Let's show them what we think of it. Let us break them upon our resistance!
Genossin Elise
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