A PLAGUE ON BOTH HOUSES
Political polarization leads to political violence because once you muster up enough hate, the use of violence against what you hate becomes permissible, perhaps even necessary.
Just as the political right is being tested by the emergence of the “alt-right,” the leftist maxim that “there are no enemies on the left” is being tested by the emergence of the violent Marxist/ anarchist “Antifa” (Anti-fascist) movement.
Those images of neo-Nazi and black-masked Antifa thugs clubbing each other should remind us of nothing so much as the street fights in German cities under Weimar, in which Hitler’s stormtroopers and Stalin’s minions in the German Communist Party (KPD) provided an ideological preview of what would occur a few years later in more organized fashion in Spain and then on a more titanic scale on the eastern front during World War II.
Such radicals fed off each other, as the altright and Antifa do now, with each using the other as the rationale for their own existence and resort to violence.
The ideological arc ultimately tends to bend back and come full circle, as Nazis and communists have always had far more in common with each other than either has had with liberal democrats, most conspicuously in their mutual rejection of liberal democracy and shared embrace of unlimited state power, out of which the concept of totalitarianism was born.
The Nazis might have hated Jews and the communists the “bourgeoisie,” but the targets of the hate mattered far less than its intensity and its role as a motive for mass murder. The actual content of a given radical ideology is ultimately less important than the way it inevitably attracts violent, fanatical personality types to the cause.
As Jonah Goldberg perceptively notes, “There’s a natural tendency to think that when people, or movements, hate each other, it must be because they’re opposites. This assumption overlooks the fact that many — indeed, most — of the great conflicts and hatreds in human history are derived from what Sigmund Freud called the ‘narcissism of minor differences.’”
In the end, each side wants to believe that their radicals (fascists or communists) aren’t quite as bad as the other side’s, but to say that something isn’t quite as bad as the Nazis is to damn with faint praise. Just because someone fights against evil doesn’t mean that they aren’t — no one killed more Nazis than Stalin, and no one killed more communists than Hitler, but such facts don’t make either any less morally repulsive.
Liberal journalists like the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and CNN’s Chris Cuomo who have fawningly compared Antifa to American soldiers hitting the beaches at Normandy slander both those brave soldiers and historical memory. Such sentiments are just as toxic to the body politic as those expressed by the human slime that slithered through the streets of Charlottesville.
The broader lesson in all this is that there is an inevitable linkage between radicalism on the one hand and political violence and totalitarianism on the other, with the ideological labels largely insignificant. The ideological continuum ceases to matter, or even be a continuum, once you reach its furthest ends.
It might not have been the most politically astute way to put it, but an obscure American senator from Missouri at least got the moral implications right when, after the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he said “if we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible” (although accuracy requires noting that Harry Truman also said that he “didn’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances”).
Far more useful and parsimonious, then, than the distinction between “left” and “right” in understanding the menace of radicalism is a simple classification system in which we distinguish between those who accept individual rights under self-government and those who do not.
Within this context, we should never forget that the struggle between contemporary American liberals and conservatives represents — properly understood, and however intense at times — merely a factional dispute within a broader liberal democratic tradition which fascists and communists (and Islamists) stand apart from and seek to destroy.
Given this, the worst thing we can do is abandon cherished principles like freedom of speech and assembly, and thus do the work of our enemies for them.
We should also remember in all this that violence is never a form of “speech,” even when committed against neo-Nazis. And speech is never violence, even when coming from neo-Nazis.
The headline of a San Francisco Chronicle story from Aug. 27 said, “Masked anarchists violently rout right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley.”
Forget for a moment which side was which and think only about the words “violently,” “demonstrators” and especially the word “rout,” a term perhaps more appropriate for describing the outcome of an Alabama-Florida International football game.
So is this Germany circa 1930 or America? Or doesn’t it matter, so long as your side won the scrum?
Bradley R. Gitz lives in Batesville, Ark.