On reductio ad Hitlerum - Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker:

‘The latter piece is collected in the new volume “Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America” (Norton), which brings together a lot of short essays like Paxton’s: scholars and journalists writing in an urgent (sometimes breathless) persuasive mode. It would be a stretch to call it light reading, but it does go quickly, in part because it’s full of such reversals. Spend a few pages with Sarah Churchwell, an Americanist at the University of London, and it’s easy to entertain the possibility that the shoe fits (“It matters very little whether Trump is a fascist in his heart if he’s fascist in his actions”). Flip to Richard J. Evans, an emeritus Cambridge historian, and suddenly the clown shoes look several sizes too big (“American democracy is damaged, but it survives”). The collection starts with what it calls “classic texts” (Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism,” Hannah Arendt’s “The Seeds of a Fascist International”) before turning to contemporary concerns (climate change, social media) and reconsiderations of the classics, with every side citing Arendt for its purpose. “Arendt cautioned against prematurely crying totalitarianism in a U.S. context,” the writer Rebecca Panovka notes, quite reasonably, although, of course, Arendt also wouldn’t have wanted us to sound the alarm too late.’

(…)

‘Paxton, in his canonical 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” attempts to define fascism in one overbrimming sentence: “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline . . . in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues . . . internal cleansing and external expansion.” A nation in decline, which only one man can make great again? Trumpism clearly checks that box. Most of the others are more ambiguous. Death camps and Lebensraum—that’s internal cleansing and external expansion, of the prototypical fascist variety. But Manifest Destiny and forever wars? Is that fascism, or just America? When Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” was he trying to collaborate with committed nationalist militants, or just mouthing off? Was Trump’s brutal approach to the southern border a step toward “internal cleansing,” or a more callous version of politics as usual?’

(…)

‘In truth, not even the most stolid skeptic maintains that Trump is a perfectly normal politician, and not even the most histrionic #Resistance foot soldier believes that Trump is literally Orange Hitler.
“The way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest,” Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan and the editor of “Did It Happen Here?,” writes in his introduction—a bit like welcoming guests to a dinner party by promising them that it will be over soon. If the goal of the book is to settle the fascism debate once and for all, then it’s not clear that it succeeds.’

(…)

‘Moyn writes that, in the early days of the Trump Administration, “I confess I found the reductio ad Hitlerum annoying.” It’s not much of a confession. In August, 2017, Moyn co-authored a Times op-ed under the headline “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is,” writing, “The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red.” He was building on “Tyrannophobia,” a seminal paper by two law professors who contend that overreaction to the threat of tyranny in the United States has done more damage than tyranny itself. Moyn’s piece happened to be published hours before hundreds of white supremacists held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This coincidence may not have debunked his argument—after all, the neo-Nazis did not topple the American republic—but it did not endear him to many Times commenters. Yet needling the Times’ commentariat, from the left, appears to be one of Moyn’s favorite pastimes. (In December, he did it again, arguing that the Supreme Court should unanimously overturn the Colorado decision barring Trump from the state’s Presidential primary ballot, which is, of course, what the Court eventually did. “I’m still miffed they closed comments at 3,900,” he tweeted. “Just kidding.”)’

(…)

‘A forthcoming book about conservatism in the early nineties, John Ganz’s lively and kaleidoscopic “When the Clock Broke,” also presents fascist sympathies as quintessentially American. (In a chapter on Sam Francis, a proponent of “respectable racism” and an influential Washington Times columnist, Francis is quoted, in the late eighties, referring to himself as “ ‘a fascist,’ pronounced the Italian way.”) When American politics is compared to European fascism, the standard deflationist impulse is to reduce the analogy to a reductio, lest American readers use it as an excuse to treat Trump as exotic and let the rest of us off the hook.’

(…)

‘One classic text not anthologized in “Did It Happen Here?” is “What Is Fascism?,” the oft-quoted essay published by George Orwell in 1944. “As used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless,” he wrote. “I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit . . . astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” (This is as true today as it was then. I have seen the F-word applied to Russia, Ukraine, Hamas, Israel, the Catholic Church, academia, and London’s Metropolitan Police—and that was just from one recent perusal of X, and not a very thorough one.) Orwell later pointed out that many such words, including “democracy, socialism, freedom,” had been similarly distorted. (Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Mitch McConnell have all been maligned as socialists; Sweden calls itself a democracy, but so does North Korea.) Yet Orwell was clear that semantic confusion was no excuse for quietism: “Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this.”’

(…)

‘Similarly, you can oppose Biden, or the forever wars, or the liberal establishment, and still think that Trumpism is a democratic emergency.’

(…)

‘“Today’s threats to democracy don’t parallel 20th-century experiences,” Müller wrote in the London Review of Books, in 2019. “One of the reasons we are not witnessing the second coming of a particular anti-democratic past is simply that today’s anti-democrats have learned from history too.”’ (…)

‘Then he came back, entrenched his power, and worked with his party to chip away at the state—patiently, clinically, not like a twentieth-century fascist but like a twenty-first-century authoritarian. “Orbán doesn’t need to kill us, he doesn’t need to jail us,” Tibor Dessewffy, a Hungarian sociologist, told me, in 2022. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too—the frog isn’t boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.” I was there to report on CPAC, the American conservative conference, which was being held in Budapest. This February, cpac—the main one, in Maryland—denied press credentials to reporters from HuffPost, the Washington Post, and other “propagandist” outlets. Earlier this month, Trump invited Orbán to Mar-a-Lago. Orbán posted some highlights on his Instagram: a cover band played a stiff rendition of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and Trump took the stage to say a few words in his friend’s honor. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump declared. “He said, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss.”’

Read the article here.

Orbán as metaphor is much more sophisticated than Hitler, or Stalin. But Stalin seems to be not a very popular metaphor.

One thing not discussed in this essay is the question whether the damage can be undone without war and violence.

In the case of Orbán that appears to be questionable, yet Hungary is still a member of the EU. I heard rumors that Hungary will leave the EU this summer, but my sources might not be very reliable.

And sure, you can be against Trump and see him as an exceptional to democracy and at the same you can despise Biden, but the question remains what this means if you have to choose between Biden and Trump.

Above all, I like the words ‘democratic emergency.’ There are many democratic emergencies nowadays, in many if not most Western countries.

Who is working in the hospitals and can we bring the patient to the ER against his will?