The right has shifted to a very old kind of rhetoric—our political situation is one in which a war has been declared on us and our values. Our attempts at self-defense have just riled THEM that much more, and they are now determined to exterminate us. They have moved from symbolic violence and political oppression to actual violence. Therefore, we are justified in trying to exterminate them from the political scene, because that is a controlled and measured response to their actually trying to kill us—no system of ethics, no sense of fairness, no concerns about legality or process should limit what political actions we take against THEM.
This never ends well.
It’s also never literally true. It’s only ever used by people in positions of power whose “existential threat” isn’t that they’ll be exterminated, but that they will lose their current political power (usually hegemony).
After all, a genuinely minority group, whose existence (as opposed to political hegemony) was threatened wouldn’t have as one of their responses the extermination of some other group. They wouldn’t have the power to make that happen. Only a group that has the ability to exterminate an out-group—that is, the group with the greatest political power–can make this threat a plausible basis for large-scale political action.
There isn’t a war on Christmas, or a war on Christians; Aryans weren’t threatened with extermination; slaveholders didn’t have to worry about a race war that would enslave them; the GOP doesn’t have to worry that “liberals” will storm gated communities. In all these cases, media worked their base into political violence against an out-group on the fallacious grounds that it was justifiable self-defense (the out-group intended to exterminate them). It wasn’t, and they weren’t. And we’re there again.
Currently, the right-wing propaganda machine is doing two things: preparing its base for a factional state of exception against any non-Trump supporters, and setting up the talking points to rationalize political and judicial violence against non-Trump supporters.
There’s a lot of talk right now about Nazis, and the right-wing talk about Nazis (and a non-trivial amount of left-wing rhetoric) gets it completely wrong.
Here’s what happened with Hitler: he said things a lot of people were saying, but he said it in a way that made many believe that he completely understood them, that he was a reliable ally against Marxism, that he would break the logjam of current politics, that he would cleanse the Agean stables of current politics by getting rid of all the bad people. In other words, he told people that politics isn’t a question of politics—that is, political discourse isn’t about argumentation regarding our policy options, but a question of identity. There are good people, and there are bad people, and politics is a question of getting good people (meaning Hitler) in place, and everyone having faith in his ability to get things done.
Politics, in this world, isn’t about policy argumentation, but about pure commitment to the person who seems to have good judgment about everything, including all political issues.
Hitler came across as a person with fanatical commitment to values a lot of Germans thought were good values—German hegemony, a revitalized military, economic autarky, crushing the left. He never supported his policy agenda with policy argumentation (he couldn’t). But, he persuaded a minority of people that he had a good plan; he persuaded a larger number of people that he was better than communists. Once he got into power, because the conservatives refused to acknowledge that democratic socialists are not communists, he enacted policies that made things better for a lot of people in the short-term.
And, because a lot of people liked the short-term what, they didn’t look into the how. Hitler improved the lives of many people in Germany, and granted the “Christian” right and the military a lot of what they wanted, so they went along with the politicization of the judiciary, the demonization of dissent, and the criminalizing of opposition political parties. They did so because, in the moment, they were getting what they wanted. They liked the outcome, but they were all eventually pulverized in the maw of the how to which they acquiesced.
It’s never about the what; it’s always about the how.
And one important part of Hitler’s how was his use of exterminationist policies justified as a kind of pre-emptive self-defense. Union leaders, communists, and democratic socialists were the first people rounded up by the Nazis, on the grounds that their beliefs constituted a threat to Nazis. The assertion was that they intended to exterminate Nazis, and therefore Nazis were justified in suspending constitutional rights in self-defense for a war that hadn’t yet happened. A lot of people don’t realize that the Holocaust and other serial genocides were justified as self-defense, against a group that, it was claimed, had been at war with Aryans already. Hitler and the Nazis insisted on calling the attack on Czechoslovakia a counter-attack. And many Germans, including the ones who might have been able to mount the kinds of protests to slow things down, didn’t protest because they liked their better financial situation, they liked the rollback of lefty policies (they liked the bans on homosexuality, birth control, and women’s rights), and they liked the sense that Germany didn’t have to apologize anymore. They liked being proud of being German. They liked winning.
For a long time, large groups of Americans have been mobilized to support any political figure who advocates banning abortion, regardless of anything else about that figure. If, that person also insists that gun ownership should be unregulated, and politics is about expelling or exterminating the out-group, they can count on a fanatical base. None of those slogans (they aren’t really policies) is defended through policy argumentation (the gun issue gets the closest, but it’s still pretty far away).
And they aren’t argued via policy argumentation because they can’t be—they’re incoherent. The argument is that abortion should be banned because it is bad, and so banning it will end abortion but banning guns will not reduce shootings and the constitution says gun ownership for militia members should be protected but that means that no one can restrict gun ownership at all but the first amendment doesn’t protect all speech so the theory underlying the NRA reading of the second amendment doesn’t apply to any other amendment but it’s a good argument and banning immigration will reduce immigration so banning works with abortion and immigration but with guns it just criminalizes the activity but that argument doesn’t apply to abortion or immigration because. Just because.
The NRAGOP (that is, the part of the GOP that dutifully repeats and acts on NRA slogans) insists that the second amendment be read as though any restriction on individual gun ownership in any public space is prohibited. But they don’t read the first amendment as providing the same protection for speech (see, for instance, their attempt to prohibit doctors from talking about guns in the household, the restriction of what the CDC can say about guns, or the contradictions about teachers’ first versus second amendment rights). So, yeah, the NRAGOP argument about the second amendment is not grounded in a consistent principle about how to read the constitution because the NRAGOP doesn’t read the first and second amendment the same way.
And anyone who says that banning guns is useless but banning abortion and immigration would be helpful doesn’t understand how major premises work.
When you can’t defend your policy agenda rationally, and the GOP can’t, because it can’t explain why it’s the party that tried to hang Clinton is not only supporting Trump, but Kavanaugh, and is enacting policies that increase the debt (while having gotten its panties into a bunch about the debt), can’t defend its contradictory readings of the first and second amendments, doesn’t support policies that would actually reduce abortion, and, well, the GOP can’t defend its policies rationally.
So, what it does is claim that the possibility that white fundagelical men might lose some of their power means that everything that matters about the US will be exterminated, and so people who support their political agenda should react in panic.
That’s proslavery rhetoric. That’s prosegregationist rhetoric. It’s hyperbolic and destructive.
If the GOP has a good policy agenda, then it can defend that policy agenda through policy argumentation. It doesn’t because it can’t.
And that’s important. The GOP can mobilize its base on all sorts of grounds, and can give talking points to your family and friends, in which they shift the stasis to which group is better, or who supports abortion, or whether HRC laughed about a rape, but what it can’t do is give them the means to engage in policy argumentation. Because their policy agenda is indefensible on those grounds.