Mo Brooks, the Big Lie, and Bad Hitler analogies

There is a media kerfuffle, and much pleasurable outrage, about an Alabama congressman quoting a foaming-at-the-mouth antisemitic section from Mein Kampf.

As is usual with the media, it’s all outrage, oddly misplaced, and misses the really important point about the incident.

Hitler says that Jews stick to one big lie, and just keep repeating it. Of course, that is what Hitler did, and was doing in the moment of the accusation.

Hitler’s point is that, if you create a big lie, you should stick to it, and insist on it, and people will accept it. And Hitler did that all the time, as in his insistence on blaming all of Germany’s problems on socialists (whom he insisted on characterizing as communist). But there is a performative point that Hitler is making, too, meaning that Hitler’s rhetorical power came not just from what he argued but how he argued.

Hitler blamed everything, including the faults of his own party, on the Jews. That was his big lie. His big lie was that Germany’s problems could be solved by excluding the impure people (Jews, Romas, Sintis, homosexuals, communists, union labor organizers, feminists, immigrants) from the community.

Brooks was, in his speech, repeating the GOP Bit Lie: that Trump didn’t collude with Russia, that it doesn’t matter if he did, and that anyone who is concerned about the issue is a socialist. There is another GOP Big Lie Brooks repeats: that Hitler was a leftist because his party was socialist.

Hitler, in that passage was (as he always was) projecting onto his out-group (“the Jews”) what he was doing in that moment.

And that is what matters about the Alabama congressman. Not that he cited Hitler, but that he was projecting. In a speech that was the repetition of a Big Lie (that Trump did nothing wrong), Brooks condemned the left (whom he called “socialist”) for doing what he was doing in the moment of the accusation: repeating a Big Lie. And that’s important.

But various leftist media instead condemned him for quoting a rabidly antisemitic passage from Hitler (e.g.). That’s an incoherent criticism. He was quoting Hitler in order to condemn anyone who disagreed with him. He wasn’t endorsing Hitler. He wasn’t endorsing Hitler’s antisemitism.

That criticism either assumes a kind of guilt by contact argument, or else assumes that it can invoke the pleasures of outrage on the part of people who won’t click through to figure out what he actually said.

I think it’s probably a bit of both, and I think both are harmful to the left. If it’s the association argument, it’s promoting the notion of pure speech, that doesn’t anything bad. If it’s the pleasure of outrage, it just makes lefties look like dumbasses.

Brooks’ argument was bad faith; it was also incoherent; it was also self-referential. Let’s take him to task for those issues, not for antisemitism.