The Politics of Hate
Charlottesville, NC right-wing demonstration
From the Three Parks Independent Democrats Newsletter
by Steve Max
Is the spreading Right Wing hate campaign just something to please the Republican base, or is it part of a larger electoral strategy, one borrowed from pre- war Germany? A few careless sentences can sometimes reveal the opposition’s whole plan. Senator Ted Cruz did that very thing in late March when he attacked the Democrats’ bill to extend voting rights. Here is how The New York Times reported it:
“ ‘This bill is the single most dangerous bill this committee has ever considered,’ said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. ‘This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats... .’ He falsely claimed that the bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.”
Here, Cruz reveals the two main parts of the Republican electoral strategy for the coming years: attack voting rights and spread fear and hatred of specific minority groups. Of course, Cruz was continuing the now familiar Trump/Republican attack on immigrants. Said USA Today:
“Trump has used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. More than half of those utterances came in the two months prior to the 2018 midterm election, underscoring that Trump views immigration as a central issue for his core supporters.”
The rise of hates crimes against Asian Americans reminds us, almost daily, of the Republican attempts to blame the COVID crisis on them. In fact, Forbes reports that one fourth of all Americans have witnessed Asians being blamed for COVID.
The Washington Post of 3/23 reported on the continuing Republican attack against African Americans. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) condemned a provision in the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that expanded the earned income tax credit for single people. His reason: the change would favor Black Americans because they have lower marriage rates than White Americans. Grothman said, “I bring it up because I know the strength that Black Lives Matter had in this last election. I know it’s a group that doesn’t like the old-fashioned family.”
It is clear how the Republicans hope to gain by reducing voter participation, but how does the hate program fit into their reelection strategy? Those of us who have been nervously studying the rise of Fascism in Germany are well aware that Trump and his allies have borrowed generously from the Hitler playbook. Looking back at those times, it often seems that German anti-Semitism was a blind and irrational lashing out at the Jews by people who had never liked them in the first place. However, in the years of Hitler’s rise to power, it was more purposeful. Here is how the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam explains it on their educational web page.
“Hitler blamed the Jews for everything that was wrong with the world. Germany was weak and in decline due to the 'Jewish influence'. According to Hitler, the Jews were after world dominance. And they would not hesitate to use all possible means, including capitalism. In this way, Hitler took advantage of the existing prejudice that linked the Jews to monetary power and financial gain... . In nationalist and right-wing conservative circles, the ‘stab-in-the-back legend’ became popular. According to this myth, Germany did not lose the [First World] War on the battlefield, but through betrayal at the home front. The Jews, Social Democrats, and Communists were held responsible.”
The web site Alpha History adds this:
“As the Nazis tightened their grip on propaganda, information and the press, the anti-Jewish campaign increased. Jews were blamed for every undesirable aspect of German society – murders and sexual assaults, disappearances, petty crime, street violence, begging, prostitution, pornography, the sale of illegal alcohol and drugs, even pollution.”
An excellent 2019 opinion piece in the The New York Times summarized it this way:
“Hitler’s anti-Semitism produced a simple answer to every complicated question. Or, rather, it transformed questions about what might be best for Germans into a séance of mysterious forces that governed the world. A solution no longer meant effectively addressing a specific problem but the elimination of those mysterious forces, personified as Jews. ...
Hitler and the Nazis had found the simple slogan they repeated again and again to discredit reporters: ‘Lügenpresse.’ Today the extreme right in Germany has revived this term, which in English is ‘fake news.’ The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.”
The message to the German people was clear. It wasn’t just that the Germans were the master race and the Jews inferior people, it was that if you want to make Germany great again, you must vote for the party that will deal with the people who are causing the problems. This is the strategy of the Trump Republican Party and the Far Right today. Every crazed perpetrator of a hate crime may not be aware of the larger political picture, but the people and organizations that are inciting hate crimes are doing so with great deliberation.
Yes, racial bias, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment have long permeated American culture, just as anti-Semitism had existed for centuries in much of Europe. Now, however, the Trump Republican Party is strengthening, mobilizing and weaponizing those sentiments as a means of gaining political power. Certainly defeating racism requires changing individual attitudes, but it also requires defeating Republicans. The personal is political.