Media liberals have been performing an increasingly common shtick. They piously proclaim that they are not comparing President Donald Trump and MAGA to Hitler and the Nazis ...and then they proceed to do exactly that. The latest example of this absurdly disingenuous technique comes via David A. Graham in Saturday's Atlantic magazine with "The Film That Explains Contemporary America."
The title itself actually says that the film directed by Marcel Ophuls which is the excellent documentary The Sorrow and The Pity about life in occupied France during World War II "EXPLAINS Contemporary America." And yet Graham after the obvious comparison presents the following obligatory disclaimer denying that he is making any such comparison. So let us first look at his disclaimer in which any savvy observer would know he is just winking at the readers to not take it too seriously.
...I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds...
In the very next paragraph, Graham starts comparing Nazism and MAGA:
The Vichy regime, like MAGA politicians and media personalities, simply had to find the right propaganda to agitate the population and, if not win them over, at least drive them away from other groups that might threaten the government...
When President Trump tries to use the National Guard, Marine troops, and agents from Customs and Border Protection or ICE to stifle protests and achieve political goals, he risks the same corruption of institutions created to protect the populace.
And now, without pause, Graham continues his worn routine:
Two of the most important forces driving the American far right are negative polarization—politics motivated by a hatred of the opposing side—and disaffection of young men.
...But he [a French Waffen SS soldier] also acknowledges that, as for some on the MAGA right today, the transgressiveness of Nazism appealed to him and his friends: “It was a way of rebelling against our families. The first images we saw of Nuremberg were like a new religion to us. We were astounded.”
Graham concludes, as you might have guessed, with MAGA on his mind:
My colleague David Frum once wrote about the Trump era, 'When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it.' I thought about that a lot while watching The Sorrow and the Pity, which showed how true it was in France.
And don't forget to remember that David A. Graham is absolutely NOT using "historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States." Wink! Wink!
