Here’s How Democrats Can Expose the GOP’s Dishonesty About Fascism.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 17: A Closer Look at the “Uniparty” Fable
RFK Jr. and MTG are using the same dismissive term for major-party differences. I took at look at this phenomenon at New York:
Partisan polarization has been steadily growing in the U.S. since roughly the 1960s. Ironically, during this time, the complaint that the two parties are actually too alike has become increasingly prevalent. For years, right-wing Republicans have called people in the GOP who don’t share their exact degree of ideological extremism RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” suggesting they’re basically Democrats. Left-wing Democrats occasionally echo these epithets by calling (relative) moderates “DINOs,” “ConservaDems,” or — back when maximum resistance to George W. Bush was de rigueur — “Vichy Democrats.”
Today the term “Uniparty” has come to denote the idea that Democrats and Republicans are actually working for the same evil Establishment enterprise, their loudly proclaimed differences being a mere sham. This contention was the culmination of a five-page letter Marjorie Taylor Greene recently sent her Republican colleagues calling for House Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal, unless he changes his ways instantly. She wrote:
“With so much at stake for our future and the future of our children, I will not tolerate this type of ‘leadership.’ This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority …
“If these actions by the leaders of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican party – we are a Uniparty that is hell-bent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also leaned heavily into the Uniparty idea in his recent speech introducing running-mate Nicole Shanahan:
“Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.”
The Uniparty claim is ridiculous, of course, as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley demonstrates:
“[O]ur current political moment is arguably farther away from having anything resembling a uniparty than at any other time in modern U.S. history. Based on their voting records, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have become increasingly polarized, and both the more moderate and more conservative wings of the congressional GOP have moved to the right at similar rates. Meanwhile, polling suggests that Americans now are more likely to view the parties as distinct from one another than in the past, an indication that the public broadly doesn’t see a uniparty in Washington. Although there are areas where the parties are less divided, the broader uniparty claim is at odds with our highly polarized and divided political era.”
Kennedy’s subscription to the Uniparty notion is understandable on two points. The first is that his candidacy is vastly more likely to tilt the 2024 presidential campaign in the direction of one of the two major-party candidates (likely Donald Trump, according to most of the polling) than to actually succeed in winning the presidency. Maintaining that it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Biden or Trump running the country is essential to maintaining RFK’s appeal as November approaches and the futility of his bid becomes clearer. Second, Kennedy’s pervasive conspiracy-theory approach to contemporary life lends itself to the argument that the apparent gulf between the two major parties is a ruse disguising a sinister common purpose.
MTG’s Uniparty contention also reflects dual motives. In part she is simply echoing Trump’s weird but useful contention that he’s an “outsider” battling a Deep-State Establishment that secretly controls both parties, which is pretty rich since he dominates the GOP like Genghis Khan dominated the Golden Horde. But there is a marginally more legitimate sense in which key elements of the two parties really are in line with each other on isolated issues that happen to obsess Greene, such as aid to Ukraine. If you are a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.
The same is true of other implicit Uniparty claims, particularly those made by progressive pro-Palestinian protesters who adamantly argue that the need to smite “Genocide Joe” Biden for his pro-Israel policies outweighs all the reasons it might be a bad idea to help Trump return to the White House (including the fact that Trump is palpably indifferent to Palestinian suffering). If the two parties do not appear to differ on your overriding issue, then the fundamental reality of polarization can fade into irrelevance.
So we’re likely to hear more Uniparty talk even as Democrats and Republicans head toward another highly fractious election with very high stakes attributable to their differences.
Euclid, brown shoe polish is brown and so are feces, but to compare the two because they are the same color is to confess the inability to distinguish shit from Shinola.
(note: the brief comment posted above is intended to be a reply to the Feb 18 comment by Euclid. It is posted in the wrong location)
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Mr. Lawford continues to seem utterly and completely baffled by the concept of how to compare the actions of MAGA/Republicans and Fascists on a scale of 0 to 10 which is what the strategy memo itself discusses.
If I am asked to compare brown shoe polish and feces on a scale of 0 to 10 I would at first probably assign the comparison a 0. If someone then correctly points out that the two things do indeed share the color brown I would probably then revise my rating to a 0.5 or so in order to indicate that in that one minor respect an extremely slight relationship does indeed exist.
But I certainly would not be so utterly mystified by the task as Mr. Lawford seems to be. Setting aside his rather immature attempt at humor, the logical content of his comment is that “if both A and B are brown, anyone who notes this similarity in comparing the two must therefore be completely unable to distinguish between them at all.”
It is, one hopes, unnecessary to explain at any length why this argument is wrong.
In reality, what Mr. Lawrence is actually attempting to do is to ridicule any possible comparisons of the behavior of the MAGA wing of the GOP with events in Germany in the 1930’s as being so utterly and entirely absurd that only a complete idiot would do so.
Well, Dr. Deborah Lipstadt is not an idiot. She is one of the most respected historians of the Holocaust. The following quotation from the strategy memo being discussed makes a preliminary point and then directly quotes her perspective:
“Since most Americans have absolutely no knowledge about Italian, Spanish and post-war Neo-Fascism only extremely vague images of German Nazi fascism in the 1930’s (images based largely on movies) Republicans easily dismiss any discussion of the issue by arguing that all comparisons of Trump and MAGA with fascism represent absurd accusations that they are engaging in mass arrests, torture and genocide. But anyone with even a limited knowledge of the period is aware that that there are more subtle comparisons that are not so easily discounted. ”
“As the leading historian of the period Deborah Lipstadt has noted:”
“I do think certain comparisons are fitting … it’s certainly not 1938,” when Nazis led the Kristallnacht pogroms throughout Germany. “It’s not even September 1935, and the Nuremberg Laws” institutionalizing racist policies. “What it well might be, however, is [the earlier period around] December 1932, Hitler comes to power on Jan. 30, 1933 – it might be Jan. 15, 1933.”
There is, therefore, absolutely nothing at all absurd or idiotic about discussing comparisons between MAGA and fascism.
Indeed, one would certainly hope that Mr. Lawford would not walk up to Dr. Lipstadt at an academic conference and tell her that she is so stupid that “she cannot tell shit from shinola.” If he would be ashamed to say this to her – as one would certainly hope he would be — he should also be ashamed to say it to anyone else as well.
No one with a minor knowledge of fascism in history would take seriously any of Andrew Levison’s accusation of fascism toward the Republican Party. For example, Levison compares Trump’s claim of a stolen election in 2020 to the Reichstag fire. Does Levison realize that after the Reichstag fire, Hitler had all the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag arrested and sent to concentration camps? Trump did nothing of the sort. Quite the contrary, he allowed the Democrats to gain a Congressional majority. Levison compares Fox News and other right wing media to the Reich Propaganda Ministry. The latter was a government office which monopolized German radio and had dissenting newspapers forcibly shut down. Fox News is a private enterprise which is anything but a monopoly and has no power to suppress its competitors. Soon after taking power, Hitler had 150 leaders of the Storm Troopers arrested and shot without trial. How many Republicans did Trump have assassinated? Did Hitler ever run for re-election?
Would Hitler have tolerated being impeached? I have seen many silly comparisons of Trump and the Republicans to Hitler and the Nazis, but Levison’s takes the cake.
The commenter apparently does not understand how comparing two things on a scale of one to 10 works. One can assign a very low number that indicates there is little or no relationship or one can assign a 9 or 10 to indicate a very close relationship. As the author of the commentary notes MAGA and Trump supporters would assign very low numbers to the comparisons suggested while others would assign higher ones.
The commenter seems to think that comparing two things on a scale of 1 to 10 means that they all are automatically assigned a 10.
This is not how comparing things on a scale of one to ten works.
I hope this simple explanation clarifies the commenters confusion. Otherwise, when a doctor asks him to rank his pain on a scale of one to 10 he will shout – “Are you crazy? I’m not in agony.”