Attack of the Crypto-Nazis! – Tablet Magazine
Nevertheless, today s gentry liberal social scientists carry on the discredited tradition of Adorno by redefining values that are widely shared not only by conservatives but also by centrists and even moderate liberals as authoritarian and contrasting them with liberal values, which just happen to be the values of those of the one-fifth or so of the population that defines itself as very liberal or progressive. According to Harvard s Pippa Norris: Authoritarian values are those which uphold belief in strong leaders, in a strong state, and in robust law and order. These are traditional values like family, home, religion &
Yet support for family, home, religion is far from being authoritarian. In fact, it is shared by most people from the center right to the center left in the U.S. and other democracies. The attempt to redefine the beliefs of the broad political center as harbingers of fascism isn t political science; it s the politics of gentry liberal technocrats, who seek to claim the title of centrism even as they stigmatize the actual political center and polarize the country in order to facilitate their own power and influence.
In the 1960s, liberals painted the toothbrush mustache on the libertarian Barry Goldwater. Since then, despite their differences, Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have all been potential American Hitlers, according to many of their Democratic contemporaries in American journalism and the universities and political life.
Today, the theory that many or most working-class and rural Americans are crypto-Nazis comes in several versions, depending on what exactly it is that is supposed to have triggered lower-class lowbrows to vote Republican instead of voting for Democrats who supposedly represent their interests which now apparently include DEI, transgender surgeries for minors, unlimited immigration, and abolishing the police. In one version, rural and working-class voters were turned into democracy-wrecking monsters by economic disappointment. This was the theme of Barack Obama s famous leaked 2008 comments from a confidential talk to wealthy Democratic donors in San Francisco:
Michael Lind is on fire with this one.