FASCISTS OR HYSTERICAL PUNDITS?: Diane McWhorter has the most bizarre interpretation of this year�s election results to date, in Slate*. It appears to argue that the midterm elections confirm not that Americans are more populist, or even more conservative, but that they are more fascist. Based on a 66 year old musing from Eleanor Roosevelt, McWhorter asserts--without a shred of empirical evidence--that Americans have a long standing tolerance for any political movement that can instill confidence in the public that they will competently carry out their agenda whatever it may be. At the time, Roosevelt fretted that Nazism would appeal to Americans for that reason. Therefore, she leaps to conclude that Americans only voted Democratic on November 7, because they rejected President Bush�s incompetence, not his policies. While I�m not one to gainsay the importance of the government�s failed response to Hurricane Katrina and violence in Iraq as decisive factors, I think her assertion that Americans would have tolerated a war that killed and maimed thousands, even if it had created a more stable and democratic Iraq, is at best unsupported conjecture. Plenty of Americans opposed the war before it even started, and more still opposed it in 2004 when the occupation was not as clearly a disaster. The rest of her piece seems to be devoted to disabusing the press and politicians of the notion that equating every undemocratic action of the Bush regime with Nazism is actually a good thing, and not a diminishment of the power of the memory of the Holocaust. But she never explains why it�s necessary to make the comparison at all. Isn�t it more effective to simply decry, say torture, as immoral or un-American without reaching for hyperbole as Dick Durbin famously did? And doesn�t McWhorter realize that the first thing most Americans think of when they hear Hitler or Nazi is the Holocaust, so they will invariably make that connection if the press were to, as McWhorter apparently thinks they should, equate Armstrong Williams with Joseph Goebbels propaganda operation? Consequently wouldn�t they dismiss people who use terms like Hitler or Nazism willy-nilly as whiny extremists, regardless of the technical correctness of the specific application? Furthermore, aren�t there other totalitarian regimes that also use propaganda and torture prisoners (Myanmar etc), without those other implications, and wouldn�t comparing the Bush government to them, when such a comparison is actually needed, be more effective? Most sane observers would argue that the Democrats� success this year is better explained by their shrewd restraint in not adopting the shrill language that McWhorter urges, and the American people�s fundamental sensibility, not their sheepish obeisance to competence in their public officials. *Rhyming is for winners. --Ben Adler
