THE PANDER, NOT THE POEM.

In Indiana yesterday, Hillary Clinton got a bit lyrical when discussing the plight of the modern worker:

At the union hall in Gary, she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemöller, about the victims of Nazism. “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist,” goes the version inscribed on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. After coming for the trade unionists, it continues, “they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.”In Mrs. Clinton’s version, she intoned: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

My TAP colleague Dana cries foul. "I know Nazi analogies have a long history, as Rick pointed out yesterday, but can't we just agree to retire them? Outsourcing is not genocide." I say nay! World War II was the defining historical event of the 20th century. It's one of the few common touchstones our culture has. This idea that we can't use anything connected to it in analogies or metaphor lest we fall afoul of Godwin's Law is a really, really odd one. Now, you obviously want to take care in your usage. Otherwise, you come off looking like a bit of a fool. But in this context, Clinton is repurposing a gorgeous and well-known poem that speaks to the need for solidarity in order to speak to the need for class solidarity. That's a good thing! And her usage is fair: The economic forces buffeting the society are not contained to the manufacturing sector or even blue collar industries. Insofar as there's a problem, it's that she's being disingenuous. Among those who came for the steelworkers was...the Clinton administration! They passed NAFTA, accelerated trade with China and India, focused on knocking down various protectionist barriers, etc. Now, I agreed with the Clinton administration's decision to not spend a whole heap of time erecting protectionist barriers around dying industries. If Clinton wants to reverse that approach, so be it. But then she should explain exactly what she's going to say when Toyota "comes for" the American car industry because they decided to focus on compact, endlessly reliable, impressively fuel efficient cars rather than pump development dollars into SUVs, trucks, and horsepower advances. I don't really imagine she's thought that line out. Nor do I actually think she can save American manufacturing (the question, as I've argued before, is whether we can shift gears and save high value American manufacturing). In other words, the problem here is the pander, not the poem.