Why we have to talk about Hitler when we discuss Trump and Sanders: Don Pittis

Godwin's law, also sometimes known as the Hitler rule, statesthat eventually, all protracted arguments, especially on the internet, end up with the introduction of an analogy to Hitler and Nazi Germany the ultimate sign thatthey have gone too far.

But despite the warning implied by the rulefirst proposed by Mike Godwin, author ofCyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age it remainsuseful to applylessons fromEurope's interwar period to what is happening in the currentU.S. presidential election campaign.

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Interfactional violence that forced the cancellation of a Trump rally in Chicagoon Fridaynight was certainly a worrying sign that something is happening outside of what we think of as the run-of-the-mill American electoral process.

Photographs of a woman wearing a Trump T-shirt giving an unmistakable Nazi raised-arm salute have only increased the tension. Her confusing explanation cannot remove the visceral impact of that image, something bound to further polarize an election marked by clashing ideologies.

There hadalready been comparisons, even in the most credible of media, between Donald Trump and the Nazis, but the details of the Republican front-runner's anti-Muslimviews and wild statements labellingimmigrants rapists areonlyincidental to a much more important phenomenon that includes Democratic presidential candidate BernieSanders, too.

Nazi allusions

Certainly, stories in the mainstream media have not shied away from associating Trump with Adolf Hitler. USA Today and the Financial Times have made explicit Nazi allusions.

Even before the Friday night incident, The Economist made reference to "a fascist-style salute," ostensibly made byTrump's supportersin Florida last week as he was asking themto pledge to vote for him. Since then, the notion ofany similarity has been discredited, including bywell-knownU.S. rabbi and broadcaster Mark Golub.

"To suggest that Donald Trump mimicked Adolf Hitler is to totally undermine and to trivialize the horrific evil that Adolf Hitler was," saidGolub.

A polarized dispute

Apart from efforts by political opponentsto identify their enemy with the modern personification of ultimate evil, there is another reason to compare the current polarized U.S. election campaign with Europe after the First World War.

While the period did, eventually, see the Nazi regime come to power,according toHitler biographer Ian Kershaw, there was nothing inevitable about it.

At the time, all of Europe was in turmoil. Long-held conventions of the social order had collapsed.Perhaps most important, the economy was in chaos, especially in Germany.

Whathad been a stable, confident economic system with soundbanking, full employment,pensions for workers anduniversal education was torn apart by the Great War.

Even as they pitched out the Kaiser and increased the power of the country'sparliamentary system, Germans knew the economy wasn't working. They just didn't know how to fix it.

No easy answers

I onlyread Kershaw's1,000-page brick last month after seeing it recommended. It wassort of by mistake, because I ordered it from the library as my subway readingwithout realizing what a monster it would be to lug around.

One of the most fascinating revelations in it was how completely unlikely it was that Hitler would ever come to power. When it was formed, hisNational SocialistGermanWorkers'Partywas only one of many political groups of the left and right and by no means the largest.

While the duly elected government struggled to get the economy back on track, mainstream leaders were increasinglyseen as helpless or indecisive or merely perpetuating the unacceptable status quo.

The country's voters knew what they wanted. They wanted a return to the good times they had had before the war. They wanted jobs and good food. They wanted their pride back. They wanted to make Germany great again.

The deadlypolitical battle that ensued was not because they ultimately wanted different things, but because each tiny faction had a different idea about how to get there. Not really knowing what was wrong, they became increasingly angry and chose different enemies to blame.Asthey fought it out and became more extreme, the various factionscoalesced into two polar opposites.

"We confirm the existence of a link betweenpolitical extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth orcontraction of the economy," concluded a group ofeconomists from the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley.

Their 2012 study whose findings were uncontaminated by the current presidential racespecifically focuses on the rise of right wing "anti-system"parties during the Great Depression. But it found that extremists of all stripes did better in countries where democracy was new or weak.

America's saving grace

And this may be the lesson of the analogy and at the same time the saving grace of the American political system.

A large group, probably a majority, of Americans are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. America is not the power it once was. Americans used to be rich, with good working-class jobs and a robust middle class.

American voters want those days back, butvoting fortraditional leadershas not done the trick, because with the best will in the world, there is no easy solution.

So long as the disenchantment continues without solution, the polarization will continue, too.- Don Pittis

In hope of finding a way back to the golden age, voters have begun to polarize around twodifferent sets of solutions with different groups being assigned the blame. But just as the time between the wars, whether or not extreme solutions ateither pole will solve the current economic problems in the long term remains a crap shoot.

Of course, despite a few similarities, the differences between the eras and the players remainhuge. But so long as the disenchantment continues without solution, the polarization will continue, too.

Unlike in interwar Germany, the U.S. dispute, while polarized, remains firmly within a long and vibrant democratic tradition, a very good thing in a country whosecitizens are armed to the teeth.

If the U.S. wants to avoid what happened in Germany, it is essential that the United States remain within that strong political tradition, and no matter how heated and polarized the debate becomes, that everyone in the countrycontinues to honour their democratic institutions.So long as theydon'tcarry things too far, they will come out the other side even stronger.

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