My Facebook feed is currently full of people declaring their opposition to National Socialism (Nazism). This is presumably arising out of the rioting and protests currently going on in Charlottesville, Virginia.
To me, this is like declaring your opposition to people who go around randomly shooting strangers for no reason, or just for the thrill of it. The number of people that engage in thrill killing is incredibly small. Furthermore, there is zero academic, cultural, or media support for thrill killing.
The same is largely true of National Socialism or white supremacy ideas in general. If you include white supremacists with all National Socialists, I think they are an incredibly small number of people. Furthermore, in modern America, National Socialism and white supremacist ideas have no academic, cultural, or media support. There are no university professors advocating National Socialism, and there are no major or local newspapers advocating it.
So why all of the opposition on Facebook to something that, like thrill killing, has no political, moral, or social legitimacy, and is not likely to become a political force in America? There are probably a variety of reasons. I have a few theories, all of which, I admit, are just theories. Partly it may be “virtue signaling”, although publicly proclaiming your opposition to Nazism doesn’t take that much courage, because no one is likely to disagree with you. Part of it may be because the left has so completely conflated Donald Trump and his supporters with Hitler and Nazism, that they can see no difference. In which case, they need to study the history of Germany more. A more ominous possibility is that the left wants to use the activities of an extremely fringe group -neo-Nazi’s and white supremacists- to advance their own political agenda of things like more injustices in the form of affirmative action programs and racial quotas in jobs and university admissions. The left may use the activities of a very small and unimportant group of people, white supremacists, to push for more government power, especially more Federal Government power, in an effort to further erode Federalism and the Constitution.
