Just Look For The Armbands

To the surprise of no one, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) is back in the news. This time, she compared a statement by President Biden that "We need to go community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood and ofttimes door-to-door, literally knocking on doors" to increase the number of people in the United States who are vaccinated.

To which Representative Taylor Greene responded (in part) "People have a choice, they don't need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door order vaccinations."

Which, in turn, prompted Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) to ask "Why does the Republican Party continue to embrace someone who thinks the Holocaust was so insignificant it deserves to be compared to public health efforts?"

Because the Republican voters of Georgia's 14th district, and Republican voters more broadly, see their own fear and loathing of Democratic voters and politicians echoed in Representative Taylor Greene's comments. I would have thought that much was pretty clear. Nazis are a pretty low-hanging stand-in for "evil people," and so partisans make comparisons between political figures and constituencies that they dislike and Nazis pretty much all the time. In fact, I don't think that it's far off the mark by this point to say that "Nazi" has stopped meaning a member of the now-defunct National Socialist German Workers' Party or a would-be revivalist of same and is simply a term for a person whose politics the speaker finds frightening and deliberately wrong-headed. It's much the same with "Fascist," which for a long time, had come to mean anyone the speaker finds both old and politically odious.

And this likely is the reason why Representative Taylor Greene makes parallels to Nazi Germany so casually. Her references have nothing to do with the state-sanctioned killings of Jews, or anyone else, during the 1930s and 40s. It's simply about conjuring up an image of an implacable, totalitarian evil that must be resisted in all things and at all costs. Were the Biden Administration to announce a scheme to provide free ham sandwiches to everyone in the United States, I would not be surprised to find that Representative Taylor Greene had a Zyklon B reference in her back pocket, ready to be deployed. And it would have nothing to do with downplaying the Holocaust or any of the systematic killings perpetrated by the Third Reich; it would simply be another way of making it clear that she considered the Democratic party to be the current face of evil on Earth.

Because this is what people want to hear. That their current political situation, which is nothing more than a political party they don't favor holding the White House and a tenuous majority in Congress is the same as an organized program of persecution and repression aimed at them because of their fundamental righteousness. Representative Taylor Greene's invocation of Nazism and the Third Reich are reinforcing a narrative of victimization at the hands of the wicked and depraved. Never mind that there have been no concentration camps or gas chambers. They're coming, because that's just how bad governments are when the just and pure don't fight back. Conservative Americans who have come to see their outlook as being the correct one want to be told that they are suffering the travails of the just in an unjust world, Representative Taylor Greene sings on command and the rest of the Republican establishment backs her, because if they don't, they know precisely who will be on the next list of supposed Nazis to be denounced.