ATL Contrarian

Rick Santorum and Nazis

He’s quite fond of comparing political opponents to the Third Reich, as Dana Milbank points out:

His most famous episode came in 2005, when Democrats criticized Senate Republicans for threatening to do away with the filibuster. “The audacity of some members to stand up and say, ‘How dare you break this rule?’ — it’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, ‘I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.’ ”

That same year, Santorum published a book, “It Takes a Family,” in which he tied fetal genetic testing, evolution theory and embryonic stem-cell research to Nazism. He quoted with approval the view that diagnosing and aborting fetuses with genetic malformations “can be considered an earlier phase” of the “German negative eugenics movement.”

Of the Darwinian view of a “purposeless universe,” Santorum wrote that “the Nazis built their pseudoethics with its grim logic on precisely this Nietzschean cosmological view.” Embryonic stem-cell research, he added, makes him “wonder if we have merely been momentarily delayed in our slide” toward the Nazi ethics.

The Nazi comparison is typically the first refuge of an extremist.

atlmalcontent

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4 responses to “Rick Santorum and Nazis”

  1. Jack Straw

    You must not have read “1984” recently. Santorum well may be correct on the basics. Ask the millions of unborn Chinese and Indian girls. Oops, you can’t.

    Jonah Goldberg is right. Liberals are fascists. “Everything inside the state; nothing outside the state.” Nationalized health care, for instance.

  2. wuky

    Jack, I agree with Santorum’s principles of faith & family. It’s his method of persuasion that will prevent him from every winning the general election, which is the ultimate goal. No independents will side with Santorum.

    By the way, I disagree with you that “liberals are fascists.” The 10-15% fringe in both parties are too extreme, yet their interests are too often represented by the media as the face of their respective party and it forces more mainstream candidates to pander for their vote.

  3. Jack Straw

    Wuky, you are correct on the first point. Santorum lacks the warmth of spirit that made Ronald Reagan, and even George W. Bush, electable. He is strident, didactic and condescending.

    “Fascism” has become a pejorative, but it is nothing more than a way of positing the relationship between the individual and the state. Granting the central government authority over all aspects of society, under the guise of remediation of social ills, is a slide toward fascism even by well-intentioned liberals.

    Hatred, poverty, laziness, poor genetics – these things cannot be eliminated by the state. Nor is it the governmental function to attempt to do so.

  4. fonsie18

    That’s a gross oversimplification, and a nice piece of revisionist history. There may be some existential similarities, but flipping the political spectrum so that it fits with your own ideologies is about as scholarly as Goldberg’s actual work. You note that “‘Fascism’ has become a pejorative,” then gleefully pin the label on “well-intentioned liberals.” Go back and look at the original post–the irony is tremendous .

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