They have become a media sensation. Their trick is to show up at
town-hall meetings and challenge congresspersons with crazy
declarations and nonsensical questions. They compare Barack Obama to
Adolf Hitler and health-care reform to Nazism.
Of course, many (if not all) white supremacists are displeased by
this comparison. They find it deeply offensive that their beloved
führer is repeatedly compared to a black man whose father was
Kenyan, whose mother was white (meaning Obama entered the world by way
of miscegenation), and whose closest advisers are Jewish. White
supremacists most certainly hate this absurd association drawn by the
teabaggers. But the people disturbing town-hall meetings and carrying
pictures of Obama sporting a small mustache will not let go of the
comparison. They need it, because it makes things clear to the world:
Who is Obama? Obama is Hitler. “DIFFERENT COLOR, SAME OLD SHIT,”
screamed a sign held by an angry-looking teabagger. How could you not
understand that?
The teabaggers make the comparison because they’ve suffered a shock,
a shock that has no relief in sight, a shock that only seems to grow
and grow and make the world evermore alien and inhospitable—the
shock that America is now run by a black man. But another mechanism is
at work in this comparison, a mechanism that is not on the minds of the
GOP’s fevered foot soldiers but is certainly on the minds of the
party’s intelligentsia. The comparison has its roots in a group of
German economists who, after World War II, established the European and
American strains of neoliberalism.
“[For the] people who inspired the programming of neo-liberal
politics in Germany [in the 1940s], the experience of Nazism was at the
very heart of their reflection,” said the French philosopher Michel
Foucault in a lecture he delivered on the morning of February 7,
1979. “Nazism enabled them to define what I would call the field
of adversity that they had to define and cross in order to reach their
objective.” What is this all about? How does this passage relate to the
teabaggers? Let’s begin with a definition and a short history of
neoliberalism, and end with a quick look at the book that contains
Foucault’s lectures on the history of neoliberalism, The Birth of
Biopolitics.
Neoliberalism is an economic program that places great importance on
the mechanism of the market and its freedoms, its innovations, its
dynamic and productive forces. The market is everything that the
government is not: efficient, reliable, progressive. Any effort to
control the market, to manage or direct its course, is seen as an act
of madness. This way of thinking is called “neoliberalism” because it
is a return to many of the principles of the physiocrats of
18th-century France (the logic of laissez-faire) and the classical
political economists in the UK (the logic of the invisible hand).
After Word War II, German economists associated with the Freiburg
School (“ordoliberals”), and influenced by Austrian economists Ludwig
von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, circulated the notion that a free and
big market and a small government was the best thing for Germany’s
future. They argued that any form of government intervention, planning,
or programs would inevitably lead to Nazism. For them, the Nazi state
was the government in its final condition, the state in a position of
total control. Foucault says: “The Freiburg liberals… thought they
could establish National Socialism as an invariant which, as both cause
and effect, was absolutely bound up with the unlimited growth of state
power.” The fight for free markets was a fight against the Nazis.
How did these ideas cross the Atlantic? By way of Hayek, his popular
book The Road to Serfdom, and his influence on the Chicago
School of Economics. From the Chicago School develops the American
brand of neoliberalism that to this day dominates American economic
policy. (When Obama went to Africa and criticized President Robert
Mugabe for mismanaging the national economy of Zimbabwe by keeping it
closed, even he sounded like a neoliberal.)
Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism are clear, easy to follow, and
fascinating because, for one, they were delivered at the very moment
the ideas of the Chicago School entered reality. As the Marxist
geographer David Harvey points out in several of his essays, the ideas
of the Chicago School transformed Chile and New York City in the 1970s.
By the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan rose to power
and began privatizing anything they could get their hands on. By the
1990s, economic power had shifted from the industrial sector to Wall
Street, and the International Monetary Fund became the instrument for
the liberalization of the global market, dismantling welfare programs
and privatizing government services.
The intelligentsia of the GOP want to demonize Obama’s health-care
plan and discredit the public option by drawing the most extreme
comparison they can—that neoliberalism is the progressive fight
against tyranny and that Obama is pulling us backward to the age of
state control.
But is Hitler the same as Obama? Is health-care reform the same as
the Nazification of America? Foucault says no. Why? Because people like
the teabaggers are confusing state power with something very different:
party power. Hitler’s Germany was a one-party state. The expansion of
violence, the transformation of the market into a war machine, the
repression of dissent—all of this was the result of unlimited
party power, without the dissent of a multiparty state, without the
dissent the teabaggers so loudly exercise for such stupid purposes.
They may wreck America’s chance to join the rest of the developed world
in providing affordable health care, but that is the price of
liberty—the liberty the teabaggers insist is being taken away.
Their confusion is destructive, but it is their right.
The more accurate comparison with Nazism would be the GOP obtaining
absolute power, weakening the Democrats until America is effectively a
one-party state: a political condition that Karl Rove attempted to
realize while George W. Bush was in office, a condition Fox News still
dreams about every day. 
it’s freiburg, not freiberg.
which, btw, is an amazingly green city that would be great to emulate (hint, hint)
Yay Charles!
Good Afternoon Charles,
Under no circumstances should Pres. Obama have been compared to Hitler. The “teabaggers” clearly overstepped the bounds of propriety. In the USA, it is virtually impossible for it to become a one-party state largely because of the “separation of powers” conceived by Foucault’s fellow Frenchman, Montesquieu which the founders of this great Republic enshrined at it’s inception in 1776.
It is GOOD that we have dissent in Congress considering that Pres. Obama enjoys Democratic majorities in both houses.
That said, on other side of the coin Rove via Bush and the GOP didn’t want a one party state either. It’s unfair (and I’m not a fan of Rove) and inaccurate to say it was “a political condition that Karl Rove attempted to realize while George W. Bush was in office”.
Comparing Obama & the Democrats and Bush & the Republicans to Hitler and the Nazis just doesn’t cut it. Pres. Obama (like Bush before him) knows that it isn’t a cakewalk to get his agenda through given the “separation of powers” and the nature of America’s political process.
Good Afternoon Charles,
Under no circumstances should Pres. Obama have been compared to Hitler. The “teabaggers” clearly overstepped the bounds of propriety. In the USA, it is virtually impossible for it to become a one-party state largely because of the “separation of powers” conceived by Foucault’s fellow Frenchman, Montesquieu which the founders of this great Republic enshrined at it’s inception in 1776.
It is GOOD that we have dissent in Congress considering that Pres. Obama enjoys Democratic majorities in both houses.
That said, on other side of the coin Rove via Bush and the GOP didn’t want a one party state either. It’s unfair (and I’m not a fan of Rove) and inaccurate to say it was “a political condition that Karl Rove attempted to realize while George W. Bush was in office”.
Comparing Obama & the Democrats and Bush & the Republicans to Hitler and the Nazis just doesn’t cut it. Pres. Obama (like Bush before him) knows that it isn’t a cakewalk to get his agenda through given the “separation of powers” and the nature of America’s political process.
Innuendos are pretty cheap – hinting that the people you don’t agree with are racists (“shock that America is now run by a black man”) or marxists (by quoting irrelevant statements of a marxist) is a way to go when there are no real arguments.
Before making any claims, read the definition of fascism. Use Benito Mussolini’s one (he knew the stuff since he was one of the evil fathers of the idelology). it is a merge of industry and the State, with state directing economy. The read Hayek on why central planning leads to dictatorships. Then read Hazzlit (Economy in One lesson). When you educate yourself beyond a trivial 1 pager in an newspaper, you will see in disgust what’s going on. Obama is not doing anything new, he is just accelerating what was already happening – the merge of State and industry, central planning and unaccountable csars, and 2 million federal employees producing nothing and leaving off the rest of us, just like leaches – and paying themselves and their Wall Street masters handsomely. And all this BS about black president shock, GOP vs. Dems, etc.. is just a red herring.
@5, If such is the case, if “Obama is not doing anything new,” where, then, were all of these teabagger people during the Bush years? Did they protest his merging of “state and industry”?
Charles – I completely agree, plenty of these “tea-baggers” are GOP bigots and have no credibility for exactly the reason you’ve mentioned.
Unfortunately it does not change the fact that Bush started bailouts, Obama extended bailouts (actually, H. Hoover started bailouts, FDR extended bailouts, and it went downhill from there with a partial exception or Reagan), the same with healthcare (though Obama is very aggressive there and Bush II just meddled with prescription). And government run health care is terrible, just as a centrally planned economy – I grew up in Russia and can provide tons of examples from there; as well as from Canada , Israel and UK.
Obama is an excellent orator and a very charismatic man, Bush II IMO was a joke and an embarrassment to the country. Well, since they are doing pretty much the same (while saying completely opposite words), Obama can just do more damage. Take any area and you’ll see the trend.
Explains all the craziness;
1~ Yuri Bezmenov
2~ “Cult of Personality” Living Colour (They rocked in the day!)
Leave it to the ignorant Republican fuckwits to idiotically compare President Barack Obama, who didn’t get America into the abysmal global mess it’s in now—A RICH, CORRUPT SHITBAG OILMAN NAMED GEORGE W.BUSH DID–to,of all people, Adolf Hitler!
No, I think that mustache of criminally insane hatred currently fits Rush Limbaugh much better.
Charles Mudede–you ROCK!!!
Mr. Mudede, I’m usually one of your detractors, but I have to give you credit for a well written article with (as best I can follow in this stuff that’s well over my head) well thought out arguments.
That said, I think you might be over analyzing the reason behind this comparison being so widely used. I think it more likely that it’s being used because of the knee-jerk reaction it gets out of the base which the GOP panders to. Would that we could just roll our eyes, mutter “Godwin’s Law”, and move on to having a real discussion about health care with those who have reservations.
Here’s my black president:
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonkno…
you uncover a lot of important history here, charles. but dig deeper.
the tea parties were first brought back into popularity during the bush administration by ron paul. the events caught larger media attention when the larouche-bags joined in.
the gop talks small government only when out of office. while in office, they are big money spenders.
ask any classical liberal or libertarian. friedman was a socialist and america is a one party system.
gop and democrats, once in office, are both big government.