By J. J. McCullough
Monday, March 26, 2018
To make a point about anything these days seems to
require ample use of Nazis.
Recent highlights of American discourse have included
debates on punching Nazis, banning Nazi websites, “normalizing” Nazis in the New York Times, and prosecuting men who
teach their girlfriends’ dogs to act like Nazis.
The press is fascinated with Nazis right now because it
fits their larger storyline that contemporary America is mired in some dark
neo-fascist moment, a sensationalistic frame that hasn’t exactly done wonders
for sane political discourse. Which isn’t to say our current Nazi-mania can’t still
offer useful tests of moral clarity.
Since “Nazi” is American shorthand for “worst thing,” and
legal tolerance of “worst things” testifies to the strength and scope of
American constitutional freedom, the determined optimist can find silver
linings amid even the most overheated allegations of Nazi tolerance.
Take, for instance, the breathless agitation over “actual
Nazi” Art Jones, who in recent weeks emerged as the sole candidate for — and
then won — the Republican nomination for Illinois’s third congressional
district.
As “actual Nazis” go, Jones’s credentials are far less
ambiguous than some. He’s the ex-führer of the American Nazi Party, and the
septuagenarian’s decades of enthusiastic involvement in other explicitly
neo-Nazi activities and organizations are notorious and well-documented.
Displayed prominently on his campaign website, amid generic GOP boilerplate, is
a sub-page entitled “Holocaust?” featuring various anti-Semitic ramblings and
conspiracy theories. Asked by the Chicago
Sun-Times to clarify this apparently ambiguous stance, Jones replied, “To
me, the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion
racket.”
Lurid fascination with Jones’s candidacy has been largely
framed as either an omen of what Republicans will tolerate in their present
dark age (“20,000 Republicans just voted for an actual Nazi” blared ThinkProgress), or at its most
charitable, a sort of “news of the weird” anecdote of the broken nature of
American politics in general. Yet viewed from a different angle, the episode is
also a case study of the remarkable protections the American democratic system
affords to the expression of any ideology or philosophy, no matter how hideous.
A fashionable gripe is that the United States has “only”
two political parties — “only one more than Russia,” as Jesse Ventura liked to
say — in contrast with the rest of the supposedly sophisticated world, where
their Election Night graphics resemble Technicolor rainbows. It’s a sloppy
comparison, however, since U.S. political parties are really nothing like the
tightly structured, hierarchical things found elsewhere in the world, and
instead retain a uniquely American communitarian character in which ordinary
citizens hold tremendous power to determine what they think and believe.
The highest power in any American political party is
simply whatever group of citizens chooses to self-identify and register as its
voters and candidates. It is these people who participate in primaries and
determine who will speak for their side in the general election. An American’s
right to act as a Republican or Democrat or Green or neo-Prohibitionist or
whatever is considered a functional manifestation of his or her broader right
to free expression and free association, and cannot be censored by any existing
partisan power structure. Likeminded voters can certainly create a formal
organization to support, fund, and promote their political tribe, and even give
it an official-sounding name like “The Illinois Republican Party,” but the
power of any such entity cannot supersede or veto the wishes of the voters who
comprise the party in practice.
The fact that an “actual Nazi” could wind up the GOP
candidate in Illinois’s third is a byproduct of the low character and courage
of Republicans in that particular corner of Chicago. The self-selected
Republican elite of the state campaigned aggressively against Jones, with
flyers and robocalls, yet was somehow unable, in a riding of over 700,000
people, to scrape up a single human being to run against him.
If Republicans across America were constantly nominating
Nazis as candidates for local office it would certainly be cause for alarm,
since it would reflect a genuine, across-the-board voter appetite. As it
stands, however, the victory of a lone Nazi in a single, uncontested,
low-turnout primary in a deep-blue Democratic district is less a harbinger of a
grim fascist future than a reminder that in a truly free political system, ugly
outcomes are inevitable when only the ugly bother to exercise their rights.
Or, to offer a more positive spin, the fact that a man as
odious and hated as Jones was able to triumph in a free and fair election
serves as proof that America is truly a nation without ideological barriers to
democratic participation, even within its supposedly dogmatic political
parties.
The right of a Chicago fascist to wind up on a
general-election ballot, after all, is little different from the right of an
independent socialist to contest the Democratic presidential primary or the
right of a tea-party libertarian to challenge an incumbent House majority
leader — two recent scenarios of American politics that would be unfathomable
in nations where parties are vastly more closed and ideologically rigid. No
American has the right to win an
audacious political crusade, of course — just as the right to free exercise of
belief entails a corresponding risk of being loathed and condemned, so too is
the right of democratic participation inseparable from the risk of crushing
failure (as Herr Jones will soon discover).
No one likes to see a Nazi on the ballot, any more than
one likes to see a thriving Nazi Internet forum or a smug, punchable Nazi face.
But compared with the alternative, in which some clique of political
gatekeepers is empowered to set the perimeters of acceptable thought and
exclude from public life those who fall outside, it remains a bargain worth
taking.
No comments:
Post a Comment