It has become as predictable as it is tiresome for Democrats to slander their Republican opponents with ahistorical comparisons to Nazi Germany, and as if on cue, House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) just did so again for the umpteenth time just days before the midterm elections.
In a blatantly demonizing smear against the probable incoming GOP majority in Congress, Clyburn asserted that the United States was “on track to repeat what happened in Germany” in the 1930s, Townhall reported.
And, no, the Democratic congressman from South Carolina was not referencing the hyperinflation that crippled the pre-Nazi era democratic Weimar Republic and set the stage for the totalitarian regime that followed it.
Republicans are Nazis, of course, again
In an exclusive interview with Fox News, Clyburn said, “This is what happens in a country that follows what happened in Germany in the early 30s, and I said this in 2018 and caught a lot of hell from a lot of people for having said it, but it was true then and it’s true now.”
“This country is on track to repeat what happened in Germany when it was the greatest democracy going, elected a chancellor that then co-opted the media,” he added. “This past president called the press the enemy of the people. That is a bunch of crap. And we know it. And that is what’s going on in this country.”
House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn: “This country is on track to repeat what happened in Germany in the 1930s [if Republicans win].” pic.twitter.com/lbkdPXVCMQ
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 4, 2022
It’s (D)ifferent when we do it
Rep. Clyburn went on in that interview to repeatedly insult the intelligence of the American people by downplaying or dismissing as “different” various actions by Democrats that are, for all intents and purposes, the same things they now rail against Republicans for doing.
The congressman echoed President Joe Biden’s assertion that the Republican “demonization” of top Democratic leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had led to acts of political violence but dismissed Biden’s own vilification of “ultra-MAGA Republicans” as fascists and racists — or his own repeated comparisons of his GOP colleagues to evil Nazis — as not being equivalent.
He also argued that multiple Democratic attempts to challenge and question and undermine the legitimacy of prior electoral victories by Republicans — which he himself has participated in — were not the same thing as the current “election denialism” of the GOP following Biden’s victory in 2020.
Economic concerns not in voters’ “self-interest”
Perhaps most insulting of all, though, was Clyburn’s abject dismissal of the very real economic concerns expressed by a substantial majority of voters and his assertion that people voting on those concerns were voting against “their own self-interest,” according to the New York Post.
“I think that the people should be voting in their own self-interest. And their self-interest is much more than what you may or may not be paying for the price of gas or what you may or may not be paying for a loaf of bread,” he said. “The question is, are we going to have a society that everybody can participate in? Or are we going to have an autocracy that is run by one person?”
What Clyburn and others like him fail to realize, or blatantly ignore, is that when people struggle to afford or must choose between gas and bread and other necessities for their family’s very survival, that becomes preeminent among their “self-interest” above all else, and no amount of vilifying their partisan opponents as Nazis is going to change that.