A common pathology in American right-wing political discourse is to compare inaction on their partisan agenda to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. This type of Outrage Du Jour, based on meager understanding of political interaction, is also rarely rooted in any parallel to World War II itself. Thus you have a free-floating metaphor that is disconnected from both its literal roots and its presumptive target; a generic expression of “Oh, Lord, this can’t be right”, except couched in muscular war talk.
Consider the latest eruption of this rhetorical disease, documented by Dana Milbank: Rick Santorum cries Nazi.
Rick Santorum sees Nazis everywhere: in the Middle East, in doctor’s offices and medical labs, in the Democratic Party, and now in the White House.
The Republican presidential candidate told a group of supporters Sunday night that this year’s election was like the time between 1940 and 1941 when Americans didn’t act against Adolf Hitler because they thought he was “a nice guy” and not “near as bad as what we think.”
The obvious implication — later denied by the candidate — was that Santorum is some modern-day Churchill and President Obama is der Fuhrer. It was outrageous and yet, for Santorum, routine.
Santorum’s vacuous use of the appeasement analogy is errant in both ways: chances are, nobody’s going to be annexing France under a potential Obama second term; and the presidential election has no relevance to WWII. In May ’08 Chris Matthews mercilessly exposed radio host Kevin James’ ignorance in parroting such a concept of appeasement:
The video has to be seen to experience the hilarious awkwardness involved, but Wikipedia summarizes:
James achieved notoriety for a May 15, 2008 guest spot on the MSNBC television program Hardball with Chris Matthews, in which James supported an apparent comparison by President George W. Bush of Democratic primary presidential candidate Barack Obama to American Senator William Borah of Idaho, who was serving at the time of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. [...]
In the middle of the interview, host Chris Matthews turned to James and, saying he was conducting a “history check,” asked “what did Chamberlain do wrong?” referring to English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin, even though President Bush never referred to the English Prime Minister. When James failed to give an answer more specific than “he was an appeaser,” and tried to explain that appeasement was the main issue, not the specifics of what Neville Chamberlin did “in 1938 or 1939″, Matthews kept repeating the same question as to the specifics of what Neville Chamberlin did. When James pointed out that it was president Bush who made the reference to history, not James himself, Matthews repeated the same questions. After this back and forth went on for a few minutes, James stated that if you are going to negotiate with your enemies, you have to negotiate from strength.
