Third Rail

Facism is the third rail of American politics. That’s especially true of the nazi variety, a word I try never to capitalize to express the full measure of my horror and contempt. As sure as God made little green apples, nazis are a really bad form of bad. If you stick out your arm in a nazi salute, you’ve offended half the people in the country. If you go to Germany and berate its government for standing in the way of a neo-fascist political party, there’s a good chance that you’ll offend the other half.

That’s why I’m a little bit confused. A few weeks ago (it seems forever), Elon Musk took to the stage at Donald Trump’s inauguration and punctuated his talk with a stiff-armed salute. Then he actually did the same thing again. With the possible exception of certain dopes in the Jewish establishment, everyone thought the same thing I did: here is a man in the stratosphere of power enacting the theater of Hitlerian nazism.

Then, within a matter of weeks, JD Vance did pretty much the same. In the run-up to recent elections in Germany, he used a visit there to promote the AfD. In case you were born sometime this week, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) is the closest we come to nazism reborn. Headed by the repellant Alice Weidel, the AfD promotes the expulsion of immigrants and longs for a return to authoritarian rule. It opposes military aid for Ukraine and embodies a special animus toward Muslims. If you’re a normal person with normal politics, its origin story should make your hair stand on end. Don’t take my word for it. Look it up.

Both Musk and Vance were treated to withering scorn. In Vance’s case, it came from the top. Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, wondered aloud how an American Vice President could cross the ocean to punch Germany in the face. Did he not know that the AfD had staked out positions that were anathema to most Germans and directly challenged the German constitution. That’s the postwar document that places nazi provocations at the top of the list of Really Bad Things.

And yet the outcry in this country lasted about a minute. With barely a moment to register these offenses, all of us were off to other things: the dismemberment of the government, Taco Tuesday, and the rich distractions of American life.

I remind us all that this is all intentional. In the phrase du jour, it’s not a bug but a feature. The idea here is to destabilize the norms of politics, to generate provocations and deny them afterwards, to throw up on the stage and refuse to swab it afterwards, so that everything becomes weirdly and surreally possible. The only sane response is to call it all out and take pride in our discernment and the strength of our resistance.