Which Political Party is More Closely Aligns With the Nazis? Democrats or Republicans?

There is a clear difference between is and was in English grammar as they talk about different periods. Is and was are used as different tense forms of the root verb ‘to be.’ We use is in the present tense whereas we use was in the past tense. More specifically, we use is in present continuous tense as in the sentence ‘He is eating food.’ On the other hand,the verb was is used in past continuous tense as in the sentence ‘The bird was flying to its nest.’

• Which P would hardworking immigrants want to avoid being in charge of the US?
  
• Which P aims its propaganda and platform primarily at disenfranchised locals who feel foreigners are 'stealing their jobs and wealth' often juxtaposing itself against 'the establishment'?
  
• Which P, when it lost an election, pushed so hard on claims of fraud that it had its leader (now ex-leader) openly support violent protest and Coups only to later deny he did anything of the sort? Which Party has had leaders flipflop and lie about their agenda, especially when it comes to foreign policy?
  
• Which P claims to loathe Communism and the left-wing  the most while simultaneously appealing to the poor in the way that Socialists would (again juxtaposing itself against the 'establishment' or 'elite')?
  
• Which P has been and remains consistently more hostile to foreign nations as well as garnering significantly more hostility towards the US from foreign nations?
  

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The president who announced this policy was not Donald Trump but Herbert Hoover, in 1930, after the start of the Great Depression. Hitler would come to power less than three years later. Raymond Geist, the U.S. consul in Berlin charged with applying immigration policy in Germany during much of the 1930s, saw firsthand the destruction the policy caused. The Nazis prohibited most German Jews from taking substantial assets out of the country, which meant they would be potential public charges unless they had close relatives in the U.S. with ample resources. As a result, American consuls rejected the applications of tens of thousands of people who could have made fine American citizens, thus trapping them in the escalating Nazi persecution.

In 1933, in the first term of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, his Administration considered changing the public charge clause to allow for the entry of more refugees from Germany. (At the time the United States did not distinguish between immigrants and refugees, nor was there any such thing as political asylum.) But immigration was a sensitive issue with the public and Congress—and Jewish immigration particularly so: some of Roosevelt’s critics called the New Deal the “Jew Deal.” There were State Department officials who thought American Jewish protests against Nazi persecution were exaggerated and artificial, part of a Jewish scheme to ease American barriers to increased immigration.

Whilst many Jews successfully migrated out of Germany, by October 1941 it was forbidden for Jews to leave the country, whereas before it was officially encouraged. Jews who had not left before this date were largely captured and forced to work in labour camps or were murdered in concentration camps, especially in Poland, which was the largest site of extermination during the war. Two of the largest concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, were based in Poland, a country with a population of over 3 million Jews in 1939. By the end of the Second World War no more than 400,000 Polish Jews are believed to have survived. 

During the Nazi era, roughly 300,000 additional Jewish refugees could have gained entry to the U.S. without exceeding the nation’s existing quotas.

The primary mechanism that kept them out: the immigration law’s “likely to become a public charge” clause. Consular officials with the authority to issue visas denied them to everyone they deemed incapable of supporting themselves in the U.S.

It is not possible to say what happened to these refugees. Some immigrated to other countries that remained outside Germany’s grip, such as Great Britain. But many — perhaps most — were forced into hiding, imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettos, and deported to extermination centers.

The Trump administration is now resurrecting “the public charge” clause as a way to limit legal immigration without changing immigration law. On Aug. 12, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced new regulations that will deny admission to those unable to prove under tough new standards that they won’t claim government benefits.
As someone who has studied European Jews’ attempts to escape Nazi persecution and immigrate to the U.S., the administration’s evocation of the public charge clause is chilling.

In his diaries, Joseph Goebbels had repeated entries where he wrote “The main thing is, they’re talking about us.”  “They” referred to media and society generally, but also to political and business leaders and, sometimes specifically, to leaders in less extreme nationalist parties who shared a negative view of the Weimar Republic. “Us” meant not just the Nazi Party, but also its embodiment in Adolf Hitler, a megalomaniac claiming to be the savior of a German nation threatened by Jews, Bolsheviks and globalism. It was Goebbels’s task to force “them” — those whose acceptance was necessary to achieve power — to talk about “us” as partners.

The new histories remind us how much Hitler and the Nazi Party, even with its seemingly indomitable force, needed such acceptance. “They” considered Hitler to be a clown and his followers to be ruffians. Mein Kampf was seen as the rambling of the leader of a pitiful “beer hall putsch.” Even as the Nazi Party seized on conditions of economic crisis and increased its vote from 3 percent in the 1928 parliamentary elections to 37 percent in July 1932, no other party would join a parliamentary coalition with Hitler as Chancellor. He could gain power only through a presidentially appointed cabinet. After initially vowing never to name the “lowly private” chancellor, President Paul von Hindenburg acceded when a significant part of the German nationalist and military establishment agreed to Hitler’s demand for the leading government post in order to form an anti-Weimar cabinet and mistakenly believing they could control Hitler.

Trump, too, was broadly seen as a political clown, unfit to wield power (still a common view that disregards his will to use it). He also built a base of political support on a racist conspiracy theory (“birtherism”). He increased his support using additional racist themes, promoting an anti-immigrant and anti-globalist nationalist platform under the banner of Make America Great Again. His politics were dismissed as fringe by the leading political competitors for the Republican Party nomination.

Trump required first tolerance and then acceptance of an extremist platform, attracting fanatical support by the political party whose presidential nomination he sought. Using broadcast and social media, staged rallies, provocative statements, and encouragement of violence, Trump practiced the Goebbels tactic of getting “them” to talk about “us.” It gained him saturation coverage of his campaign. That led “them” (media, elites, and leading figures within the Republican Party) to legitimize Trump’s “populist” brand of politics, even as he grew more extreme. One by one, fellow candidates conceded to Trump’s seemingly unstoppable momentum. No effort was made to coalesce behind a remaining candidate with less extreme views — despite others performing better in national polls against the opposing party’s likely candidate. 

As in Germany, there was nothing inevitable about the nomination of Donald Trump, nor the full consolidation of an entire political party around an egomaniacal and extremist candidate. Yet, Republican Party leaders at national, state and local levels, seeking to regain national power for the party after eight years, tolerated his extremism and alarming behavior. The candidate once considered anathema became, as some claimed, “exactly the right leader for our times.”

Nazi policies concentrated on building a cohesive national majority, to unite ‘ethnic’ Germans against Jews, foreigners, homosexuals, political critics and other minority groups. The  contemporary analogy would be Trump actively pitting white Christian America against minorities in the years ahead.

Political polarization has increased during the Trump presidency. This is especially visible since the killing of George Floyd in police custody and similar high-profile incidents involving police brutality against minorities. Riots and deadly confrontations between predominately white Trump supporters and more diverse “Black Lives Matter” activists have occurred and polarized US politics along ethnic lines.

Beyond this general outlook, I highlighted four key steps that were taken by the Nazis to consolidate their power. Using history as a guide, I translated them in scenarios for contemporary America. The first step is scapegoating. I wrote:

Scapegoating was a Nazi maneuver to blame minority groups for policy failures and the weak economy. Trump has blamed foreigners and minorities for taking away jobs and killing Americans, but we need to see if this rhetoric from the campaign trail continues once he takes office. 
Moreover, Nazi ideologues drew connections between their adversaries: to them, Marxists were essentially Jews, and Jews were connected to big money, so they alleged a global conspiracy against “racial” Germans — the “Jüdisch-Bolschewistische Weltverschwörung.” The equivalent today — an invented conspiracy of Trump’s domestic critics, minorities and international adversaries — would be a clear parallel and warning sign.

Trump has continued to blame foreign and domestic enemies for his policy failures. China has been blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic. Domestically, violent Anarchists, left-wing cancel culture, and the “deep state” have been blamed. Trump has never connected these dots into a Nazi-style world conspiracy, but his most ardent followers have. In the popular QAnon conspiracy theory, a child-abusing, state-run conspiracy, composed of global elites, is responsible for a wide array of social problems. Such conspiracy theories were not originally proposed by Trump, but he has embraced them, by drawing a “Q” in the air, referring to the state department as the “deep state department”, and by proposing that his reelection was stolen by a conspiracy. In summary, Trump has relied heavily on scapegoating.

Trump has repeatedly lashed out at reporters by calling them “Fake News”. He also attempted to silence critics on Twitter and sued the New York Times.

A second component of the Nazi power consolidation was media co-optation. I wrote:

Media co-optation (“Gleichschaltung”) proceeded in two steps in Nazi Germany: extending ideological command over the media where possible and shutting down those media outlets Hitler could not control. In the United States today, this type of autocratic control would be virtually impossible, though attempts at censorship are imaginable. Trump has had openly hostile relations with major newspapers such as the New York Times and The Washington Post, and threatened legal action during the campaign. The role of social media in the election points to future possible points of contention. One factor that contributed in some part to Trump’s victory was propaganda containing false but factual-sounding statements that discredited Hillary Clinton on social media.

Facebook has announced that it will do more fact-checking on trending stories. Mass-media technology has changed dramatically since the 1930s — and Trump has no legal basis to shut down critical outlets. But legal quarrels between his administration, the media and social networks would be a red flag, and a threat to the First Amendment.

Four years later, the struggle over fact-checking has prevailed. Trump has repeatedly lashed out at reporters by calling them “Fake News”. He also attempted to silence critics on Twitter and sued the New York Times. The largest and most consequential attempt at media co-optation came with proposed changes to legislation that could eliminate fact-checking from the Internet. Under U.S.C. section 230, online publishers, such as social media companies, are protected from liability for presenting, but also restricting information provided by third parties. This legislation allows Twitter and Facebook to label published information as disputed or not trustworthy. If repealed without replacement, labeling something as factually incorrect could be result in costly lawsuits. Even after having lost the election, Trump threatened to veto military funding unless Section 230 was repealed. Calling Trump’s word into question would have been financially impossible for most providers, had this attempt been successful. In this sense, Trump has attempted media-cooptation.

A third component of the Nazi reign was paramilitary organizations. I wrote:

Paramilitary organizations were also part of the Nazi effort to boost national-majority cohesion. The “Sturmabteilung” (SA) violently attacked and intimidated adversaries, most notably on “Kristallnacht” in 1938, when they carried out large-scale attacks on Jews and political opponents. Thus far, the president-elect’s reaction to post-election racial violence and harassment has been a call to “stop it!” Trump rejected an endorsement from a KKK-linked newspaper before the election, but continued praise from former KKK leader David Duke leaves many Americans concerned about the potential for a rise in SA-type activities. Even more alarming would be any indication that the U.S. government would tolerate violence or racial intimidation from white supremacist groups.

In the wake of the attacks on the Capitol on January 6, direct comparisons to Kristallnacht and Hitler’s early violent power grab, the “Beer Hall Putsch” have been drawn by US politicians. Earlier than that, Trump has refused to condemn deadly right-wing attacks: after the Charlottesville car attack, Trump commented there were “very fine people on both sides”. Instead of rejecting paramilitary organizations threatening violence, Trump simply asked the “Proud Boys” to “stand down”. The threat of paramilitary violence coming from QAnon, local militias, and anti-BLM vigilantes was part of his presidency and culminated in a deadly attack on the US capitol, directly instigated by Trump. However, there is one important difference to Nazi Germany: Trump did not organize and directly control paramilitary organizations, labor service, and youth indoctrination. The Nazis did that with the SA, the Reichsbund organizations, and the Hitler Youth.

Finally, I identified emergency laws as a cornerstone of Nazi rule:

Emergency laws came about in Germany after the 1933 arson attack on the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament). Hitler used the threat of terrorism and foreign aggression to justify sweeping autocratic policies, including the 1933 Enabling Act (which let the government issue laws without the Reichstag). Similarly, the Reichstag Fire Decree in 1933 gave Hitler the power to suspend most Germans’ political and individual rights, effectively outlawing opposition parties. Changing the U.S. Constitution to abolish elections and remove freedom of speech is hardly imaginable. The United States has an uninterrupted democratic history, while Hitler was able to tap into nostalgia for the times under the last German emperor. But the United States has had similar measures in place since Sept. 11, 2001, which have boosted government surveillance while limiting checks and balances on domestic policing and the use of military force.

Trump has attempted to directly control politics while circumventing checks and balances on multiple occasions. However, the US has not seen an abolition of checks and balances comparable to the Enabling Act. Instead, “ruling by decree” was a constant element of his presidency, starting with banning Muslims from entering the country and mobilizing the National Guard during BLM protests. Additionally, he prompted to designate ANTIFA a terrorist organization, which in turn would have lowered legal barriers for employment of force.
With regard to international conflict, the picture is mixed. Trump has made good on his promise to not start a war, but he has come very close at times. Tensions with North Korea increased early on in his presidency, culminating in threats of “fire and fury” and dismissing Steve Bannon for his  observation that there is no military option for the Korean peninsula. The assassination of high-ranking Iranian General Qasem Soleimani brought the countries to the brink of war, and retaliatory strikes were conducted against a US base in Iraq.