| What is up with right-wingers declaring that they've been quoted out of context when they say something offensive? Rush Limbaugh says soldiers who want to get out of Iraq are phonies. Suddenly, it's a matter of context. Bill O'Reilly says it is surprising that black people in restaurants don't yell things like "Get me more iced tea, M-Fer!" Suddenly, it's a matter of context.
And Dave Budge compares progressives to Nazis and suddenly it's a matter of context.
Let's go to the tape:
Jay Stevens highlights this quotation: Ever since David Sirota attempted to define the difference between a liberal and a progressive I have made the assertion that modern progressivism is little less than both National Socialism and Fascism. Dave Budge responds in comments saying that Jay "both didn't read the article and quoted me out of context."
So, yeah, let's check the context, which is a post introducing a review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Now, with a name like that, it's hard to know how we misplaced the context (probably similar to how we failed to notice the nuance of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods.
But here's another problem -- by all indications, Schievelbusch is making a far more reserved argument than Budge. Schievelbusch does two notable things.
First, he starts by noting that, "To compare is not to equate." Budge does equate -- he says that progressivism is "little less" than fascism. In other words, it is nearly the same.
Second, Schievelbusch notes that during the reign of Roosevelt there were "no secret police; the Constitution remained in force, and there were no concentration camps; the New Deal preserved the institutions of the liberal-democratic system that National Socialism abolished." In comparison, Budge flat-out argues that he sees "Roosevelt as the single biggest destroyer of The Constitution in the history of the country. What Roosevelt did to basic protected rights makes G.W. Bush look like a piker in comparison."
In other words, Dave Budge, supposed reasonable man of the right, is calling a man who typically is looked up as one of the five greatest Presidents in American history an atrocity. And he's classifying anywhere between one in three Americans and one in five as being "little less" than Nazis.
Dave Budge wasn't taken out of context. He flat-out equated Nazism and progressivism. If he didn't mean to, he ought to apologize. If he meant to, he's an idiot and a scoundrel. |
