Don't Tell Them What They Think They Know

On the left, no change: Senators Jack Reed and Chuck Schumer are two of several national Democrats who have chosen to publicize, on the cusp of an election season, agnosticism towards the nature of the enemy known as Islamist fascism, a term recently used by President Bush. The term isn't without flaws but it is practical, and anyway Schumer and Reed were less interested in discerning religious motives of non-state authoritarians from cultural ones than they were to deny terrorists' affirmed capital intentions and pronounce the movement dangerous but categorically diffuse.

On meeting the enemy, Senator Schumer either contradicted himself, cautioning that "you got to have a real policy" to "fight them," as if deployments in dozens of countries weren't, or was instead referring to a revolution in military strategy of his own intellectual labor to be announced. Senator Reed was disdainful of "a catchy slogan...more for political consumption" and faulted President Bush and his advocates for failing "to do the hard work of digging into the facts" and ending up with a paralogism. The fascists of the Pact of Steel, said Reed, came to power through democratic elections. He corrected himself — he was certain that the Nazis, at least, did.

What Reed didn't say, perhaps because his own hard work was elsewhere, is that had General Kurt von Schleicher not etiolated Germany's Weimar polity for his own manipulative ends, affording the Nazis whatever legitimacy that could not be got from electoral gains and terrorist acts, Adolf Hitler's appointment to Chancellor would have been by no means inevitable. Von Schleicher contrived and helped sunder two Reichstag governments, those of Heinrich Bruening and Franz von Papen, before trying to build a cabinet of his own. Mendacity, however, preceded him and von Schleicher's weak prospects led the doddering President Paul von Hindenburg to accept, from the embittered von Papen, a premise that ten years before would have been unthinkable: the National Socialists' seditionist leader as political intermediary. "Hitler was elected" is erroneous and, too, inimical to the understanding of self-determination in tenuously liberal societies, since it was undemocratic doings that exalted the Third Reich.

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