In 1953, the philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term Reductio ad Hitlerum, a derivative of the Reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd), defined as a tactic to invalidate someone else’s ideology on the basis that the same idea was promoted or practised by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.
The Reductio ad Hitlerum is the demonization of opposing arguments by association with an absolute evil in order to make them unjustifiable. It is a straw man fallacy based on a sophism, a flawed logic – e.g. raven are black, raven are birds so black birds are raven – that manipulates the opponent’s arguments by appealing to powerful emotions.
According to that logic, just because Hitler shared an idea, it’s necessarily wrong. So, as Hitler was a vegetarian, does that make vegetarians also Nazi supporters?
Similarly, the Godwin’s law is an empirical rule issued by the American lawyer Mike Godwin in 1990 who realized that on social networks, the longer a discussion lasted, the probability that interlocutors call each other Nazi or fascist approaches 1.
The Godwin’s law is a consequence of the polarisation of the discourse and the specific cultural background of Western counties in which the Second World War and its qualifiers of good and evil are pregnant. Although, while in our collective memory remain the idea of bad judged as such by the Nuremberg trials (the communist crimes for instance have never been judged by an analogous tribunal), we lost sense of the idea of good.
And so, like Emmanuel Goldstein, the leader of the counter-revolutionary organization in the novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by Orwell, the figures of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party served as a way to unite people in an emotional frenzy against a common enemy and allow them to vent personal frustrations, anguish and hatreds towards those identified as the ultimate evil: the political opponents.
As the popular saying goes, “If you want to kill your dog, accuse him of having rabies”. Similarly, if you want to cancel a dissident, accuse him of being a Nazi. In short, the Reductio ad Hitlerum is the justification of free speech erosion on the ground of universal moral consideration.
Stalin supposedly had advocated to call fascist political opponents, so while wasting time trying to deflect the accusation, they would not argue against the ideology. Those political tactics were also defended by gurus of the new left, Frankfurt School’s philosophers such as Marcuse[i] who wrote an essay on repressive tolerance in “A Critique of Pure Tolerance[ii]” published in 1965.
In this text, Marcuse criticizes the liberalist neutral tolerance as a repressive tolerance that stands in the way of the liberation of society, a passive condition, the acceptation of all evils that fail to challenge the status quo. Only intolerance i.e. the “ability to say no”, can lead to social improvement.
Marcuse also severely condemns active tolerance i.e. those who advocate for unconditional freedom of speech, which extends tolerance in a non-partisan way to Nazi ideologies for instance.
He encourages to move beyond those false tolerances and appeals for liberating tolerance: being consciously selective and only allow the proclamation of specific views and behaviours. In his essay, Marcuse call for the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and parties which promotes opinions or statements considered aggressive, chauvinistic, discriminatory … as well as those opposing the extension of public services, social security, medical care and even those supporting the idea of free market.
Liberating tolerance ultimately turned out to be the intolerance against anything that does not endorse and validate ideology from the left, the intolerance against movements from the right: an Orwellian doublethink in which “intolerance is tolerance”.
Similarly, today, his disciples from the new left, have disguised their intolerance as a fight against bigotry and hatred, a fight against intolerance. They demonise their opponent with the Reductio ad Hitlerum, claiming that hate speech – i.e. any speech they don’t like – is violence.
They petition to ban, control and censor this so-called hate speech, erode political freedom and force people to adhere into their totalitarian ideology concealed behind kindness. They oppose free speech to hate speech so we forgot that the real opposition lie between free speech and regulated speech i.e. if individuals are free to speak or not.
Along with Marcuse, following the rise of fascism in Europe and USSR, Horkheimer and Adorno progressively shifted their studies from understanding why people might fail to embrace socialism to understanding why people would embrace totalitarianism.
Horkheimer and Adorno in “Dialectic of Enlightenment[iii]” (1972) situated the origin of totalitarianism in the Enlightenment philosophy and defined it as reason and rationality taken to the extreme.
Adorno and other scholars at the University of Berkeley, California, also examined totalitarianism from a more psychological standpoint. In 1950 they published “The Authoritarian Personality[iv]” in which using psychodynamic (Freudian) theory, they made the assumption that no one is born with an authoritarian personality but develop it when experimenting strict parenting.
Their empirical research consisted in questionnaires and follow-up interviews in which they found common patterns that help them design an F (Fascist) scale to measure responses on nine different components of authoritarianism:
· Conventionalism (rigid adherence to traditional norms and values)
· Authoritarian submission (deferring to authority within the group)
· Authoritarian aggression (support for punishment of those who violate conventional norms)
· Anti-intraception (a dislike of subjectivity and imagination)
· superstition and stereotypy (make generalities)
· Power and toughness (value for tough/strong attitude)
· Destructiveness and cynicism (celebrating strength)
· Projectivity (projecting own negative traits to others)
· Sex (acute obsession with people sex lives)
Critics argued that there was no empirical evidence to support the Freudian/psychodynamic assumption in which the study is based and Adorno & Co only looked at right-wing authoritarianism. Besides, their questionnaire missed reverse key items (ex: I am a shy person – > reverse key item: I am an ongoing person) allowing for acquiescence bias in which an interviewee would agree with all items irrespective of their content.
Even so, this influent study revealed that being a fascist is not believing in particular tropes but a psychological structure or worldview that could be opposed by reforming the society as an all, by deconstructing the foundations of Western civilisation: family, Christianity, patriotism, and adherence to traditional gender roles and attitudes towards sex…
This deconstruction of the allegedly oppressive heteronormative society undermined the role of men, accused of all evils (toxic masculinity, patriarchy…) and forbid them to display natural behaviour of virility.
This disappearance of the classical Western masculinity gave birth to Homo consumericus libertarian[v]. The erosion of strong cultural models were replaced by artificial models promoted by the market (ostentatious virility in hip hop) or imported models (extra-European “virile” culture such as Islam).
The supposed anti-fascist emancipation from the traditional structures based on permissiveness and transgression has left men striving to appear partaking in non-utilitarian consumption for lack of being able to assert themselves.
The “anti-fascism” of the new left has therefore paved the way for neo-capitalist fascism.
[ii] Marcuse H. & co (1969). A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Beacon Press; Boston.
[iii] Adorno T., Horkheimer H. (2016). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso Books; London.
[iv] Adorno T. & Co. (2019). The authoritarian personality. Verso; New York city.