Brendan Nyhan

I have a new column up on Time.com about Nazi appeasement analogies, which I wrote about on The Horse’s Mouth earlier this week. Here’s how it begins:

A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin’s law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate with conservatives grows longer, the probability of a comparison with the appeasement of Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

Make sure to read the whole thing…

Update 9/1 11:10 AM: Some commenters are complaining that I didn’t mention liberals using Hitler analogies. The reason is that it was outside the scope of the column. However, I linked in the column to a blog post taking a liberal to task for using a Hitler analogy, and we wrote extensively about both sides’ use of Hitler and Nazi analogies on Spinsanity.

Also, I should note something else about the appeasement rhetoric that I took for granted in my column — the Bush administration is assailing a straw man, as the Washington Post pointed out (in an article I criticized for other reasons on THM):

Bush suggested last week that Democrats are promising voters to block additional money for continuing the war. Vice President Cheney this week said critics “claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone.” And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, citing passivity toward Nazi Germany before World War II, said that “many have still not learned history’s lessons” and “believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased.”

Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq

Sound familiar? It should. The administration has a penchant for attacking straw men. Here’s a virtually identical passage from an interview with Dan Bartlett back in June — he fails to name a single Democrat who wants to surrender, as President Bush suggested:

LAUER: The white flag of surrender — that’s a very dramatic and harsh expression to use against the Democrats. Have you heard any Democrats calling for the white flag of surrender?

BARTLETT: Well, I have heard a lot of Democrats call this President a liar, saying we’ve gone into Iraq for the wrong reasons, saying that he’s incompetent. So there is a lot of heated rhetoric in Washington. But what we see in the heart wrenching developments, when we see our 2 soldiers lose their lives in such a horrific way, is that we’re up against a very determined enemy. This is an epic struggle in which we have to be committed to winning.

Update 6/10/08 8:45 AM: A historian alerts me that there are questions about the veracity of the alleged Borah quote.

Here are today’s posts on The Horse’s Mouth:
–A “stay the course” timeline — how the White House bamboozled the Post;
–RNC: It’s the media’s fault we’re losing — a GOP official blames the media for his party’s poor showing in the polls.

Here are yesterday’s posts on The Horse’s Mouth:
–Krauthammer’s hack appeasement rhetoric — the Washington Post columnist compares a series of foreign policy crises over the last 17 years to appeasing Hitler;
–George Allen’s post-“macaca” problem — how the Virginia senator’s comments set off a dynamic that may kill his presidential candidacy.

The paperback edition of Chris Mooney’s excellent book The Republican War on Science is out — go buy it! Here’s a quote from my review: “TRWOS takes a deeply reported and researched look at how conservatives are using PR to confuse debate over science and science policy on issues ranging from evolution to global warming to embryonic stem cell research.”

Can our discourse really be this stupid?

From the New York Times (via Henry Farrell):

[Congressman Mike] Pence argued that tax cuts help the poor by revving the economy. That may eventually prove true, but despite large tax cuts the poverty rate has risen in each of the last four years.

“That’s anecdotal,” Mr. Pence said in an interview last fall. Then he offered an anecdote — a story President Reagan told about a pipe fitter pleased to see the rich prosper, “because I’ve never been hired by a poor man.”

From Jonathan Chait (in a must-read TNR column):

Also working through his emotions toward the Middle East right now is Chris Matthews. In a recent broadcast, Matthews declared, “[President Bush] didn’t have any philosophy when he went in, and they handed it to him–these guys with … you know, the guys you used to make fun of at school, the pencilnecks, the intellectuals, the guys you never trusted.” So now we know the true sinister influence behind the Iraq war: nerds. Nerds have always been, of course, the favorite target of demagogues, and this latest attempt to scapegoat them is steeped in the usual illogic. Far from being nerds, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are gruff former jocks, and distinctly thick of neck. And the more we learn about the bungling of the war, the more we discover that it was precisely Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld’s propensity to ignore the geeks in the bureaucracy that has made it such a fiasco. Yet Matthews appears ever more deeply wedded to his blame-the-nerds theory. In another recent broadcast, he asked Pat Buchanan:

When are we going to notice that the neocons don’t know what they’re talking about? They’re not looking at this country’s long-term interests. They’re bound up in regional and global ideology, and they have had no experience–I’ll say it again–in even a schoolyard fight. They don’t know what physical fighting is all about. They went to school and were intellectuals, but they want our government to be their big brother. I don’t get it. I don’t know why we keep falling for it–and the president, you say is he free of these guys yet or not?

A more suspicious mind might detect in this some ugly insinuations, but I prefer to take Matthews’s theory at face value. Maybe he truly believes that participating in schoolyard brawls is necessary training for the successful conduct of foreign policy. (Perhaps the young George F. Kennan formed the nascent outlines of his worldview in the elementary school latrine, while administering swirlies to the pencilnecks.) There is, of course, a long-standing belief that only veterans have the moral standing to support wars. Matthews, who never joined the military himself, is simply defining the relevant combat experience more broadly than has been traditionally done. In this novel schema, the heroes are those who braved the horrors of fighting–be it during wartime or recess. They stand across an unshakable psychological divide from mere civilians who remained behind in the safety of, respectively, the home front or the monkey bars. Buchanan, for instance, was a notorious bully as a youth. No doubt this experience accounts for the subtlety of his foreign policy thinking.

The Nation is on the case. And don’t miss my new Horse’s Mouth post about how he is in big trouble — “macaca” has set off a dynamic that may kill his presidential campaign…

Here are today’s Horse’s Mouth posts:
–The strange economics of money-losing opinion magazines — a TNR reader survey designed to sell ads to lobbyists;
–A turning point in coverage of Iraq-9/11 suggestions? — a Reuters story suggests that the press may start covering White House suggestions of an Iraq-9/11 link more critically.

The latest Zogby/Wall Street Journal poll shows George Allen down a point to James Webb — yet another sign of the shifting post-“macaca” landscape in Virginia. The futures markets have bumped the probability of an Allen victory against Webb down from 85+ to around 75 percent:

However, Allen ’08 futures are holding steady in the 12-14 range.

Here are the two posts I put up today over at The Horse’s Mouth:
–The state of progressive media criticism — the failures of FAIR, why Media Matters is better, and why we need a conservative counterpart to it
–Time promotes outlier poll on Hillary — why the magazine’s poll showing her only two points behind McCain shouldn’t be trusted.

A reminder — my guest-blogging at The Horse’s Mouth begins today. Greg Sargent just put up a post introducing me. I’ll try to post links to my THM posts each night, but I hope you’ll read the site directly while I’m over there.