These are indeed “profoundly troubling” charges, which makes one wonder why they’re being bandied about with such flippant regard for historical plausibility.
The “jackboot” analogy, for starters, breaks down at the ankle: The footwear was favored by enforcers for totalitarian governments, not random Ron Paul supporters flashing Thomas Jefferson quotes outside political events. Weimar-era brownshirts were an organized Nazi paramilitary group perpetrating calculated violence against political opponents in a hyperinflationary, recently humiliated country that had never enjoyed liberal democracy; not a dozen-plus scattered gun nuts in one of the world’s oldest democracies peacably (if jarringly) exercising their Second Amendment rights by keeping their guns holstered (not “brandishing” them, as Rich and countless others have claimed). The last actual lynching in America, depending on who you ask, took place in 1981; the atrocious practice had been all but dead since the 1960s.
To fear the Weimarization of America, or the return of lynching, is to fundamentally lack confidence in the very real progress the United States has made over the past several decades. Conditions have improved exponentially even since the post-lynching 1980s, when I was coming of voting age. Back then there was still a politics to be had in bashing Martin Luther King, supporting apartheid South Africa, whipping up fears of black ultra-violence, and otherwise appealing openly to white resentment against blacks. It was gross, it was reckless, it led to terrible policies, and it was the reason I permanently swore off joining the Republican Party. It’s also largely an artifact of the past.
Matt Welch, “The Race War That Isn’t: Media anxieties over ‘lynch mobs’ and ‘brownshirts’ demonstrate a telling lack of faith in contemporary America”, Reason Online, 2009-08-25
Update, 27 August: Matt Welch posted a follow up to the article from which this QotD was abstracted. He writes: “The assertion that the Esquire piece was promoting the “racial-resentment” narrative was inaccurate, and I have corrected the article accordingly.”
