Why the Nazis Loved America |
TIME
2017-03-21
James Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law
Yale Law School
 American Nazis parade on East 86th St. in New York City around 1939. Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images |
Whitman is the author most recently of Hitler’s American Model.
To say America today is verging on Nazism feels like scaremongering. Yes, white nationalism lives in the White House. Yes, President Donald Trump leans authoritarian. Yes, the alt-right says many ugly things. But for all the economic pains of many Americans, there is no Great Depression gnawing away at democracy’s foundations. No paramilitary force is killing people in the streets. Fascism and Nazism have not arrived in the United States.
But there is a different and instructive story to be told about America and the Nazis that raises unsettling questions about what is going on today — and what Nazism means to the U.S.
When we picture a modern American Nazi, we imagine a fanatic who has imported an alien belief system from a far-away place. We also, not wrongly, picture captives in concentration camps and American soldiers fighting the Good War. But the past is more tangled than that. Nazism was a movement drawn in some ways on the American model — a prodigal son of the land of liberty and equality, without the remorse…
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Tags: Germany, James Q. Whitman, James Whitman, Nazi Germany, TIME