NSDAP USA

Most people know that the label “Nazi” is short for the German term for “National-Socialist”  (a puzzling term, and self-contradictory in the traditional conception of international socialism);  fewer know the full designation:  Nazional-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, “National-Socialist German Workers Party”.  (There was even, for a time, an even more absurdly named tendency, the "National Bolsheviks".)

For, in their pre-power years of propaganda and putsch, the Nazis would don a proletarian mask when it suited them.  (And indeed they were  in origin  by no means a plutocratic party.)   Hitler offered bright-green olive-branches to workers, even while plotting the destruction of organized labor, as he would later send forth doves of peace to Western capitals, even as his armies drove east.   It was all a lie, of course;  but the point is, the world at that time was such that Hitler needed to lie.  Despite a willing, groveling horde of appeasers and self-deceivers, like Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy, and Chamberlain, Hitler knew that he had to offer a fig-leaf, in the form of a plastic olive-branch, wherewith the appeasers might cover their private parts. 

Perry, Trump, et al. -- in a sense  to their credit -- do not feel similarly constrained.

Thus, in its public pronouncements, and even more in its private actions, on the particular issue of its relations to the working class (which, properly seen, is not a “particular “ “issue” at all, but is the motor of the forward progress of History), the Republican Party, with its Tea Party appendage (or as it might be, the Teabagger Party with its Repurbligan excrescence) , stands -- mutatis mutandis, and toutes proportions gardées -- to the right -- to the right -- of the Nazis.  (That is to say, what the Nazis professed, before they came to power.  What they did in power was quite otherwise; as workers here may learn, should the likes of Rick Perry ever sit at the controls.)

Yes, the comparison is outrageous;  but it again was brought to mind when, as a prospective presidential candidate, the reptile Donald Trump was asked his foreign policy, and his reply was,  “Seize the oil!”.  In his public pronouncements, prior to power, Herr Hitler was generally more circumspect than that.

This present American balance of forces is not new.  Cf.  Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, vol. I. (1997), p. 821, quotes FDR:   “This nation cannot endure if it is half ‘boom’ and half ‘broke’.”  He fingered  “the Four Housemen of the Republican leadership: … Destruction, Delay, Deceit, Despair.”

Workers, workers, don’t let's be fooled again.

[Update 8 IX 2011]  As the wildfires blaze in Texas, notice who stuck it to the firefighters back it March.  This man is now the Republican front-runner for President.

[Update 18 IX 2011]  From the lead article in this morning's NYTimes Review:

Perry ran against a Hightower rule  requiring farmers to get their workers out of the fields before they sprayed pesticide on them, and won.

[Update 7 I 2011]
My, my, my.   In Indiana, the Republican Party is to the right of ... the NFL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/indiana-right-to-work-measure-expected-to-pass.html?hpw