Without the slightest hint of irony, I am beginning to miss the days when the left called everyone on the right a Nazi and was usually wrong. The accusation was almost always lazy, insulting, and routinely aimed at people whose supposedly fascist ambitions amounted to wanting a more secure border. Simply put, the word was weaponized to scare dissenters away from honest debate. What I did not expect was to watch so many on the right begin reciting the rhetoric we had spent years explaining bore no resemblance to our beliefs, with some proceeding all the way to open admiration for Hitler. It is an unpleasant experience to spend years defending people against a slander and then discover that a growing number have adopted it as a political identity. At first, I thought they were trolling, borrowing Nazi language for the pleasure of watching people recoil. I’m less sure now. Apparently, some accusations become aspirational if repeated often enough.
Before continuing, allow me to explain with rapidity my own path toward identifying with the right. I grew up on Long Island and eventually earned my master’s degree in Manhattan. Until my late twenties, I scarcely knew anyone I would have described as seriously right-wing. The people around me were often intelligent, educated, and perfectly decent. They also tended to agree about which opinions a decent person could hold, leaving surprisingly little for all that education to investigate. Conservatives were greedy, Christians were gullible, and anyone worried about immigration probably had motives that were both ignorant and sinister.
I absorbed plenty of this myself. Liberalism was the atmosphere in which I grew up, and I had no more thought of examining it than of conducting a chemical analysis of the air. When an assumption is shared by your friends, your mentors, and the people whose approval you want, it takes on the appearance of something you worked out independently. You may even become rather proud of yourself for having worked it out, even if a parrot could accomplish the same task that inflates your own ego.
My politics changed when I began moving out of the highly glorified bubbles I called home and the pinnacle of mankind, meeting people who failed to resemble their assigned caricatures. Some conservatives had thought seriously about questions I had been encouraged to regard as settled. Obviously, others were every bit as foolish, or more so, as advertised. Regardless of the bottom of the barrel, the discovery of the top impressed upon me that I had to make these judgments individually, which was considerably less convenient than the previous arrangement of simply breathing in morality and ethics.
Psychoanalytic scholar Erich Fromm explored the relief people can find in surrendering their independence, especially when freedom leaves them lonely or uncertain. The thought, taken from the brilliant The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, defined my experience growing up in an echo chamber. Anyone who has watched a friend acquire an entire political personality along with a new social circle has seen enough to recognize the problem.
My doubts about immigration orthodoxy grew independently from my affection for the New York I knew. I liked hearing different languages and eating food whose names my grandparents might have struggled to pronounce. Jamaican restaurants, Korean groceries, Jewish neighborhoods, and the innumerable ambitions that brought people there were part of what made the place worth living in. I have no interest in inventing a duller version of my childhood to make my politics easier to explain.
But affection for that world did not answer every question about how it worked. How many newcomers can a country absorb, over what period, and under what expectations? What happens when people settle into communities that have little contact with one another? How much agreement does a society need before its disagreements become unmanageable? These struck me as reasonable questions, though voicing them was enough to get me banished and condemned from social circles in which I thought myself deeply rooted. Being told that asking them revealed a moral defect did little to resolve them.
Cultures do change when populations change. If Japan became overwhelmingly Somali over several generations, it would be a different country in important respects, even if every new citizen were admirable and the transition entirely peaceful. The reverse would also be true. This says nothing about anyone’s worth. It says that language, religion, customs, and habits travel with people, although people also adapt to the places where they settle. The extent and direction of that adaptation are worth discussing without pretending the subject is either forbidden or self-explanatory.
And there I sat, once a self-identifying socialist, now armed with an abundance of research supporting the thesis that socialism could not exist in an extremely ethnically diverse society, being told that I was now a right-winger.
Regardless of any thoughts on the correct number of immigrants to take in or kick out, I was also skeptical of the invitation we extend when we describe our own history almost exclusively as a record of crimes. Slavery and dispossession belong in an honest account of America. So do the arguments and institutions through which Americans have challenged injustice. A country that teaches only self-congratulation produces ignorance. A country too embarrassed to explain why its liberties deserve loyalty leaves newcomers, and its own children, with very little to join.
These remain reasons for my conservatism. They have never struck me as reasons to become interested in rehabilitating Hitler. I had assumed this distinction required no maintenance.
Yet I now encounter people who seem to think that years of unfair accusations have relieved them of the obligation to distinguish a conservative argument from an actual Nazi one, as if the rather apparent differences between free-market capitalism and Nazi-era economic conditions do not stand boldly before us. I understand the resentment. When “fascist” is used to describe every unwelcome school policy or border restriction, the word loses force. People stop listening, including when they ought to listen. Those who spent years using it carelessly bear some responsibility for that, but this does no good for those of us who have rejected their hysterical nomenclature for years.
The rest belongs to the people making their own choices now. Having been falsely accused of admiring Hitler does not oblige anyone to start. I left one political environment, or was kicked out, if I’m being honest, because it demanded that I accept too many bad arguments as the price of admission. I have no intention of paying the same fee to another.
Fromm is useful here because the attraction of authoritarianism is easier to understand if you consider what it offers an unhappy person, a failing person desperate to point a finger in the direction of anywhere but inward. Your failures acquire an explanation. Your resentments become evidence of insight. You join a community that knows who is responsible, and the discomfort of uncertainty gives way to the satisfaction of recognition. At last, everything fits. Jews have served as scapegoats for this purpose more times than anyone could count.
An explanation that accounts for every disappointment ought to arouse suspicion, especially when it identifies the same guilty population every time. The antisemite can move from banking to Hollywood to foreign policy without ever needing a new conclusion. Contrary evidence merely demonstrates how well the conspiracy conceals itself. There is nowhere for an honest inquiry to go once disbelief has become proof of complicity. The great convenience of a conspiracy theory is that it never suffers the indignity of being disproved. Confirmation bias becomes the science of the emotional and the desperate.
Other ideologies offer versions of this comfort. I have heard people explain an astonishing range of human behavior by invoking capitalists, immigrants, white men, Christians, or globalists, with little apparent interest in the individuals involved. The categories differ, and so do the consequences. What I recognize across them is the pleasure of being excused from further thought.
I want no laws against being a fool, but I do want the freedom to say that someone praising Hitler is one, without receiving a lecture on how my criticism threatens free expression. The right to publish an opinion does not include a right to be admired for it. A podcast invitation is an editorial decision. Declining to offer one does not require a theory of censorship. The First Amendment has survived many things. It can survive your not being invited onto a podcast.
The argument over Israel suffers from the same refusal to make ordinary distinctions. Netanyahu’s government is a government. Its military decisions, settlement policies, and demands for American support are proper subjects of criticism. Nobody should have to endorse them to establish that he has no grievance against Jews.
But the man who sees a menorah and launches into a denunciation of Israel one hundred percent of the time is telling us something about the way his mind works. So is the person who begins with a dispute over foreign aid and ends by explaining that Jews control the banks, the press, and the government. Calling this criticism of Israel does not make it so. The accusation is older than the state.
I care about these distinctions because blurring them damages both arguments. It gives antisemites respectable language in which to operate and makes it easier to dismiss legitimate criticism as antisemitism. Anyone interested in an honest debate about Israeli policy should resent that confusion, yet many embrace the hateful brigade, armed with ancient rhetoric, with open arms.
There are also people abroad with an interest in keeping us confused. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s account of Russia’s Internet Research Agency described an influence operation that exploited existing American divisions, including disputes over race and immigration. It found plenty to work with.
In 2024, the Justice Department charged two RT employees in an alleged scheme to channel nearly $10 million into a Tennessee-based online content company. According to prosecutors, the company published almost 2,000 videos that drew more than 16 million YouTube views. Those were allegations, and I am describing them as such. The case nevertheless supplied a specific account of how concealed foreign funding could enter an American media operation.
American intelligence reports from the same year described efforts by actors linked to China and Iran to deepen social divisions, including Iranian activity surrounding the Israel-Gaza conflict. These accounts deserve scrutiny on their evidence. They do not justify deciding that every disagreeable account on the internet belongs to a foreign intelligence service.
What troubles me is how little invention such operations require. Americans supply the anger, the grievances, and usually the content. An outside actor can help circulate the most inflammatory version, then leave us to explain to one another why compromise would amount to treason. A population does not have to believe a foreign government is its friend to become useful to it. Our enemies do not need to invent American insanity. Increasingly, distribution appears sufficient.
Social media rewards material that keeps people watching and responding, and anger is an effective way to hold an audience. A measured argument for lower immigration asks the reader to consider a policy. A story about a secret plan to replace him offers a personal enemy and a reason to return tomorrow. The second has advantages in a business where attention pays. When an army of bots and paid influencers is devoted to stoking this already blazing danger, incredible, albeit dreadful, power is created. The algorithm did not invent the village crank. It merely gave him analytics.
I find myself interested in how quickly a technology promising independence supplied new communities of conformity. We can read almost anything ever written and still spend the evening checking whether the people who agree with us have found someone new to hate.
I don’t think a constitutional republic can survive indefinitely on those habits.
The right is supposed to understand the danger of political schemes that promise to remake humanity. That is one of the things that attracted me to it. Watching people defend Western civilization by flirting with movements that helped devastate Europe is therefore more than an embarrassment. It raises the question of what, exactly, they think they are conserving. The West presumably contains something worth preserving besides its oldest hatreds.
Immigration policy should take seriously the circumstances that help that process succeed, including its pace and scale. I still think citizens are entitled to decide how much immigration their country can manage. I still object to being told that attachment to a national culture is a psychiatric symptom or a disguised racial grievance. But I cannot make those arguments honestly while pretending not to recognize racial hatred when it appears among people who agree with me about something else.
Perhaps that is why I find myself nostalgic for the old accusation. It was easier to answer when I could assume that the people beside me understood why it was false. Now I sometimes have to interrupt the defense of a perfectly reasonable position to ask why someone in the room is making excuses for Hitler.
I would like to get back to arguing about immigration. It was considerably easier when nobody felt obliged to defend Hitler first or rummage through the medieval pamphlet collection explaining the Jews. There are perfectly good arguments to be had in the twenty-first century. We needn’t exhume the thirteenth to have them.