Reduction to Absurdity

It’s been over three-quarters of a century since a senior government official responsible for national security in Europe publicly spread racist messages. That fact alone should give us pause.

Reductio ad Hitlerum is a term coined in 1953 by Leo Strauss, a German-born Jewish-American political philosopher, to describe attempts to discredit an opponent's viewpoint by comparing it to Hitler or Nazism. In the early 1990s, American lawyer and author Mike Godwin adapted Strauss's idea to the digital era, famously stating that the longer any online discussion continues, the higher the likelihood someone will invoke a comparison to Adolf Hitler. Both Strauss and Godwin were right. Who among us hasn’t encountered people trying to compensate for a lack of arguments or facts with far-fetched analogies?

But that doesn’t mean that every analogy to Nazism or fascism is baseless, as alt-right activists and apologists often claim. These individuals routinely misuse Strauss’s and Godwin’s insights to cover for all manner of indecency and filth. We can’t know what Leo Strauss would think of today’s resurgence of ideologies we believed were forever defeated in Europe—he died in 1973—but we do know he didn’t underestimate racism: he had to flee it once in his lifetime. We also know what Mike Godwin thinks of the current revival. In August 2017, two days after a white supremacist’s deadly attack during a demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, he stated: “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again.” A different perspective came the next day from Donald Trump, who set a new low by saying there were “very fine people on both sides,” trying to legitimize indecency, intolerance, and hatred through a morally false equivalency.

These thoughts came to mind recently when I saw a post on social media presenting photos of four white women as an example of “the only kind of diversity Europe needs.” This racist outburst so delighted the current State Secretary for National Security that he decided to share it with his followers. His vulgar response to the reaction from a female party leader shows this wasn’t a slip—it was a deliberate and calculated provocation of racial intolerance.

Let’s set aside the question of where these self-appointed racial certifiers would place themselves in their taxonomy of acceptable European physiognomy. What’s most shocking about this tweet isn’t even its content, since such incidents have become disturbingly frequent and are increasingly normalized.

What’s most concerning about this latest milestone in our collective descent into a new normal is once again the silence. The fact that there was no response from those who should have spoken out about a racist outburst involving a senior government official in a highly sensitive position is deeply troubling.

Coincidentally, this racist tweet came at a time when national television aired an interview with the President of the Republic. I don’t know whether the president was aware of how his national security official was communicating at the time of the recording. But the tweet certainly throws an uncomfortable light on the president’s familiar refrains about how Slovenians are too divided, how we must respect all opinions, and how we must overcome differences.

I don’t question the President’s noble motives for promoting national unity. However, the truth is that Slovenians are even more divided now than when he began his efforts in his first term. Perhaps despite his efforts. Or, at least in part, because of them. His doctrine of respecting all opinions—no matter how extreme—gives cover and a veneer of legitimacy to views that are fundamentally unacceptable to the vast majority of Slovenians. There are some differences that, in a democratic society, must not be bridged.

We often fail in Slovenia to distinguish between tribal polarization and democratic political conflict. Political scientist Jan-Werner Müller from Princeton University recently wrote in The Guardian that polarization is a project of far-right populism, which reduces all political issues to questions of cultural affiliation and identity. According to Müller, bridging differences is not an end in itself. Rather than clinging to naïve expectations that politics can function as a neutral effort toward shared goals ("not left or right, but forward"—a quip I’ll claim), we must learn to distinguish between democratic and anti-democratic forms of political conflict.

If we ignore this boundary—or refuse to see it—we fall prey to the sleight-of-hand of far-right populism, which wants to convince us that the political landscape is divided between left-liberal democracy and a supposedly balanced anti-liberal "conservatism." The absurd but logically consistent outcome of such thinking is that human rights, political freedoms, and the rule of law become leftist conspiracies, while racial intolerance becomes legitimate, presented as a counterbalance to tolerant leftists.

If we seek national unity based on the lowest common ethical denominator, we may end up in a situation where that level falls below the standards enshrined in our constitution and democratic values. That leads to a perverse situation where defending fundamental constitutional and democratic principles—such as condemning racism—somehow becomes not in the national interest.

Racial intolerance by a high-ranking government official should be the last straw. The President of the Republic regularly ranks highest in public popularity polls. People are tired of political squabbling and name-calling, and in their disillusionment, they gravitate toward someone who abstains from both. But the fact that the president enjoys such support is also because he takes no stand on anything. I respect his decision not to engage in party squabbles, but he should realize that a moral vacuum does not equal political neutrality.

I believe the president does not wish his political legacy to be reduced to an Instagram feed. His popularity is capital that can be used to unite the country around—not at the expense of—European democratic and civilizational values. It’s encouraging that in recent times, even if still very cautiously, he’s begun to do just that.

Slovenia will be a modern and successful democracy when its leaders build support not by distancing themselves from moral authority, but by embracing and embodying it.