Charges Of Nazism

Charges of Nazism are rather common today when conservatives and liberals want to find some culturally weighty accusation to hurl at each other.  It does not matter if the person or action being charged with this has nothing to do with German Nazism or subsequent groups that wish to revive something similar to historical Nazi Germany.  What matters to those making the accusations, unless they truly believe what they are saying, is that the word Nazi will snare the attention of those on one side of the mainstream political divide or the other and stir up strong emotions.  This goes for both some conservatives and some liberals.  However, no one is truly a Nazi in an ultimate sense unless they specifically believe in Aryan racial superiority coupled with violent hyper-nationalism.

Now, being a nationalist or a racist does not make one a Nazi.  Only a very particular kind of nationalism or racism qualifies as Nazism.  Conservatives and liberals, in their constant irrationality and frequent misunderstandings of their own tenets and the tenets of the other party, are not reluctant to accuse each other of acting like "Nazis" because of the controversial attention given to the term, not because Nazism actually represents basic conservatism or liberalism.  The symbols that could have become more widely associated with a different political worldview but were used by the historical Nazis are not even superficially embraced by either party!

Are either conservatives or liberals, as opposed to some individuals who identify as such but do not ultimately share the philosophical stances inherent in conservatism or liberalism, antisemitic, for example?  Conservatives tend to have a default loyalty to the modern nation of Israel regardless of what the nation actually does, and liberals tend to at least claim to despise all forms of discrimination based on someone's race and birth geography.  There could be more superficial similarities between how the Nazi party acted and how some conservatives and some liberals speak or act, but it is laughable folly to charge someone with a positive attitude towards Nazism or "neo-Nazis" just because they are conservative or liberal.

This does not, however, make conservatism and liberalism rational, righteous, or beneficial except by sheer happenstance in random areas.  Conservative and liberal fallacies are pathetic and obvious enough without each of these primary parties calling attention to fallacies that their ideological opponents do not believe.  Straw man charges reveal a fundamental lack of awareness of the concepts other people express (of course, misunderstanding a philosophical concept in one's own mind apart from social experiences is still a straw man fallacy, just one that is seldom addressed in such a way), and lack of awareness is one of the dominant traits of modern political parties.  Nazism just happens to not be one of the primary traits of either major party.