Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.

— George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”

Politcados — and none more guilty than your humble Weekend Politics Thread host — regularly plumb for upvotes by comparing current and aspiring Republican lawmakers to Nazis. The GOPers do invite these parallels by embracing Nazism.

Consider, in four-epigraphs-for-four-examples fashion,

• S. Rep. Martha McSally* who has stepped down from her seat representing the Tucson area to run for Arizona senator and just pitched construction of walls along the Grand Canyon State’s borders with Mexico and California.
• California gubernatorial candidate Patrick Little, whose platform promises “a government … that forbids all immigration except of biological kin, where no person of jewish [sic] origin may live, vacation, or traverse.”
• Georgia gubernatorial candidate Michael Williams, who has taken to crisscrossing his state in a “Deportation Bus” and threatening to kidnap brown-skinned people for extrajudicial deportation regardless of whether those individuals have “papers.”
• Dallas County Commission candidate and sitting Texas district court judge Vickers Cunningham, whose revocable trust calls for denying inheritances to any of his children who marry nonwhites.

This truncated traipse through the mainstream of Republican politicians at all levels of current and potential public service leaves out the actual Illinois Nazi opposing Sen. Joe Donnelly; the neo-Nazi running to succeed Paul Ryan in WI-1; ousted White House advisor and admitted Hungarian Nazi Sebastian Gorka; “intellectual” Jordan Peterson, who, backed by Ross Douthat, calls for establishing modern-day Joy Divisions; and Grima Wormtongue, er, culturally Jewish Nazi Stephen “Jungle Love Makin’ Him Crazy” Miller.

When a political party rests all the way down on the backs of ducks that walk like Nazis, talk like Nazis, and openly join Nazi groups, reasonable people have no option but to decry the Nazi duck infestation.**

As a fair polemicist,*** Uvular now casts equal aspersions on the Democratic politicians and thought leaders whose communistic proposals go so far to the left that they meet Nazi equivalents coming around the corner.

Somehow, the U.S. political landscape spent a little over 60 years morphing from one in which every bed covered an imagined commie to a playground for the Schutzstaffel. Explain how in 3,000 comments or more.^

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n.b., Jello Biafra of The Dead Kennedys wrote “California Über Alles” in the late 1970s about a far-left dictatorship under once-and-current Gov. Jerry Brown. Put a pin in that and the balloon explodes to cover you in glitter forged from pure irony. In Jello’s defense, lyrics like “You will jog for the master race / And always wear a happy face / Close your eyes, can’t happen here / Big Bro’ on white horse is near” would not sound out of place in a rewrite of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”
*One almost feels disappointed in McSally’s supporters for their failure to spark to the twofer antipapist-cum-homophobic slur of her surname.
**SPOILER: Donald woke from his nightmare. May we all.
***It could happen. Shut up.
^The committee will accept all versions of “reversion to form, white boy!” As much as it disappoints and dismays, it should not surprise to see a country founded on race-based slavery abandon most pretenses to civil rights and equality under law.