… Let’s start with former Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964. Over 50 years before Trump decided to run for president, celebrities, journalists, politicians, and other politicos warned that the GOP presidential nominee was an extreme fascist who would cause considerable harm to the country. Goldwater, who served as a pilot during World War II, was likened to Nazis and fascists for promoting conservatism during his presidential campaign.
For example, the then-Democratic governor of California, Edmund Gerland “Pat” Brown, remarked about Goldwater’s acceptance speech, claiming it “had the stench of fascism. All we needed to hear was Heil Hitler.” It should be noted that Goldwater served as a pilot in the military during WWII. Brown didn’t have any military service at all.
Other comments about Goldwater included a scathing rebuke from civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” King said.
Baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, said of Goldwater’s speech, “I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
The then-mayor of San Francisco, the city where the 1964 Republican National Convention was held, said the GOP “had Mein Kampf as their political bible.”
The despicable comments continued the following election in 1968. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Democratic nominee for president, remarked about the election, “If the British had not fought in 1940, Hitler would have been in London, and if Democrats do not fight in 1968, Nixon will be in the White House.”
Former President Richard Nixon won the election, but the Hitler, Nazi, and fascist comparisons never stopped. For example, in 1970, a political poster featured an image of Adolf Hitler, wearing a Nazi armband, holding a mask of Nixon.
Meanwhile, a news article from October 1972, available for viewing on the CIA’s website, referred to “Nixon’s Nazis” as part of commentary criticizing Nixon. Then there is a photograph from October 1973 of someone wearing a Nixon mask with a crown, giving the Nazi salute.
Gerald Ford followed Nixon as president and as a Republican who was called a fascist. In 1974, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized Ford for his lack of punitive action against Nixon.
“If [President] Ford’s principle had been the rule in Nuremberg,” he said, “the Nazi leaders would have been let off, and only the people, who carried out their schemes, would have been tried,” the ACLU said at the time.
Additionally, in the Gerald Ford Library Museum, a document describes an interaction with a woman in 1975 in which Ford was harassed and repeatedly called a “fascist” and a “fascist pig.”
Surely, over a decade of accusations and allegations of fascism never coming to fruition would stop Democrats from calling Republicans Nazis, fascists, or comparing them to Hitler, right?
Wrong.
Former President Ronald Reagan was the next target in the Democrats’ line of unsubstantiated accusations of fascism.
Rep. William Clay (D-MO) stated that Reagan wanted to “replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”
The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were comparable to the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”
American Enterprise Institute scholar Steven Hayward highlighted another incident in which the intelligentsia and academia also contributed to the Reagan fascist comparisons when John Roth, a Holocaust scholar from the Claremont Colleges, commented about Reagan’s election:
“I could not help remembering how 40 years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism — all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe. … It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling.”
Former President George W. Bush might have been the Republican politician who faced the harshest and most vile criticism before Trump. Bush was regularly called every dirty name in the book, from racist to Nazi to fascist to war criminal. There are many examples of linking Bush to Hitler, Nazis, and fascists.
In 2012, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), the same Romney so many Democrats love today, was also linked to Nazis and fascism. One delegate from Kansas (at the time) said Romney was a habitual liar and likened him to Hitler “while criticizing the accuracy of Romney’s campaign talking points.”
A chairman of the California Democratic Party compared then-vice presidential candidate (and eventual former Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan, again, the same Ryan loved by many Democrats today, to Nazi filmmaker and propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should. It is the same line of attacks Democrats have used against Trump.
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