When You Know You've Lost the Battle

Most of you have some familiarity with the famous "Hitler Argument Principle", the one that essentially goes something like "If you bring Adolf Hitler into an argument first, you have lost."

That's not so silly a proposition as it sounds, and it is fundamentally accurate.  We regard Hitler as the total extreme of evil, with zero redeeming qualities.  In that context, when you say something like "Sure, but if it were Hitler would you do the same thing" or "If Hitler had done that ...", you are engaging in the odd flavor of reductio ad absurdum argument that people use when they can't defend their postulate on its merits.

While I admit that I probably have not adequately explained the Principle to any of you who have not previously heard it, please bear with me, and it least temporarily stipulate that it is true for the moment.

Today, I opened the op-ed section of the Washington Post only to find a fairly loud headline at the top of the column by the leftist columnist Dana Milbank.  The headline read "Donald Trump is a Bigot and a Racist."  The column itself was surprisingly absent of any real evidence of that; Milbank laid out a pattern of actions on Trump's part -- and, to be accurate, action on other people's part that he was blamed for not opposing or commenting on -- that supposedly amounted to a pattern of bigotry and racism.

Of course, if you look at each of the incidents with any depth at all, you see that the action of the original perpetrator was pretty much irrelevant to their race -- criminal violence in some cases, for example.  Milbank brought up Trump's previous support of the "birther" movement, people challenging whether Barack Obama was born in the USA, and lumped that in as if opposing Obama for anything at all was, by definition, racist because Obama is half-black.

I bring up the Hitler Argument Principle not just because Milbank got close enough to it (he mentioned a quote from a concentration-camp survivor, as if it were relevant), but because the relative absence of actual fact in his piece relevant to bigotry -- especially with such an accusatory headline -- shows the Principle in all its glory.

Dana Milbank put out an op-ed that was under the kind of headline that can get you sued.  He then provided no real justification for his accusation, and he brought the Nazis into it.  It would appear that the left, particularly the Trump-hating part of the left (i.e., the press), has become so frustrated with the rise of Donald Trump that they are going to the far side of Debate 101 to try to make their case, like a bunch of petulant children going "Well, you're wrong .... and you're fat and you're ugly too!"  So there.

I do not know Donald Trump, and I don't know his attitude toward other races (except for being suspicious of Muslims, but willing to accept each on a personal level, which puts him in the majority of American voters).  However, Milbank's column, by being so completely over the top, has utterly convinced me of two things:
(A) Donald Trump is not a racist
(B) The left is frightened to death of him.

I still have not decided for whom I will vote in the primary on Super Tuesday next year.  If it were today, it would not likely be Donald Trump; there are some in the field I also support whom I would prefer even more.  But after today's column, there's no question that I needn't be worried about whether or not Donald Trump is a racist and a bigot.  He is clearly not.

If Dana Milbank has to play the Hitler card, he has already lost the argument.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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