National Review likened Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to a Nazi. 

In a July 20 post on National Review Online, National Review editor Kevin Williamson claimed that Sanders' political views equate to “national socialism,” even as Williamson acknowledges Sanders' Jewish heritage and the fact that his family was killed in the Holocaust: (emphasis added)

Aside from Grandma Stalin there, there's not a lot of overtly Soviet iconography on display around the Bernieverse, but the word “socialism” is on a great many lips. Not Bernie's lips, for heaven's sake: The guy's running for president. But Tara Monson, a young mother who has come out to the UAW hall to support her candidate, is pretty straightforward about her issues: “Socialism,” she says. “My husband's been trying to get me to move to a socialist country for years -- but now, maybe, we'll get it here.” The socialist country she has in mind is Norway, which of course isn't a socialist country at all: It's an oil emirate. Monson is a classic American radical, which is to say, a wounded teenager in an adult's body: Asked what drew her to socialism and Bernie, she says that she is “very atheist,” and that her Catholic parents were not accepting of this. She goes on to cite her “social views,” and by the time she gets around to the economic questions, she's not Helle Thorning-Schmidt -- she's Pat Buchanan, complaining about “sending our jobs overseas.” L'Internationale, my patootie. This is national socialism.

In the Bernieverse, there's a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.

[...]

There are many kinds of Us-and-Them politics, and Bernie Sanders, to be sure, is not a national socialist in the mode of Alfred Rosenberg or Julius Streicher.

He is a national socialist in the mode of Hugo Chávez. He isn't driven by racial hatred; he's driven by political hatred. And that's bad enough.

 

Image via Marc Nozell via Creative Commons License