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JD VANCE, AMERICAN RACISM, AND GERMAN FASCISM  
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Chuck Idelson
February 18, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ A sordid history to remember and the horrific prospects of a vice
president's embrace of Germany's neo-Nazi party. _

Thousands of people gather at Bebelplatz Square in Berlin to protest
against far-right extremism, racism, and xenophobia, while also
demonstrating against far-right parties in Berlin, Germany on February
16, 2025, Halil Sagirkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images

 

Vice President J.D. Vance’s embrace of Germany’s neo-Nazi party
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in a high profile Munich visit this past week sparked outrage and
alarm across Europe. It was the latest example of a long history of
U.S.-Nazi racism and dictatorship ties that should be a stark warning
of what it portends for the U.S. as well.

Vance’s refusal to meet with German Chancellor Olof Scholz, instead
holding a private meeting with the Alternative for Germany (AfD)
leader, followed Elon Musk’s video appearance
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at a campaign kickoff for the AfD ahead of next Sunday’s German
elections. It also coincided with escalation of the Musk-Trump
administration’s gutting of federal programs and firing of workers,
a key step for establishing authoritarian rule at home.

The rise of the AfD and President Donald Trump’s election were both
animated by vitriolic, racist practices and ideology, a stark reminder
of how the U.S. legacy of racist behavior and laws were a prime model
for the ascent of Hitler and Nazi fascism. And how Hitler’s success
inspired U.S. acolytes of Hitler like Charles Lindberg, Father
Coughlin, and Henry Ford.

Just as Hitler utilized antisemitism, along with vilification of the
left and traditional party elites to propel his dictatorial dreams,
Trump has long employed speech and actions to animate his thirst for
unchecked power. For Trump it went from launching his first campaign
by branding Mexican immigrants as “rapists and murders,” to
today’s demonization of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a
vehicle to rally support for his autocratic goals.

Unleashing Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency
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DOGE [[link removed]]) on public agencies and
staff accelerated the longtime far right libertarian goal and Project
2025 plan to privatize, deregulate and shrink federal government to
nothing more than handouts to corporations and the super-rich and
expanding military, policing and border control. Augmenting it with a
DEI shroud enabled them to further a white surpremacist vision of
purging workers of color from public service.

Trump and Musk seem intent on reversing every political, economic,
multi-cultural democratic advance envisioned by the post-Civil War
Reconstruction reforms that also were the foundation of subsequent
legislative and cultural gains of the 1960s and ‘70s for racial,
ethnic, gender and LBGTQ+, and disability rights.

‘It’s a coup’

That plan is just getting started, as illuminated by the _Washington
Post_
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in a preview of the next phase, escalating evisceration of critical
public health, safety net and environmental and consumer protection
programs already underway. On February 11, Trump signed an updated
executive order directing federal agency heads to prepare wholesale
“reorganization plans,” commencing a “critical transformation”
of “our system of Government itself.”
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Even two veteran Republican budget experts,
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told _Reuters_ the plan is “driven more by an ideological assault on
federal agencies long hated by conservatives than a good-faith effort
to save taxpayer dollars.” The goal, says Our Revolution
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“consolidate billionaire power and dismantle democracy as we know
it. This is not efficiency—it's a coup."

The DEI demagogy, a focus of Trump’s 2024 campaign, drives Trump
2.0. Following the Potomac plane crash, White House press secretary
made it explicit [[link removed]],
“when you are flying on an airplane with your loved ones, do you
pray that your plane lands safely, or do you pray that your pilot has
a certain skin color?”

Building authoritarian power through fanning bigotry has a long
backstory in the U.S., from the slave states’ power over the federal
government and post-Civil War in the former Confederate states
following the counter revolution against Reconstruction. It was also
the cudgel used by Hitler, along with political violence, to attain
power following his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch coup and then to
secure his regime.

The U.S. blueprint for Hitler

As James Whitman writes in his book, _Hitler’s American Model: The
United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, _Hitler praised the
U.S. as “the one state” that had made progress for a racial order
that has allowed it “to become the master of the American continent
and … remain the master as long as he does not fall victim to racial
pollution.” Hitler used antisemitic demagogy blaming Jews,
especially, for Germany’s defeat of in World War I and its economic
crisis, as a key lever to gain votes, leading to being handed the
Chancellorship in 1933.

Nazi demagogy admired how Americans felt the need to exclude the
“foreign body” of “strangers to the blood” of the ruling race,
Whitman observes, an eerie prelude to Trump’s depiction
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of immigrants from South America, Asia and Africa “poisoning the
blood of our country” that built upon year of similar racist rants.

Echoing _Mein Kampf_ in the 1930s segregationist Mississippi Senator
Theodore Bilbo asserted “one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins
of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and
palsies his creative faculty,” a racist trope Trump nearly a century
later paraphrased to disparage the intellect of numerous Black
leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris
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Shortly after Hitler’s reign began, Germany adopted a law on the
Revocation of Naturalization and the Withdrawal of German Citizenship
for the “denaturalization and expulsion of Eastern European Jews who
arrived after the First World War,” Whitman observes_._

Nazi lawyer Otto Koellreutter called it, “a further necessary
measure for maintaining the healthy racial cohesion of the _Volk_
(German people),” another step influenced by U.S. as well as British
Dominion laws that parallels Trump’s racist immigration goals and
his effort to overturn the 14th Amendment right of birthright
citizenship.

By 1934, as the Nazis were well on their way to sustaining their
dictatorship they moved to codify persecution of German Jews. Leading
Nazi lawyers began crafting the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws to
prevent “any further penetration of Jewish blood into the body of
the German _Volk_.” It banned intermarriages and sexual relations
between Jews and other Germans. They cited anti-miscegenation laws
ultimately adopted in 30 U.S. states, and not finally expunged until
the 1967 Supreme Court _Loving v Virginia_ ruling.

Jews were also barred from a broad swath of employment in governing,
academia, and the legal world. “What they were worried about,”
Whitman explained to
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journalist Bill Moyers [[link removed]],
“was that Jews might take over Germany, so the Jews had to be kept
out of government, out of the legal profession, and out of any other
situation in which they might exercise what the Nazis always called
influence.” It looks like a harbinger of Trump and Musk’s DEI
goals.

The U.S. assumed the mantle of “the leadership of the white
peoples” after World War I, wrote far-right German professor
Wahrhold Drascher in _The Supremacy of the White Race,_ in 1936,
adding without the leadership of the U.S. “a conscious unity of the
white race would never have emerged.” He termed the founding of the
U.S. “the turning point” for the theory of the white supremacy.

What especially appealed to Nazi legal experts, Whitman concludes, was
how readily traditional legal norms were overridden in the United
States. “What commanded the respect of the Nazi lawyers," he said,
"was an America where politics was comparatively unencumbered by
law,” which the Nazis quickly replicated.

“While it is true that ordinary citizens were to be blindly
obedient, Nazi officials were expected to take a different
attitude,” writes Whitman. “Political leaders were enjoined to be
loyal to the spirit of Hitler. Whatever you do, always ask: How would
the Fuhrer act, in accordance with the image you have of him.”

Whitman could have envisioned how Vance, Musk, and Trump would endorse
defying multiple adverse court rulings on DOGE “reorganization,”
illegal firings and executive orders, best evidenced in Trump’s post
quoting Napoleon: “He who saves his Country does not violate any
Law.”

What will actually “save the country” is spirited fight and
resistance to the coup.

German Chancellor Scholz responded to Vance
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noting the U.S. helped overthrow Nazism. “‘Never again’ is the
historical mission that Germany, as a free democracy, must and wants
to continue to live up to day after day,” he said. “Never again
fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”

What is needed right now across the country, said Indivisble in a
recent call to action [[link removed]], is "an
unprecedented show of constituent power to hold Republicans
accountable for their complicity in the Trump-Musk coup and demand
that Democrats in Congress use every ounce of leverage and power they
have to fight back.”

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Chuck Idelson, retired, is the former Communications Senior Strategist
for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and
professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members.

* JD Vance
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