NBC
News recently published a
piece
criticizing
Vivek Ramaswamy
‘s statements on immigration titled “Vivek Ramaswamy celebrates his immigrant family while pushing far-right border policies.” Disturbingly, the subhead of the article suggested that Ramaswamy was “lifting talking points from neo-Nazis.”
The article was a response to Ramaswamy’s claim during the GOP primary debate that illegal immigrants crossing the United States
southern border
constituted an “invasion” and suggested using “military resources” to address the problem.
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As a libertarian, I disagree with Ramaswamy’s position on immigration; I
would like to see
more people allowed to cross the border, not fewer. Nonetheless, attempting to tie Ramaswamy to neo-Nazis goes too far.
For one thing, Ramaswamy’s position on immigration is more nuanced than NBC suggests. He points out that he’s a child of immigrants. He
wants to
secure the border and “eliminat[e] lottery-based immigration in favor of meritocratic admission.” More broadly, he
said
he wanted to “build a multi-ethnic working class majority” to win the presidency. Neo-Nazi talking points these are not.
Indeed, Ramaswamy’s stance on immigration isn’t far outside what many prominent Democrats said a couple of decades ago. In his 1995 State of the Union, then-President Bill Clinton
claimed that
“all Americans … are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.”
Smearing Ramaswamy as a neo-Nazi is a problem because it narrows the Overton window. In a republic, most political ideas should be on the table because a
robust culture of free speech
is how we, the people sort good ideas from bad ones and make informed decisions. But if someone is seen as a neo-Nazi, then his or her ideas will be ignored and belittled. That might be a good thing for genuine white supremacists such as Richard Spencer, but saying that run-of-the-mill Republican ideas are off the table is a dangerous move.
The second problem is that smearing Ramaswamy in this way makes it harder for us to uncover actual neo-Nazis. Genuine white supremacists do exist, and their toxic ideas should be called out. But all of that gets much harder when we call Indian immigrants such as Ramaswamy neo-Nazis merely for having right-wing attitudes on immigration. If everyone to the right of NBC News is a neo-Nazi, how can we as a society actually discern the true white supremacists?
Finally, this sort of inflammatory rhetoric threatens to increase our already high levels of affective polarization.
Affective polarization is
defined as
“the gap between individuals’ positive feelings toward their own political party and negative feelings toward the opposing party” or, in layman’s terms, the anger and fear that we feel toward members of the other party. Affective polarization is already at a fever pitch, and it causes immense problems. It’s one of the reasons we have so much partisan gridlock. It represents an
existential threat to our republic
; when people hate and fear the other side, they become less willing to share power and more eager to change the rules to keep the other side permanently out of office.
On an individual level, feeling intense fear and anger toward the half of the country who doesn’t vote like we do is almost tautologically bad for our mental health.
When we imply that our political opponents are neo-Nazis, we spike our societal levels of affective polarization through the roof. After all, who wouldn’t be angry or scared if a genuine neo-Nazi was gaining
broad momentum
in the other side’s presidential primary?
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Of course, there’s a better way. We can and should call out ideas from politicians that we disagree with while leaving the overblown rhetoric at home. That might not get as many rage clicks or shares on social media, but it’s better for our country.
Julian Adorney is a writer and marketing consultant with
fee.org
and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
