How widespread are these views? I’m fascinated by how someone can become so detached from reality as to make this comparison. Presuming it’s not a calculated media intervention (why would it be? it makes him look like absurd) then how someone can come to hold such a belief demands explanation. The capacity to draw a parallel between a socio-economic position (the 1%) and a socio-cultural one (German Jews in 30s and 40s) speaks of a complete failure to recognise any social structural reality conditioning the positions of groups. The atomistic ontology of liberal individual can, it seems, engender a tendency towards persecution mania which might very well have profoundly illiberal consequences at times of social crisis.
Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286
Mark Carrigan 