DEMOCRATS AND THEIR REDUCTIO AD HITLERUM SLANDER:

The usual hectoring elites are complaining that the virus crisis—another “moral equivalent of war”—isn’t generating oodles of national unity and good fellow feeling among citizens, like World War II. Quite the opposite: we seem just as divided as before. (And of course we are told this is Trump’s fault.) But it turns out much of that gauzy (and nowadays recreated) memory of the war years is distorted if not mistaken.

I dusted off historian Fred Siegel’s neglected 1984 masterpiece, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan to refresh the scene. Siegel reminds us in the opening chapter that the pre-war political divisions carried easily into the early war years and lasted throughout.

Read the whole thing, the result of which, I’ve updated this 2016 post keeping track as many prominent Reductio ad Hitlerums as I could assemble. It originally had listed the first spotting of a Democrat (in this case FDR) comparing a Republican president or presidential nominee back to 1944; it’s now back to 1940.