SPRINGTIME FOR KUTTNER: Liberal Magazine: Hitler Knew How to Fund Science, Unlike Trump.
Adolf Hitler was really a pretty good guy, according to the American Prospect. At least he knew that funding universities was a good investment and that scientific research was a national good. Donald Trump should be more like Hitler, don’tcha know?
No, I am not kidding. They really think America should follow the Hitler model when it comes to funding science.
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Now, don’t get me wrong: American Prospect is not calling for a systematic purge of Jews from the scientific community, although no doubt many of their readers are on board with that idea since it would be a good way to “decolonize” academia. They just think Hitler had the right idea about pouring money into universities.
At least I don’t THINK that is what Robert Kuttner is arguing.
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In Robert Kuttner’s world, Hitler may not have been the ideal leader, but he did have some good ideas. Look to the Nazis, he tells us.
Geez.
Curiously, he’s not the first contributor to the socialist American Prospect to go the “good ideas” route. That thought seems to cross the minds of its contributors once every decade, so they were definitely due:
Not everything the Nazis touched was bad. Hitler was a vegetarian. Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company. Universal health care is a perfectly good idea. Indeed, the Nazis actually did a pretty good job increasing economic growth and improving standards of living (they were, many think, the first Keynesians, adopting the strategy even before Keynes had come up with it), pushing Germany out of a depression and back into expansion. Unfortunately, they also set out to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jews. People shouldn’t do that.
—“Nazi Ideas,” Ezra Klein, The American Prospect, September 11(!) 2006.
Klein’s fellow TAP contributor and future Vox.com co-founder Mathew Yglesias tweeted in 2016:
As future Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg wrote at the beginning of 2001, “I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: ‘Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?’”
Related: From Newsalert in 2015: Flashback: When Comrade Robert Kuttner Was Honored By The Democratic Socialists of America.
Well, TAP seems determined on occasion to expand their socialism on an “unexpectedly” national scale!