With any presidential election – any election of high-stakes for that matter – comes with it rhetorical devices to persuade the voters. While lesser-known devices like epimone and anacoloutha certainly are perpetually in the background, no device gets more use than that of hyperbole. Every graduate of high school knows what it is, and every living person has used it a thousand times over (see what I did there?).
It is a legitimate device, but unfortunately, it has gotten a bad rap because people tend to associate it with lying, fearmongering, or false analogy – probably because so many people employ the device for precisely these ends.
But it does not follow that we must cry foul every time we hear a comparison that seems exaggerated. Hyperbole (more specifically, apagoresis) exists to cause us to reflect on exaggerated comparisons. So when people dismiss any analogy to Hitler as necessarily unworthy of consideration they are themselves employing a faulty form of hyperbole – that nothing in the past or future can ever compare in any way or fashion to the events of and surrounding the life of Hitler; that Hitler is an exclusive singularity, his actions and motives elevated to an exaggeratedly transcendent position that does not allow for any simile, metaphor, or allegory.
“Godwin’s Law” is its own rhetorical device that states the first person to compare a situation to Hitler automatically loses the argument. But one could just as easily go one step further by saying the first person to invoke Godwin’s Law has deliberately cut off any rational discourse and has therefore automatically lost the argument.
Are all Hitler comparisons valid? Of course not. But it does not follow from that premise that no Hitler comparisons are worthy of consideration. And those comparisons that are valid very rarely make a comparison of identity – i.e., so-and-so is exactly like Hitler in all actions and motives. Rather, more often these valid comparisons highlight a specific attribute or quality of each.
To disallow the comparison of modern political figures to those of the past – like Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin – is to disallow the possibility that the world could ever see such a manifestation of their specific attributes again.
When someone compares to Hitler politicians who play on the base human emotions of fear and anger, the hyperbole is likely not one of identification, but rather an exhortation to be mindful of the circumstances that allowed Hitler to manifest all of his attributes in sum – i.e., his “Hitler-ness”. That person is more than likely reminding us that Hitler would not have been “Hitler” without the exploitation of fear and anger, and is therefore warning us that History has shown that disastrous consequences are indeed possible given that condition.
When someone compares to Lenin those politicians who massage and nurture the natural avarice of man into a frenzied envy, that person is not saying the socialist necessarily wants to sacrifice millions of people for the “revolution”. Instead the argument more likely is that government intervention to determine equal outcomes has at times in recent History had disastrous consequences for human life; that the attribute of exploiting envy has enabled the manifestation of “Lenin-ness” and “Stalin-ness”.
So when we hear comparisons of Sanders or Trump or Bush or Obama to Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, or Franco, let’s not dismiss the argument simply because it’s an argument. We should not fear being warned regularly of the circumstances surrounding historical atrocities. We should not fear hyperbole. We should, however, understand it.
