Normalizing Hitler: The permission structure mainstreaming Nazism

Never in my life did I expect to have to fight against normalizing Adolph Hitler.

Something has been happening the past few years in some of my classes. Not a lot, but a  number of students have turned in work in my Jewish Studies classes giving sympathetic accounts of Hitler, seeking to normalize Nazi race theory. Note: these students are not Jew-haters. They take the class to educate themselves, to overcome ignorance, which they do.

Where is this coming from? Today’s politics in which Donald Trump and his gang of right-wing pundits have been steadily constructing a permission structure designed to mainstream Great Replacement theory, tropes about Jewish divided loyalty and geopolitical control, and thereby a whitewashing of Hitler and the erasure of the Shoah.

Sebastian Gorka proudly flaunts his connections to a Nazi-adjacent group as he broadcasts to Trump loyalists. Mark Robinson, the Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate from North Carolina, called the Holocaust “hogwash” and was recently discovered by CNN to have referred to himself as a “Black Nazi.” Tucker Carlson recently hosted Darryl Cooper on his podcast, introducing him as the most important living historian, not a fringe Holocaust denier. Cooper argues that Hitler wasn’t the bad guy in WWll, but rather that it was Winston Churchill who was the source of evil. After Carlson posted the interview, Elon Musk re-x’d it on X, commenting, “interesting.” Musk later deleted it, but only once the optics became clear. Regardless, the message was clear.

During this time, Donald Trump was (and is) spraying gasoline on democracy, placing Jews in a familiar place, declaring that if he loses the Presidential election, it will be the fault of American Jews, putting a MAGA target on the back of every American Jew.

I’m not surprised. Trump has made clear he has no regard for Jewish people, e.g., he had Jew-hating white supremacist Nick Fuentes over to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. When marching Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Trump first protested those protesting the Nazis. After it became clear how this looked, he walked it back a bit when he said, “there were good people on both sides.” What good Nazi marchers did Trump mean? Like everything else he says, his admiration for Hitler is both clear and infectious.

To normalize horror as a social good requires what sociologists call a “permission structure,” that is, a cultural model that is added to one’s set of factual commitment, moral values, and internalized social norms that allows for a transition in belief and actions that would otherwise be unacceptable. Consider, for example, the seeking of help from a therapist, something that through the early 1960s would be seen as shameful. But once Dr. Joyce Brothers and others normalized therapy for the usual sorts of mental problems we face in day-to-day life like depression or addiction, it created a permission structure for people to allow themselves to seek professional help. Sometimes these permission structures are helpful, opening up the pathway to personal and cultural betterment, but other times they can be deeply harmful.

Normalizing Hitler and Nazi doctrines like the Great Replacement Theory is such an example. Donald Trump and cronies like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson have been working for years to construct this permission structure. It creates a standing danger for American Jews, which has always been the goal of Christian nationalists.

And so it is not inexplicable that it is only in the last few years that I have had to read student papers and listen to in-class comments defending Hitler, arguing that I misunderstood  Hitler’s goals in my lectures. Hitler was only trying to do good works for the Germans, they argue. The students who said such words were corrected by other students, a product of Jewish Studies’ impact on our curriculum.

The students defending Hitler were not  anti-Semites or provocateurs. They chose to take Jewish Studies classes with me and are not trouble-makers. These are not fringe actors repeating what they learned from other fringe actors. These are uneducated students getting taught  by increasingly mainstream sources; they get misinformation from TikTok normalizing Hitler. They had never studied Hitler with actual experts, only with culturally-approved, Trump-connected social media. As such, they swallow this propaganda not understanding they are taking part in a genocidal orientation when trying to defend him.

While there is no doubt antisemitism on the left, this normalizing of Hitler is happening only on the right. Left wing Jew-hatred makes me tremble, but as dreadful as it can be, the left still sees Nazis as factually wrong and morally abominable. Hitler’s name is not being normalized on the left.

Some on the left will say that the only reason the holocaust is discussed so much is that the victims were white, but that’s not true. Jews were not white in Nazi Europe. They were Jews. The construction of pigment racism is a 17th century myth manufactured by American white Europeans. Racism in Europe is ethnic, not skin pigment. This line, to use the contemporary left’s own vocabulary, is a matter of cultural appropriation, to take an American concept and apply it to another culture.

Why then is the Holocaust much discussed, especially in contrast to other genocidal horrors? One reason is that the Nazis wrote down a great deal about their genocidal project against the Jews; no other group or mad person documented their genocidal campaigns like the Nazis. Another reason for this is Holocaust denial. Faux historians like Darryl Cooper revise the facts of the Shoah to trivialize it, allowing them to avoid having to face its horrific truths which are inconvenient for their anti-Semitic worldview. It is thus left to American Jews having to highlight that Hitler was an evil person. Having to defend those murdered from the murderer must be understood as a forever Jewish fight.

But while never forgetting the Holocaust requires an effort at educating students, teaching them history that seems irrelevant to the modern day because that was then and this is now. If my classes are an indicator, however, now is seeming increasingly more like then. And that is not an accident. Indeed, it is a goal, the aim of a long-term program on the global political right to create a permission structure to restore, reclaim, and justify Nazism. From what I am seeing, its success at infiltrating the minds of even those who are not explicitly anti-Semitic should have us deeply concerned.