As a conservative, I am temperamentally inclined to reject out of hand the subtype of the genetic fallacy which Leo Strauss seems to have been the first to call the reductio ad Hitlerum. “A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler,” as Professor Strauss so wisely put it in Natural Right and History of 1953—by which time it must have been pretty clear that the rhetorical tactic of claiming one’s opponent’s temperamental or ideological kinship with the late German dictator and mass murderer would most often be directed against conservatives. Conservatives believe in the family and the nation and in military strength, after all, and so did Hitler. Of course, there were lots of other things that Hitler believed that conservatives don’t believe—and some of them, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out in Liberal Fascism, were things that liberals do believe. But then, Mr. Goldberg was sometimes less admired for turning the tables on the left’s guilt-by-association tactic than criticized for engaging in a reductio ad Hitlerum himself.
Anyway, I naturally have mixed feelings when someone with whom I think of myself as being politically in sympathy starts making comparisons between Nazis and those with whom we are both out of sympathy. One such person is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journalin January purporting to identify tendencies not entirely un-Nazi-like among those of our fellow-citizens
