02 September 2008

Nazi vs. Anarchist vs. Fascist vs. Gestapo vs. Traitor

There's a lot of talk about the negative effect of political name-calling on the state of democracy in the US. In my native tongue Dutch we call that type of argument dooddoeners, literally "death-renderers." They make any form of dialogue impossible, they stop it "dead in its tracks," which is exactly what they are meant to do. A related concept is reductio ad Hitlerium. Anyway, I compared five of those names:


Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of anarchist in all years.
nazi 7.40
anarchist 1.00
fascist 0.40
gestapo 0.40
traitor 0.30

Nazi is by far the favorite (though declining in Google-popularity) and makes it hard to see what's going on with the other terms. Let's leave out Nazi:


Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of anarchist in all years.
anarchist 1.00
fascist 0.42
gestapo 0.42
traitor 0.30

The frontrunner anarchist is also declining in use while the others are more or less stable. Note the tremendous uptick of traitor at the very end caused by the McCain campaign's extensive use of many allusions to this dooddoener against regarding Obama.

Update: I corrected the last paragraph.

No comments:

Post a Comment