For Godwin's Law, Against "Godwin's Law"
Godwin's Law famously concerns itself with what appears to be a wearisome predilection of impassioned Internet argumenters for invoking comparisons related to Hitler and the Nazis. Godwin himself explains it thusly:
In its original simple form, Godwin’s Law goes like this: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches one.” It’s deliberately pseudo-scientific — meant to evoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the inevitable decay of physical systems over time. My goal was to hint that those who escalate a debate into Adolf Hitler or Nazi comparisons may be thinking lazily, not adding clarity or wisdom, and contributing to the decay of an argument over time.
You will most frequently see this law invoked whenever Hitler or Nazis come up in conversation as, most charitably, a point of reference to make sense of current political events, or, least charitably, as a tenuous attack against someone's character. Inevitably, someone will invoke Godwin's Law by name and declare that the debate has been essentially forfeited. This, according to Godwin, is a misuse of the concept:
Since it was released into the wilds of the internet in 1991, Godwin’s Law [...] has been frequently reduced to a blurrier notion: that whenever someone compares anything current to Nazis or Hitler it means the discussion is over, or that that person lost the argument. It’s also sometimes used (reflexively, lazily) to suggest that anyone who invokes a comparison to Nazis or Hitler has somehow “broken” the Law, and thus demonstrated their failure to grasp what made the Holocaust uniquely horrific.
[...] I do want to stress that the question of evil, understood historically, is bigger than party politics. [Godwin's Law] is about remembering history well enough to draw parallels — sometimes with Hitler or with Nazis, sure — that are deeply considered. That matter. Sometimes those comparisons are going to be appropriate, and on those occasions GL should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter.
The man himself takes umbrage with the notion that the moment Nazis are brought up, the conversation ought to be considered moot. He is less concerned with policing the invocation of Nazis, which is how people tend to conceive of his law, than he is with being mindful of when such invocations are appropriate and constructive. It should come as no surprise that gaggles of thoughtless people across social media fail to understand its actual purpose, and choose instead to wield it as a cudgel to eliminate unflattering comparisons (as a Trump supporter might when you criticize his abhorrent treatment of illegal immigrants) or needlessly inflammatory hyperbole.
In this way, I see value in his law as a useful construct with which not to spuriously declare victory in a debate, but to analyze online communication.
So there is Godwin's Law, as he conceived it, and there is "Godwin's Law," as the Internet tends to use it. The latter is far less defensible, and though Godwin himself argues why, I also take a bit of a different perspective. People online have collapsed the concept of analogy to the point where it's not understood as completely as it ought to be. As Godwin says, a comparison between a contemporary politician and Hitler is not intrinsically invalid, and may be worth making if the care is taken to demonstrate parallels in a way that evinces a proper understanding of history. But to limit the scope of "valid comparisons" in this way misses the point of what analogies are for.
If I may allow myself to be, for a moment, the kind of guy that insufferably cites the definition of a word, an analogy is "a method of comparison that highlights the relationship between two different things to clarify or illustrate a third concept." That definition does not include a stipulation that the validity of an analogy hinges on its tastefulness or how hyperbolic its invocation appears to be.
To make my objection more clear, consider the following analogies:
President Trump is like Hitler because both were involved in government.
President Obama is like Hitler because they both had two arms.
Jesus Christ, biblical son of God, was like Hitler because both had mustaches.
The author and the reader of this essay are both like Hitler because they all wore shoes.
These analogies are all undeniably valid. The point of an analogy is to draw a comparison between two things for the purpose of illustrating a common principle between them, but to draw an analogy between two things does not imply that they are equal. This is the vital component of analogies that many people online appear to miss, and you can see where their understanding of the device breaks down by the sort of responses you'll see to Hitler-related analogies. People will admonish each other for "equating Trump and Hitler," or ask whether someone "seriously just compared Obama and Hitler." This sort of response reveals a critical misconception regarding analogy, namely, that to draw a comparison between people for a particular reason is the same as insisting that they are alike in all significant ways. Therefore, as they see it, if the two subjects of the analogy are not sufficiently equal in all the ways that they believe to be relevant, the analogy is invalid.
But analogies are not assertions of equality, and their validity only rests on whether its subjects are alike in the specific way being indicated. An analogy between two people cannot be definitively determined to be categorically invalid unless you know what common principle is being indicated. In my examples above, it's not coherent to declare that Obama and Hitler could never be the subjects of a valid analogy, because there are, in fact, plenty of similarities between them: their species, their body parts, the fact that both breathed air, and so on. To draw an analogy on these grounds is rhetorically pointless, to be sure, but not logically invalid. On the other hand, analogies between these two men which draw attention to a principle involving governance, moral values, or the consequences of their reigns may or may not be valid, depending on the nature of the argument being made. By no means can you reasonably declare that "you can't compare Hitler to Obama"; you can only declare that "you can't compare Hitler to Obama this way". The same goes for Trump, yourself, a salamander, the tree I see out the window, the concept of time, and literally every other thing that exists, either concretely or conceptually. All things can be validly compared to Hitler, or to each other, as long as the analogy is constructed coherently. An analogy is not rendered valid, or not, based on its subjects, but on its argument. "Hitler and the concept of Thursday are alike in that they both existed" is a completely valid and logically sound analogy. The objection that "you can't draw an analogy between Hitler and the concept of Thursday because one is a day, and the other is an evil human" is false.
On a similar note, you'll often hear people say things to the effect of, "you can't compare Obama to Hitler, because Hitler was obviously worse." This objection is utterly incoherent on a semantic level; to insist, correctly, that Hitler was worse than Obama is itself a comparison, and therefore cannot be used to argue that no comparisons are possible. To say "you can't compare X and Y because X is worse" is as rational as saying "I don't have a sister, and I have a sister." It's not incorrect, per se; it's utter meaningless gibberish that is too devoid of coherence to have a truth value at all, and is a sure sign that the person making the objection does not even understand what analogies are to the extent that they could determine in the first place whether one was valid or not. It is not a good idea to trust an opinion about national governance and moral behavior from someone who cannot conceive that "Obama is better than Hitler" is a comparison of Obama and Hitler.
Around this point is when I imagine I lose a reader, who may object that I am being overly pedantic. Perhaps Obama and Hitler may technically be the subjects of valid analogies, but nobody is drawing them for the sake of pointing out that they both possessed functioning right thumbs, or some other such inconsequential trait. They draw those analogies in order to portray Obama as evil to the extent that he and Hitler are within the same moral echelon. Additionally, "you can't compare Obama and Hitler because Obama is better than Hitler" is merely an inarticulate way of communicating that it is disingenuous to portray them as morally alike to any appreciable degree.
The issue I have with this, as well as most arguments that appeal to the idea that being pedantic constitutes a rhetorical deficiency, is that they do too much work for the benefit of someone who hasn't bothered to do it themselves. Comparing and contrasting historical figures can be a heavy business, and, as Godwin says, obliges us to conduct ourselves with intention and precision in our language. Just as drawing an analogy between Obama and Hitler makes for sloppy argumentation if you do so not because you think their moral standing is particularly similar, but merely to emphasize how much you hate Obama, so too does pushing back on the grounds that because one is better than the other, these two things cannot possibly be compared. Both of these arguments are either disingenuous or plain dumb, but the latter is actually in worse shape because it is semantically vacuous.
This point is worth belaboring. If, by appealing to Godwin's Law, my argument is less cogent than "Obama is pretty much Hitler," I have catastrophically erred in my argumentation. This is the consequence of my own rhetoric, and people should not intervene to bail me out on the grounds that they approve of what they assume I probably meant instead. My moral highground does not rescue any malformed, half-baked jabs I toss out to express it. In this example, I have lost the debate against the guy who thinks Obama is as bad as Hitler, and I should be ashamed that I failed so comprehensively to counter an idea that barely has legs to stand on. Likewise, Internet onlookers to this debate should not pop in and declare that what I actually meant is something completely different than what I said. They should, if anything, admonish me for doing such a poor job that I made an insane person look more sane than I am. Explaining why Obama was better than Hitler should be among the most trivial arguments one could possibly make, and I bungled it.
We should take debates, discussions, and argumentation seriously. We shouldn't be content to drag our knuckles to the keyboard and randomly smash a bunch of letters together, relying on our ideological peers to insist that a failure to make coherent points is actually just fine as long as the person making them is in their good graces. We should demand better of each other, especially the people on "our side," and especially in the context of exchanging ideas with people who don't agree. Your brain doesn't get to sit a discussion out just because it happens on Reddit, or Facebook, or Twitter. When the subject matter is something as important as politics and society, you do yourself, and everyone around you, a disservice by disengaging your brain and insisting that your horrible takes are profound as long as everyone knows what you meant to say instead. As I have argued before, arguments are not valid simply because they support your conclusion. If I am to crown a rhetorical winner between "Obama is as bad as Hitler" and "Obama is better than Hitler, which is comparing them, therefore you can't compare them, but Obama is still better than Hitler," the only intellectually honest verdict is the one that makes me cringe to award. Because the person with the moral highground failed to take their position seriously, they cede victory to the person with the morally inferior perspective who at least bothered to string a coherent thought together, however reprehensible that thought may be. There is no consolation prize for not being bright enough to prove that your position is the better one, even if I know that it is. All you've accomplished is making the idea that "Obama is as bad as Hitler" look more defensible than it actually is.
My suspicion is that people may still object that this is beside the point, and that it's perhaps even Quixotic to fret about given the stakes at play. Honestly, who cares about whether you construct your arguments soundly or not against literal neo-Nazis, or people who have somehow become convinced that Obama was as bad as Hitler? It's foolish to sit there and dissect the arguments like we're writing an essay; these people need to understand that they're wrong, and that their beliefs are not acceptable.
This is backward; the idea that we don't have the need or luxury to worry about how well our arguments are formed is the foolishly idealistic perspective. Put simply, if people with morally reprehensible beliefs could be bullied out of holding them by stupid but morally superior counterarguments, it would have happened already, and it would be a simple matter to, for example, convince Trump's base that he's a scourge on our democracy. That is obviously not the world we live in. You cannot bully people into seeing the world your way. You cannot Punch Nazis™ out of existence. It just doesn't work. (We even laud figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. for changing social norms by changing minds, not assaulting racists, and we realize that the lesson isn't "racists don't deserve to be punched," but that "punching racists doesn't lead to fewer racists.") Furthermore, attempts to do so with violence lead directly to the perpetuation of the ideas you're trying to eliminate. The Left has wielded Cancel Culture for over a decade at this point, and all it has to show for it is Trump, the man who all but openly orchestrated an insurrection, having been elected back to the seat of the presidency. It is astounding to me how we could have fallen so far as a country only to see people on the Left doubling down on how the only thing that can possibly save us is to shame, bully, coerce, Cancel, and physically assault the people responsible. It's not working.
The objection that quibbling over the logical construction of anti-Nazi arguments is just missing the point is but another extension of this tendency. I've explored at length how dimwitted and devoid of rationality I often find people to be, but it remains patently obvious that these people cannot be bullied into changing their minds. Trump's approval ratings among Republicans aren't finally showing signs of cracking because they spontaneously decided that a bunch of idiotic Left-wing rhetoric has suddenly become cogent and convincing; it's cracking because the rational arguments against Trump, such as the reality of prices at the grocery store and gas pump, are becoming too difficult to deny. I can't say for sure that a culture wherein liberals insisted on focusing their attention on rational argumentation would certainly have helped this happen more quickly, but it assuredly would not have made it happen more slowly.
The subtle interplay between our behaviors online and their effects on the broader world is why I get so hung up on people refining those behaviors, or, more accurately, resisting the notion that those behaviors could stand to be refined. There should not be a conceptual barrier erected between the Internet, where I can, in my righteous indignation, vomit out the first words that come to mind and assure myself that I've totally owned the Nazi cuckservatives, and the "real world," where I suddenly care very, very deeply that our leaders and neighbors have the mental fortitude to understand what constitutes a rational argument and the presence of mind to use good argumentation to inform their decisions. How can I possibly lament that Trump supporters are irrational if I leave my brain at the door whenever I engage with them on social media? In what way do I expect the "Obama is as bad as Hitler" guy to see things my way if I can't, or won't, engage him with arguments purpose-built for the job? Am I to sit idly and judge that my ideas are simultaneously so self-evident that he will inevitably drift to them regardless of what I say, but so oblique and esoteric that I could be waiting decades for it to happen? If coming around to the morally superior perspective were inevitable, we wouldn't have found ourselves in this mess of a world. And if I'd like to wash my hands of it all and insist that making well formulated arguments won't work anyway, by no means should I allow myself to make poorly formulated arguments instead, which is directly counterproductive to my own goals.
These are the implications at hand when people dismiss the value of cogent argumentation as merely ancillary, or even counterproductive. If we only punched Nazis just a little bit harder this next election cycle, suddenly everyone would see the light and Trump would become a lame duck, but let's not dare engage ourselves with explaining why it would be good for him to become one, lest we risk "validating" the people whose opinions not changing, and feeling to themselves already very valid, is the reason we're having this discussion in the first place. This leaves those in the middle or otherwise open to be swayed, and by refusing to "validate" abhorrent viewpoints through argumentation, we don't give those people any reason to see how abhorrent those views are. It doesn't lend credence to Nazis to argue for why Obama is better than Hitler, but it will push people toward that viewpoint if the best counter we can muster is an abject failure of rhetoric.
Set aside for a moment the benefits to oneself that arise from centering rationality as opposed to intellectual stagnation, and the notion that we'd live in a better world if everyone nurtured in themselves the capability to articulate and organize their thoughts in a coherent manner; Americans live in a country where everyone understands that we are becoming increasingly polarized, and that this is very bad for us, but where no one has the desire to change their own behavior in order to ameliorate it.
This is why "Godwin's Law," as in its improper formulation that you encounter more frequently, is such a noxious influence on Internet discourse, and, as a consequence, on the world more broadly. It's just one of innumerable tropes that stifle productive discourse and cede ideological ground to people who, by all accounts, would not be able to earn it if their ideas were constructively challenged. To the extent that words on the Internet are capable of harming anyone, which is debatable, "Godwin's Law" and its brethren do harm to society by making us content to sling logical fallacies, incoherent arguments, and ideological swill that leak into the real world and have consequences for everybody.
"Obama is as bad as Hitler"? Godwin's Law facilitates a discussion about why you feel that such a comparison is founded, and opens us to discussing the historical context, in which I can disagree. Meanwhile, "Godwin's Law" prompts me to feel at liberty to set rational discussion aside in favor of stroking my ego by declaring myself the winner without having done anything to earn it. The former is a worthy rhetorical tool; the latter is a bad habit that ought to be dropped, not least for my own sake.
On the other hand, Godwin's Law is like "Godwin's Law" in that they both have the letter G in them. This is a perfectly rational and valid analogy, but only if I listen to Godwin can I judge exactly how useful that is.