Restoring our Common Commitment: Nazi Salutes Must Not Be Allowed to go Mainstream

Some in America today want us to forget this and to mainstream the Nazi salute—a prospect against which left, center, and right must unite in firm opposition.

What is the worst gesture in our civilization?

Any adult with basic education knows the answer: the fascist/Nazi salute. It is the worst because it is the most identifiable emblem of the totalitarian regimes that butchered and oppressed countless millions in the last century.

What does it look like?

Again, common knowledge: the right arm extended, palm down. If not for Mussolini and Hitler it would be theoretically possible that it could carry some other common and less menacing implication. But any other meaning was obliterated by its centrality to the authoritarian political theater of the Italian and German fascists and the staggering scale of their crimes against humanity.

Appallingly, some in America today want us to forget this and to mainstream the Nazi salute—a prospect against which left, center, and right must unite in firm opposition.

“We can and must have moral and civic standards higher than rock-bottom U.S. legal baselines about what government can regulate.”

The Seig Heil salute is vastly worse than others, such as the middle finger or a finger drawn across the neck, for the same reason that Nazi Germany was distinctively horrific. Everyday rude gestures typically relate only to persons immediately present. In contrast, the fascist regimes were genocidal dictatorships that first crushed their republics and then acted to exterminate entire demographics of human beings.

Given this context, would it be morally and civically acceptable for someone to give the salute today? Of course not. The fascist dictatorships were so monumentally evil that performing their salute—or deliberately doing anything resembling it—is totally unacceptable. This is why it has been virtually nonexistent in our society throughout our lifetimes. Starting during World War II, from the center of our civic culture extending out toward its farthest edges, the salute has been socially intolerable for at least 85 years. No adult has been able to do it without facing severe consequences—including loss of employment, public trust, friendships, and other social opportunities—unless they make amends. And rightly so.

But what if the gesture were accidental? A bungled attempt at some other gesture, done around others and unintentionally causing alarm? If it truly were an accident and it caused alarm, any decent adult, upon seeing images that showed them how it looked, would not let any misunderstanding stand. They would immediately explain and sincerely apologize.

Under our moral tradition, acknowledgement of wrongdoing is the vital first step on the path to redemption, for either an accidental or intentional offense. Next is a clearly stated commitment never to do it again. Also in order would be compassionate outreach to folks likely to be most terrorized, for example, descendants of people murdered by fascists (e.g., Jews) or related to people who fought heroically and suffered greatly to defeat fascism in World War II (so many of us).

Why do we have to talk about this now? Tragically, this is also a matter of common knowledge: prominent people who assuredly know better performed the salute this year. At an inauguration day political rally, the nation and world witnessed two very emphatic and very fascist-like salutes from then-top presidential advisor Elon Musk. At the February CPAC conference there were two more, including one from former presidential advisor Stephen Bannon, who has a long record of violent rhetoric and remains one of the President’s most influential supporters. Check the tapes. Even worse, those high-profile salutes have generated copycats whose work can be found easily online.

I join millions of others in the opinion that the similarity of these salutes to the fascist salute is unmistakable. Even the leader of a French far-right party—one that critics justifiably decry as descending from 1940s Nazi collaborators—pulled out of CPAC after Bannon’s salute because of what he recognized as “a gesture referring to Nazi ideology.”

The prominent perpetrators have offered denials but have not apologized.

Their excuses (it was a “wave”), like several initial apologetics by fearful people who know better (“an awkward gesture”), are flimsy because the gesture is so distinct and the offense is so monstrous. Hypothetical excuses also all fall flat. Musk and Bannon were not playing Nazi bad guys in a “Sound of Music” revival or a Mel Brooks comedy. Neither were they giving a performative history lesson, with stern warnings that the Greatest Generation that bled in war and built post-war America would endorse. These affluent grown men with well-documented records of fostering violence and far-right parties were instead gleefully throwing straight-arm expressions of appreciation at political rally attendees.

Finally, the saluters ought to find no safe harbor in the lazy claim that they were merely “owning the libs.” That is, making a statement not intended as sincere expression of opinion but rather to provoke a negative emotional response in their political opponents, distract the public, and thereby dominate. Here is the thing: can anyone point to a compelling moral justification for tactical or recreational terror? Intentional infliction of emotional distress, here directed against others in one’s civic community?

Nazi-themed politics or recreational cruelty are simply too horrific for any decent society to indulge. As all decent American adults have done since the 1940s, every moral person in our nation today must stay far away from the fascist salute and condemn it whenever we see it.

Our response in the present moment matters. We are fortunate that the salutes in January and February have not been repeated in recent months. But we are not out of the woods. That the saluters neither lost their followings due to the salutes, nor apologized, tells us that the salutes could recur. There remains real danger that fascist salutes could become widespread in America.

Germany, as Nazism’s incubator, has since World War II reasonably criminalized this Sieg Heil salute, the swastika, and other fascist symbols under its national commitment to exclude anything with clear fascist content from the public space, with limited educational and artistic exceptions.

In our country, unless its use amounts to incitement to imminent violence, the fascist salute is generally protected expressive conduct under the First Amendment. But that does not mean that as a matter of social norms we should allow it to be mainstreamed—just as a person of conscience would not remain silent if someone at a neighborhood BBQ sang vile songs advocating lynching and child sexual assault. In short, we can and must have moral and civic standards higher than rock-bottom U.S. legal baselines about what government can regulate.

 To make illegal all private speech and expressive conduct that is socially toxic would not only be unconstitutional under the First Amendment but could only be accomplished by a repressive government inconsistent with American values and traditions of limited government. High civic standards in contrast—to include speaking and writing to condemn Nazi salutes and other horrifying conduct—reflect exercise of free speech rights by a critical mass of civil society, without expanding the reach of criminal law. Similarly, freedom for professional journalists and scholars to highlight fascist conduct without fear of government sanction or private violent reprisal reflects exercise of First Amendment freedoms of the press, speech, and conscience. Self-censorship reflects lowered civic standards and gives repression a win.

Americans should have the courage of their convictions and take full advantage of their constitutional right to participate in the maintenance of social standards via free speech, assembly, association, journalism, and religious exercise. Straight-arm salutes should be flagged and condemned for what they most obviously are: inherently terrorizing performative fascist conduct, at odds with our nation’s traditions of liberty and proud heritage of defeating authoritarians abroad and preventing their ascendance domestically. Civic institutions, event organizers, political parties, and individuals should impose clear consequences of condemnation and exclusion for Nazi salute practitioners, while always leaving the door open to apology and civic rehabilitation.

This is not an endorsement of “cancel culture” nor any other recent obsession of our overheated political culture, but instead urgent defense of the longstanding American norm of excluding murderous authoritarians and their symbols of intolerance from the mainstream. The philosopher Karl Popper famously argued that the intolerant cannot be tolerated in a free society, because if the intolerant exploit tolerance to establish control, that will be the end of open, free, tolerant societies. In other words, one can legally throw Nazi salutes, but nobody in their civic lives should tolerate the saluter in the nation’s civic mainstream. This exclusion maintains our anti-Nazi cultural norm—enforced not by government but by all of us in our capacities as individual citizens—that is integral to our civic firewall against authoritarianism.

On the other hand, if social standards are lowered to allow our habituation to this worst and most notorious of all totalitarian salutes, one can logically conclude that new and unprecedented civic space has been created in America for fascist symbols and Nazi conduct.

What, then, comes next?