“When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism.” – Huey Long.

I thought I had left the LaRouche clan behind when I moved out of the city. If you’ve visited your local post office recently, you know what I’m talking about: the folding card table, the picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache, the smug surliness. I’m talking about the followers of Lyndon LaRouche, an American figure who manages to stay on the fringiest fringe of politics and yet remain omnipresent. After years of observation, conversation and reading at least three of those magazines they hand out, the only thing about his political platform that I can gather is that it involves returning to economic prosperity by “demonetizing” the economy, riding a rocket to Mars and never, ever showering.

I don’t have to work hard to avoid them anymore – I just carry some reporter stuff around and they yell at me to go away.

But I love to look at that sign with our president and that trendy little Photoshopped mustache, because it’s an image and idea that has saturated our culture in the last year.

We see the picture as a driving force at Tea Party rallies televised on FOX News or attended in person. We see parallels drawn to Hitler’s regime on late-night “documentaries” produced by Glenn Beck. And we saw the prototype for that argument in 2006 within Beck’s review of “An Inconvenient Truth,” which compared Al Gore to Hitler.

But how is this new? Comparing the opposition to Hitler is a tactic as perennial as peonies. I must have seen hundreds of variations on the “Bush in Nazi chic” photograph during his presidency. But none of those partisan accusations had the weight of an entire media network’s support.

The Tea Party movement we see today is called grassroots conservatism, but rallies receive coverage from a major cable news network, most Tea Party sites have a link to said network’s newsfeed and the movement has its own national convention with a $549 ticket price (which root does the money go to?). The movement is more like controlled chaos: a central leadership with a loose hold over a multitude of autonomous sects.

What bothers me about the Tea Party issue is that I could get behind the basic message (the massive deficit does worry me) if it weren’t for the Hitler parallel and other silly (and occasionally racist) imagery.

I’m a firm believer that people reveal themselves in what they most loudly oppose, hence the quote by Louisiana’s most famous son. This is why we have politicians who rail on behalf of family values only to be caught up in sex scandals.

When Beck or Rush Limbaugh sell the bejeezus out of the idea that the Obama agenda parallels the rise of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany, the arguments they use are more accurate criticisms for the Weimar Republic and the methods they use to argue are closer to those used by the Nazi propaganda machine. And when the Tea Party repeats the talking points used by the talking heads, they become complicit.

Consider: Hitler appealed to a sense of wounded German pride following a raw deal in World War I; Beck and Limbaugh appeal to a sense of wounded (Republican) American pride following what they see as a raw deal in the 2008 election. Hitler capitalized on a failing economy and the real hyperinflation of the Reichsmark; Beck and Limbaugh use the spectre of possible hyperinflation of the dollar in the immediate future. Hitler used radio to spread his message across the country; conservative pundits practically monopolize radio and have a cable television show to boot. Hitler blamed German troubles on an unseen Jewish plot; to this day, a segment of the anti-Obama population still believes the president is vaguely foreign invader, recently prompting a Hawaiian state senator to submit a bill that would allow the public to view birth records under strict conditions.

Also consider the differences between argument and fact: Obama was democratically elected; while some pundits have claimed Hitler, too, was democratically elected, he was actually appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg and once he died, a public vote closed the president’s seat. Strangely enough, the fear that the Obama administration will ban guns “like Hitler did” has remained prevalent. This is doubly wrong, because nary a peep has been made by the Obama administration regarding gun control since taking power, and the gun ban credited to Hitler was actually a gun registration passed earlier by the Weimar Republic to disarm fledgling Nazis and communists.

A pattern emerges: All the substantial arguments about Obama and the Democratic Party today are more comparable to the Weimar Republic than to the Nazis, and yet the latter group receives the spotlight. The Nazis were a reactionary force. For all their evil, it was really a side effect of their response to the ineffectual Weimar government. And the worst you can really say about Obama and the Democratic Party is that they’re ineffectual.

So I’m interested to see how the conservative backlash against the current administration affects our history in the long term. I’m not saying FOX News and the Tea Partiers are all closeted Nazis (OK, I’m not saying the Tea Partiers are all closeted Nazis). In fact, any attempt to perfectly compare one point in history to another is a waste of time.

But if we don’t learn the lessons of history we’re doomed to repeat it. And if we attribute the right lessons to the wrong source, we’re doomed to become exactly what we despise.