There are excellent reasons to oppose Donald Trump, and there are excellent reasons to oppose Benjamin Netanyahu. Neither case requires Adolf Hitler, and it certainly does not require Lord Voldemort.

One might expect people who invoke the history of Nazi Germany in contemporary political arguments to be especially careful about doing so. Instead, Hitler has become a portable unit of political measurement. A politician says or does something authoritarian, discriminatory, cruel or merely obnoxious, and somewhere between the first angry post and the fiftieth reply on social media, the Third Reich appears in meme form as if somebody has decided that ordinary political vocabulary is no longer sufficiently punitive. Netanyahu has repeatedly been compared to Hitler over the conduct of the war in Gaza. Trump has been compared to Hitler for roughly a decade. When Hitler feels too historically grave, another villain is available from popular culture: Lord Voldemort.

The Voldemort comparison became unusually persistent during Trump’s first presidential campaign. In December 2015, after Trump proposed barring Muslims from entering the United States, J. K. Rowling responded to people comparing him with her fictional villain by saying that Voldemort was “nowhere near as bad.” Daniel Radcliffe later entertained the analogy while making a more interesting observation: Trump appeared considerably more opportunistic, and less ideologically coherent, than Voldemort. What began as a joke became part of the political vocabulary surrounding Trump, especially among American progressives. Trump was apparently less of a true Slytherin than Voldemort. Fine. It was funny in 2015. It was not political analysis then, and it has not improved with age.

The Hitler comparison is much worse because it converts an actual historical dictator, an actual political regime and an actual genocide into an all-purpose adjective for extreme political wickedness. The objection is not that Trump or Netanyahu should be insulated from severe criticism. Both men can be criticized in terms considerably harsher than those ordinarily used in respectable political conversation. The objection is that Adolf Hitler was a specific person operating within a particular historical system, and the contents of that system cannot be detached from his name every time someone wants to make a contemporary politician look exceptionally evil.

National Socialism emerged from the racial nationalism, antisemitism, political violence, revanchism and social dislocation of post-First World War Germany. Hitler attempted a putsch in 1923, published Mein Kampf, developed a mass political movement organized around racial ideology and Führer authority, became chancellor in January 1933, dismantled German constitutional government, established a one-party dictatorship, began a European war of conquest and presided over a state apparatus that murdered approximately six million Jews through an explicitly exterminatory racial project. Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, political opponents, gay men and numerous others were imprisoned, persecuted, sterilized, deported or murdered under the Nazi regime. That history is not ancillary information attached to the word “Hitler.” It is what makes Hitler Hitler. In a period of persistent Holocaust denial, resurgent antisemitism and renewed right-wing nationalism, stripping away those particulars in order to obtain a stronger insult is especially irresponsible.

Leo Strauss described one version of the intellectual problem in Natural Right and History in 1953, using the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum for the habit of treating Hitler’s approval of a proposition as evidence that the proposition itself must be wrong. Contemporary political culture regularly performs the operation in reverse. A politician does something reprehensible; Hitler did reprehensible things; therefore the politician can be called Hitler. The association supplies a moral verdict without establishing the historical relationship supposedly necessary to justify it.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has repeatedly warned against careless Nazi and Holocaust analogies for much the same reason. The Holocaust becomes less historically intelligible when it is treated as an expandable metaphor for anything sufficiently terrible. People invoke Hitler because they want to signal........

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