Downplaying right-wing danger is a durable procedure pairing minimization with moral inversion

Evidence

What Hofstätter was practising was a tried and tested procedure which is popular to this day: playing down the dangers from the right, presenting the `exposers’ of such dangers as totalitarian moralists and idealists themselves, and declaring genuine reflection on this to be a private affair. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 502

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Compresses a whole rhetorical mechanism into one sentence that describes not just 1950s Germany but contemporary political discourse; hard to summarize further or dismiss as mere partisanship.
• SEED: An essay tracing the identical three-step move — minimize the threat, pathologize the warner, privatize the reckoning — across denazification debates and present-day media criticism.
• XREF: Echoes the learned example from this book: “Indifference to victimization, not overt bigotry, enables fascism.”