The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists
The Nazis hated socialists. It was the governments that rebuilt Europe
that embraced social welfare programs.
Perspective by Ronald J. Granieri
Ronald J. Granieri is a Templeton Education Fellow at the Foreign Policy
Research Institute and history professor at the U.S. Army War College.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army,
Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
February 5, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Nazi soldiers salute as Adolf Hitler leads his staff down the aisle
during the opening of the National Socialist German Workers� Party
Convention in Nuremberg, Germany, on Sept. 11, 1933. (AP)
Share
Did you know that �Nazi� is short for �National Socialist�? That means
that Hitler and his henchmen were all socialists. Bernie Sanders calls
himself a socialist, too. That means Bernie Sanders and his supporters
are the same as Nazis � doesn�t it?
Anyone who has been on political Twitter in the past decade has seen a
version of this syllogism. Conservatives, seeking to escape the �fascist�
and �Nazi� labels tossed at them by leftist critics since the 1960s, have
turned the tables. Books such as Jonah Goldberg�s �Liberal Fascism� have
noted that many leading fascists, such as Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini, started out as socialists, just as many early 20th-century
�progressives� embraced eugenic ideas ultimately linked to Nazi racist
genocide. This connection has become a silver bullet for voices on the
right like Dinesh D�Souza and Candace Owens: Not only is the reviled
left, embodied in 2020 by figures like Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and Elizabeth Warren, a dangerous descendant of the Nazis, but anyone who
opposes it can�t possibly have ties to the Nazis� odious ideas.
There is only one problem: This argument is untrue. Although the Nazis
did pursue a level of government intervention in the economy that would
shock doctrinaire free marketeers, their �socialism� was at best a
secondary element in their appeal. Indeed, most supporters of Nazism
embraced the party precisely because they saw it as an enemy of and an
alternative to the political left. A closer look at the connection
between Nazism and socialism can help us better understand both
ideologies in their historical contexts and their significance for
contemporary politics.
Advertisement
The Nazi regime had little to do with socialism, despite it being
prominently included in the name of the National Socialist German
Workers� Party. The NSDAP, from Hitler on down, struggled with the
political implications of having socialism in the party name. Some early
Nazi leaders, such as Gregor and Otto Strasser, appealed to working-class
resentments, hoping to wean German workers away from their attachment to
existing socialist and communist parties. The NSDAP�s 1920 party program,
the 25 points, included passages denouncing banks, department stores and
�interest slavery,� which suggested a quasi-Marxist rejection of free
markets. But these were also typical criticisms in the anti-Semitic
playbook, which provided a clue that the party�s overriding ideological
goal wasn�t a fundamental challenge to private property.
Instead of controlling the means of production or redistributing wealth
to build a utopian society, the Nazis focused on safeguarding a social
and racial hierarchy. They promised solidarity for members of the
Volksgemeinschaft (�racial community�) even as they denied rights to
those outside the charmed circle.
Additionally, while the Nazis tried to appeal to voters across the
spectrum, the party�s founders and initial base were small-business men
and artisans, not the industrial proletariat of Marxist lore. Their first
notable electoral successes were in small towns and Protestant rural
areas in present-day Thuringia and Saxony, among voters suspicious of
cosmopolitan, secular cities who associated both �socialism� and
�capitalism� with Jews and foreigners.
Advertisement
This fear of social revolution and a sense that democracy, with its
cacophony of voices and the need for compromises, would threaten their
preferred social hierarchy gave Nazism its appeal with these voters �
even if it meant sacrificing democracy. While Communists abetted the
destruction of German democracy, seeing it as a way to eventually produce
the revolution they wanted, the only German political party that
consistently resisted Nazi arguments, the Social Democratic Party (SPD),
offered another sign of the discontinuity between socialism and Nazism.
Those outside Germany who embraced Nazi ideas were also generally anti-
leftists. When Frenchmen murmured �Better Hitler than [Socialist Party
Leader and Prime Minister L�on] Blum,� they were well aware what National
Socialism represented, and it was most emphatically not �socialism.� When
many of those same Frenchmen set up the puppet Vichy government in 1940,
they did so under the banner of �Travail, famille, patrie,� (Work, family
fatherland), happy to use state resources to support their idea of
authentic Frenchmen � even as they criticized capitalism for providing
benefits to people they didn�t view as French.
Unlike much of the European left, many conservatives proved willing to
work with Nazis � something they later regretted � an association that
tainted postwar European conservatism. When it came time to rebuild
European politics after the war, therefore, it fell to center-left
parties such as Labour in Britain, the Socialists in France and the SPD
in Germany, which abandoned rigid Marxist doctrines, alongside the new
center-right movement of Christian Democracy, which rejected traditional
nationalism, to take up the challenge. This was the hour of the welfare
state, supported by social and Christian Democrats, which encouraged
social solidarity within a democratic and capitalist framework.
Advertisement
Despite this reality, linking socialism and Nazism to critique leftist
ideas became a political weapon in the post-World War II period, perhaps
unsurprisingly given that the Cold War followed directly on the heels of
World War II. Scholars as diverse as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Hannah
Arendt used the larger concept of �totalitarianism� to fuse the two. This
formula made it easier for Americans to slip comfortably from considering
the Soviet Union a wartime ally to recognizing it as an existential
threat. Totalitarianism emphasized the structural similarities and
violent practices of Nazi and Stalinist regimes.
This concept, however, proved controversial as an explanation of the
origins or subsequent appeal of either communism or Nazism/fascism.
Although Hitler and Stalin had cooperated in an effort to conquer Eastern
Europe in 1939 to 1941, this was more a marriage of convenience than a
byproduct of ideological synergy. Indeed, the two sides eventually fought
a genocidal war against each other.
Austrian economist and future Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek added an
extra layer to the conversation about socialism and Nazism with his 1943
bestseller, �The Road to Serfdom.� As a staunch free marketeer, Hayek was
appalled by the rise of economic planning in democratic states, embodied
by Franklin Roosevelt�s New Deal. Hayek warned that any government
intervention in the market eroded freedom, eventually leading to some
form of dictatorship.
Advertisement
Hayek was enormously influential across the globe within the rising
conservative movement during the second half of the 20th century. He
advised future leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and
his book became foundational for the right. Hayek�s assertion that all
government interventions in the economy led to totalitarianism continues
to animate popular works such as D�Souza�s �The Big Lie,� reinforcing the
idea that the welfare state is a gateway drug to genocide.
But while these ideas may make sense to free market purists, the history
shows that it was the parties that arose in reaction to the Nazi horrors
that built such welfare states. Denouncing their programs as �socialism�
or warning of a tie between the two is nothing less than historical and
political sophistry that attempts to turn effect into cause and victim
into victimizer.
Historical analogies have a useful purpose to simplify and clarify, but
they work best when used carefully. As manifest problems with global
capitalism, as well as political gridlock, encourage a new hunger for
fundamental political transformation, it is especially important that we
understand the tragic decisions of the 1930s and their consequences in
their full context, rather than simply transposing words from the past
onto the debates of the present.
National Socialism preserved private property, while also putting the
entire resources of society at the service of an expansionist and racist
national vision, which included the conquest and murderous subjugation of
other peoples. It makes no sense to think that the sole, or even the
primary, negative aspect of this regime was the fact that it used state
power to allocate financial resources. It makes as little sense to
suggest that using state power to allocate some financial resources today
will automatically result in the same dire consequences.
Historical �gotcha� threatens to reduce our political conversations to
meaninglessness, and we should resist it. Debates over the proper role of
the state in protecting citizens against the negative exigencies of the
market are necessarily complex. Finding the proper balance of interests
within a democratic political order depends on the measurement of
results, not on the power of magic words to devalue competing ideas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/05/right-needs-stop-falsely-claiming-that-nazis-were-socialists/
The Right Needs To Stop Falsely Claiming That The Nazis Were Socialists