Hitler was not a Fascist, just as Mussolini was not a National Socialist. Two distinct ideologies. Hitler was a socialist, Mussolini a corporatist. Hitler was about eugenics, Mussolini was about the state.
How could the U.S. have gone Fascist realistically before WWII?
- Thread starter Bullmoose713
- Start date
Kaze
Banned
You forgot a possible leader -- Charles Linbergh. He did hold some pro-German / fascist leanings.
If he ran for president... people might vote for him. Especially, if he runs after his kid's kidnapping - he could run as "the government failed me, the government failed you, make me president and I will change everything for you." Once he wins - here comes the goose-stepping.
If he ran for president... people might vote for him. Especially, if he runs after his kid's kidnapping - he could run as "the government failed me, the government failed you, make me president and I will change everything for you." Once he wins - here comes the goose-stepping.
The question is more properly "could the US have degenerated in to an authoritarian state, along the lines of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Soviet Russia". Here the state (or the soon to wither state in the USSR) is in unquestioned political power, decisions are made entirely from the top down either coming from the man at the top or with his approval. Other centers of thought and morality other than the state are either co-opted, marginalized or actively destroyed (think the various churches in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia as examples). Conformity is enforced through government control of education and employment - don't toe the line and higher education or a "good" job is out of bounds. Failing that the ultimate tool of enforcement is a secret police apparatus including formal and informal informers, where nine times out of ten if you are arrested/taken away guilt and punishment will follow with at best a sham trial. When examined like this terms like "fascist", "corporatist", "communist/Soviet" are basically window dressing. While some of the workings of the economic system vary in terms of level of state ownership or control, private property, etc, in the end the will of the state as embodied in the leader rules over all.
As an American, I would hope that ingrained American institutions, the rule of law, and so forth would act to prevent such an occurrence. Sadly, while something like this happening in the USA is relatively unlikely, given the right stresses it could occur. Although the books are in many ways polemics I recommend "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis, published in the early 30s and "The Iron Heel" by Jack London published about 25 years earlier. Realistically the best scenario is a somewhat earlier depression, and absent FDR and his policies things get even worse. The government decides to print money and you get a hyperinflation (like post WWI Germany) which wipes out the middle class. The middle class tends to act as a brake on both top and bottom and when they are gone, and all their work destroyed this moderating force is gone. The disaffected and demoralized middle class brought Hitler to power, they can do the same in the USA.
As an American, I would hope that ingrained American institutions, the rule of law, and so forth would act to prevent such an occurrence. Sadly, while something like this happening in the USA is relatively unlikely, given the right stresses it could occur. Although the books are in many ways polemics I recommend "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis, published in the early 30s and "The Iron Heel" by Jack London published about 25 years earlier. Realistically the best scenario is a somewhat earlier depression, and absent FDR and his policies things get even worse. The government decides to print money and you get a hyperinflation (like post WWI Germany) which wipes out the middle class. The middle class tends to act as a brake on both top and bottom and when they are gone, and all their work destroyed this moderating force is gone. The disaffected and demoralized middle class brought Hitler to power, they can do the same in the USA.
Hitler's definition of a 'socialist':
Ian Kersahaw wrote the following in his book, Hitler: A Biography
So, if the Klan's anger was still aimed directly at Blacks and accepted Caucasian membership, regardless of national origin and strain of Christianity, like it's Reconstruction-era counterpart, would the Klan have stood a greater chance of achieving political power?
Hitler explicitly and vehemently rejected the Marxian notion of class struggle. In regards to capital, as early as 1920, he made a distinction between financial capital and industrial capital, disapproving of the former and approving of the latter. He did, however, advocate for the solving of the "social question", as it was termed in that period. Essentially, he was a statist and implemented some things we would consider "social democratic", but without the democratic parts, and expropriated and nationalized property and assets on an ad-hoc basis, but not particularly along any specific ideological program.
Nazi economics was about infrastructure and rearmament, state directed but operated by large existing entities, but also, and this often gets ignored, as it is a paradox, for a movement that wanted autarky as its end goal, it sure went out of its way to foster more European economic integration with states in Central and Eastern Europe, both before and after the war began.
Private property was protected (up to a point, of course), but prices, wages, and perhaps most important politically, interest rates from financial institutions, were subject to regulatory intrusion from the state. Hitler was certainly a collectivist and a statist who used the power of the state to redistribute resources, but he was not a dialectic materialist, and his notion of the term socialism was that Marx had corrupted it from its Aryan roots.
It should be noted, however, that the approach taken was of protecting private property while looking to expand the role of the state in the provision of benefits and using the state to jumpstart infrastructure projects to strike at unemployment was not that radically different from the SPD's approach in government. The difference of course comes in two strands: one, the SPD was far more friendly to the idea of independent trade unions, and two, the NSDAP brought in a cavalcade of anti-usury measures in the banking sector in 1933 (Hitler's initial speech as Chancellor even makes note of usurious interest rates, a relatively strange topic for the kind of speech he was making) and used state force to settle the issue of Depression era depositor losses. These difference of course make sense when you consider the parties in question, as the SPD rose from the trade union movement, after all, and the NSDAP believed international finance and banking in general to be a Jewish plot, so they had no issues telling lenders to take a hair cut en masse.
It would be incorrect to call Hitler a socialist in the Marxian sense of the term. It would also be incorrect to call Hitler any conventional economic label we use today (like "social marketeer" or "state capitalist").
If there is one parallel I can come up with, it would be the Russian economy under Putin since 2011, in which rule of law is so far gone that it is well known that the state wields ultimate power when it chooses to, but it only chooses to sparingly, because the economy isn't the focus of the political project.
The thing about Nazi ideology is that it was always opaque on questions relatable to contemporary countries because, much like Kevin from the Office who used a made up number to balance the books, the Nazis used Jewish perfidy to fill in the gaps.
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You don't become a Socialist by simply saying it.
Socialism is about public ownership of the means of production. Nazi Germany in contrast even privatized state assetts. The german word for "privatization" was coined for the Nazi economic policy.
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
Yeah, tell that to the Communists, Social-Democrats and unionmen in the concentration camps.
By that logic, Lenin and Stalin were not socialists either. They threw the Kronstadt left-communists, the SRs, Social Democrats, Anarchists, and trade unionists not affiliated with the Bolsheviks into camps as well.
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
But then Stalin also collectivized the agriculture, threw millions of people into camps for their socio-economic status and forced state-planned, state-owned industrialization.
If Adolf Hitler had nationalized Krupp's factories, I would be much more inclined to call him a socialist.
He effectively did. While the Nazis didn't take full, de jure state ownership of the means of production, they certainly established state control of said means, and therefore effective de facto ownership.
Every state has control about his economy. Germany was a planned economy in World War I yet it was far from being socialist. Socialism is more than that.
A Socialist can just plain command his economy. Nazi Germany in contrast had always to balance the profit interests of Big Business on the one side with the interest to gain Lebensraum on the other.
Mussolini was a self avowed socialist yo to and during wwi. He wasn't by the time he came to power.
Hitler was definitely not a socialist by the 30s; being hyper nationalist, and staunchly anti communist, are rather incompatible with the ideology.
Fascists viewed themselves as a "third way" opposed to both bourgeois capitalism and degenerate socialism, but what they were more than anything else was Romantic, hyper nationalist reactionaries against modernity. Diametrically opposite to "left eing" movements which embrace modernity and champion "progress" and "rationality" in an international context.
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
As long as the proprietors of the means of production retain de jure control of their businesses, and especially as long as they are free to use the profits extracted therefrom, the rulers don't radically change the social fabric of the country (and indeed, with the major exception of Aryanization, the Nazis didn't; families that were rich before the war were rich after and during the war; the wages of workers didn't increase significantly, and the property structure essentially remained the same).
We need to distinguish the structure of property and the structure of the economy.
You can have a socialist economy with market structures, Yugoslavia being the most egregious example; you can, at the same time, have a privately-owned but centrally planned economy: this is roughly what Nazi Germany was like.
Deleted member 109224
Power is too decentralized in the United States for Fascism to be able to take power.