When The Socialism Is National And The Faith Is Bad

It's something I've heard since high school, from know-nothing students to braindead teachers to historically-challenged op-ed writers and cable news talking heads with spittle on their flapping lips and talk radio bomb throwers hosting their two-minutes hate: The nazis were socialists!

Because, you see, Nazi Party officials and members claimed to follow the tenets of national socialism, while also trumpeting the glories of the German Democratic Republic during a time of unrelenting political oppression and the creation of a shadow government apparatus that would overrule the country's judges and lawmakers. In no way was the party socialist or democratic. It worked as a good-enough recruiting strategy to lure disaffected young people who had tired of traditional left politics, however.

Check out the latest Bad Faith Times post on fascism's false promise of revolution

As I read Robert O. Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism, I've thought a lot recently about the use of "national socialism" to describe the nightmare Nazi Party project. I recalled all the times mainline liberals and conservatives would confront me with the thorny issue of nazis describing themselves as national socialists, thereby smearing the term socialist as some kind of race-obsessed, hate-filled monster.

I understand how "national socialism" can be confusing for political normies who have no interest in the gritty details of history and what they mean for the current moment. A normie hears "socialism" tied to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party – a convenient little bad-faith rhetorical trick deployed by more than a few prominent newspaper columnists over the generations – and they say, well, socialism must be bad. How could it be good if motherfucking Hitler was into it?

Equating the most vile political movement of the 20th century with an ideology bound and determined to protect human beings from capitalist excesses and exploitation is as bad as the faith gets. Doing so is a surefire way to keep any kind of socialist policies or priorities outside the political mainstream (my long-held idea for how to introduce socialist reforms in the United States would be calling them the Freedom Agenda and dressing their advocates in the most grotesque jingoistic outfits imaginable, since presentation is all that matters in politics).

Socialism is an international project, a way of organizing the economy and the world's resources in an unapologetically humane way. Its goal is to allow humans to be human, not cogs in some rich guy's machine. Socialism was never meant to be a private, exclusionary utopia for only certain kinds of people depending on skin tone or region or religion or however else a people might be divided. National socialism in this way is little more than a dog whistle to those who understand they are (or can be) in the in-group. You can be showered with the many benefits of socialism if you join the party, if you follow our orders, if you ingest our poison and keep up your hatreds like a good boy (or girl).

National socialism is a lie. It has never been and can never be.

Paxton's book time and again emphasizes the usefulness of fascist movements as a violent tool for conservative political parties that had lost power or were on the verge of losing power to left-wing parties that were very much ascendant in the years after the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia (which scared the living piss out of every upper middle class and wealthy person in Europe and the US). If conservative parties could rule alone – without the help of wild-eyed fascists – they do, and always have, Paxton writes. When they need a (ultra-violent) helping hand, they recruit the fascists to destroy up-and-coming leftist parties. And so it was in interwar Germany.

The country's conservatives allowed the Nazi Party into a power-sharing agreement because the nazis promised to take care of the communists winning power in parts of Germany. Their first task was annihilating left-wing movements by any means necessary while their conservative allies turned a blind eye. In the so-called Night of the Long Knives – which took place over a three-day span in summer 1934 – the Nazi Party conducted purges via extrajudicial killings in hopes of consolidating power and removing any and all challenges to Hitler's authority. The first people purged by the party were nazis who had boisterously advocated for a socialist economic platform. And by purged, I mean brutally murdered in extrajudicial killings, along with their friends, families, and political allies. The party was not going to fuck around with members who might bring Marxism into the fold. They had to go.

How anyone can know this history and conflate national socialism with actual socialism is beyond me, though I suppose it is an effective bad-faith interpretation that can muddle the ideological playing field and turn leftist economic policies into something toxic and utterly unpalatable to the normies among us.

If the goal is protecting capitalist domination and shutting down discourse around leftist economics, this bad-faith trick works just fine.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.