The National Democrats
As I have repeatedly written, despite the desperate and semi-successful propaganda engineered by leftist academics to convince the historically ignorant masses that the National Socialist German Worker's Party and the Italian Fascist Party were extreme right-wing groups, both parties were founded by socialist activists, guided by socialist principles and governed largely according to left-wing ideals.
Only those who know so little leftist ideology that they do not realize that Marxism is merely a subset of socialism can fail to understand that while both the National Socialists and Fascists rejected Marxian socialism, they remained hard-core socialists. For if rejecting Marx is the ideological definitive, then every socialist from Francois Babeuf and Charles Fourier to Sidney Webb and Edward Bernstein must be likewise characterized as right-wing thinkers.
This is, of course, absurd.
If one examines both the political programs and subsequent governance in Germany and Italy, it is easy to see that both National Socialism and Fascism offered nothing but socialism with a nationalist spin. Hence, in the case of the German party, the name. For example, the following elements of Karl Marx's 10-point Communist program were adopted, more or less, by the National Socialists:
- State control and regulation of private property
- Progressive income tax
- Abolition of inheritance
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels
- A central bank
- Centralization of the means of communication and transport
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state
- Free education for all children in public schools
The two points of the Communist plan explicitly rejected by the National Socialists were:
- Equal obligation of all to work. Being influenced by the Kaiser-Kirche-Kinder-Kuche slogan of imperial Prussia, the National Socialists preferred women to stay home and breed the next generation of Aryan ubermensch.
- Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. While the National Socialists insisted on the state's right to seize property without compensation, they were rather more Green than their Communist kin; their concept of Lebensraum did not encompass the amalgamation of town and country.
As with Lenin and Stalin, the most significant area where the National Socialists and Fascists departed from Marx - and his true successor, Leon Trotsky - was not in their dismissal of class consciousness, but in their nationalist approach to socialism. What Stalin called "socialism in one country" is essentially the same concept that Hitler dubbed National Socialism. In fact, one would not be amiss to label Stalin a National Communist.
Today, when one surveys the American political landscape, one sees much the same uniformity of opinion that existed in early 20th-century Europe. There are few - very few - who question the superiority of the State's demands over the individual's rights. And despite clear majorities opposed to unlimited immigration, open borders, abortion on demand and political integration with Mexico and Canada, the Republican and Democratic parties are either pushing remorselessly ahead or maintaining the unpopular status quo.
The primary difference, now as then, revolves around the question of nationalism, and, to a lesser extent, militarism. George Bush and his cadre of Strong Government Republicans are not so much neoconservatives as neoliberals of the decidedly non-classic variety, combining the domestic program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson.
The American Left's hatred for George Bush is not because they are ideologically opposed to the spirit of his governance, but because he has co-opted them. By moving consistently leftward, he has marginalized them and seized the reins of central power that the Democratic Party considers to be rightfully its own. After all, it does seem a little unfair that after 70 years of steady centralization, they should be forced to hand over the massive federal machine they have constructed to a heretic.
At this point, it is primarily the nominal Republican opposition to the United Nations and an openness to the use of military force in what can at least theoretically pass for being in America's national interest that really separates the two parties. The Democrats have been roundly defeated at the polls, only to be replaced by George Bush and what should more rightly be termed his party of National Democrats.
But the successful heist of central power on the part of these National Democrats no more represents a move toward genuine freedom and a return to constitutional republicanism than the National Socialists' 1933 electoral defeat of the previously dominant socialists was a move toward restoring the Kaiser. And as history teaches, socialism with a nationalist face is little more palatable than the pure strain of the disease.