People are wondering how Trump could get away with nationalizing 10% of Intel, with plans to acquire more corporate assets for the Federal government, while hardly hearing a peep from other Republicans. Isn’t this socialism, which is anathema to the Republican Party? Uhh, no. It’s National Socialism. Contrary to some right-wingers, who try to blame the left for fascism because the Nazi party had “socialism” in its name, that interpretation of what fascism was about is like thinking that the fact that the official name of North Korea is “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” somehow discredits democracy.
So let us remind ourselves of the differences between socialism and National Socialism. Of course, socialism and National Socialism were mortal enemies. The first thing Hitler did after burning down the Reichstag was to murder all the leading Social Democrats–the standard-bearers of socialism in Germany at the time. Of course he also went after the Communists. But the Communists and Social Democrats were also mortal enemies. Why? Because the Social Democrats believed in democracy, and both the Nazis and the Communists hated democracy.
Trump, too, hates democracy. He is very rapidly building an authoritarian state. Central to this project is crushing all opposition or potential opposition. And central to that is bringing the CEOs and very wealthy to heel. This is what makes his illegal seizure of Nvidia’s revenues so dangerous, even though we should shed no tears over Nvidia itself. And why democrats should oppose Trump’s partial nationalization of Intel, even though in other contexts state-run firms can be a very good idea, and exist even in deep Red states.
One thing, at least, that Trump is proving is how ridiculous is the neoliberal claim, championed by the likes of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, that somehow a set of laws that protect private property, especially if it is concentrated in a few hands, would be able to protect individual liberty against tyranny. In reality, the very wealthy are the first to cave when an aspiring autocrat comes knocking. They so deeply identify themselves with their wealth that very few will risk even a small portion of it to resist a wannabe dictator. And many even admire and support autocrats, foolishly imagining that their wealth protects them from autocratic meddling or worse. So it’s no surprise that the tech bros so quickly bent their knees to Trump in humiliating fashion. This is another reason to support fellow CT blogger Ingrid Robeyns’s limitarianism–a cap on wealth. Billionaires pose grave dangers to democracy, and not just through their excessive influence on the electoral system. Even more because many are attracted to autocracy, and because many more who aren’t will nevertheless flip at the slightest sign of a threat to their wealth and end up bolstering autocrats.
But back to the differences between socialism in the social democratic sense and National Socialism. First, as I’ve mentioned, is democracy. (Of course, there are plenty of autocratic socialists, such as Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega who take power by democratic means and then rule autocratically. I’m not claiming that socialism is inherently democratic, only that social democracy or democratic socialism is.) Second, and related, is that National Socialism turns the economy into a form of crony capitalism, whereas social democracy, to the extent that it directly runs economic enterprises or channels the operations of privately owned firms, does so for the public welfare (not necessarily successfully) and not just to consolidate the leader’s personal power by rewarding sycophantic capitalists. Third, social democracy is ideologically egalitarian, whereas National Socialism is ideologically hierarchical–patriarchal, racist, and hostile to cosmopolitanism. When National Socialists speak of “the people,” they never mean, as social democrats do, all the people, but rather the “real” people, the ethno-racial-sexual-religious group that they identify with the nation, to the exclusion of all other citizens and denizens of the state.
Trump, of course, checks all 3 National Socialist boxes. It’s no secret that his “real” people are white Christian heterosexual patriarchs. And that nobody else matters. That exclusionary message is what bonds his base to him. As Trump once said in a campaign speech, “the only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.” And like all fascists, his promise to them is to restore them to their former supreme position in the nation.
Which brings us to National Conservatism, a polite way to refer to fascism, as J.D. Vance, the highest-ranking National Conservative ideologue in the U.S., made clear through his support for the neo-Nazi AFD. As well as his blood-and-soil definition of who the real Americans are, in which he allowed that other people (like his wife) could be Americans, sort of, but only on a lower, deferential tier.
You might think I am being unfair to Yoram Hazony, the most influential political theorist of National Conservatism, in claiming that this ideology is essentially fascist. But check out Ezra Klein’s conversation with Hazony. Klein does a good job pushing back on Hazony’s claim that nations fall apart when there isn’t a dominant group, however defined (by race, ethnicity, religion, etc.), that constitutes who the “real” people of the nation are, on account of that group’s having been dominant at the nation’s founding. Letting other “tribes” in is ok, Hazony grudgingly concedes, as long as they keep to their inferior place and don’t get too numerous.
But Klein concedes far too quickly that Hazony’s view isn’t racist–or, as they too-politely call it, “racialist.” For who does Hazony think the “real” Americans are, the ones who are entitled to reclaim their lost ascendancy over all other American “tribes”? It’s “Anglo-Protestants,” who were, he claims, “95%” of the U.S. population at this nation’s founding. I guess Hazony didn’t consider blacks as part of the U.S. population at the time, since they were 38% of the South’s population in 1780, and 21.5% of the U.S. population at that time. But even more absurd is the idea that the U.S. would fall apart if it didn’t restore “Anglo-Protestants” to the supreme position they had in 1780–or maybe, to be more charitable, 1965. People reporting dominant English ancestry were 12.5% of whites in the 2000 census; mixed ancestry including English 20% of whites. Throwing in Scots and Welsh will hardly make the numbers more impressive, especially after deducting the Catholics and other non-Protestants from that number, and counting these as a proportion of all U.S. citizens, not just whites. In reality, there is no political movement of whites who identify principally as of English ancestry, claiming supremacy over American whites of Irish, German, Scandinavian, etc. ancestry. What there is is a political movement of whites, predominantly white Christians (including many Catholics), who, identifying as white Christians, form Trump’s base. National Conservatism is an ideology tailor made for them in the U.S. “Anglo-Protestant” is just a smokescreen for them, designed to disguise the racism at the heart of American National Conservatism.
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