Many analysts realized long ago that Hitler meant what he said when he announced that his party was the National Socialist Party. Yes, you say, but everyone knows Hitler was a fascist! Hitler knew that as well, but unlike many who know fascism only as an epithet rather than as a political phenomenon, Hitler knew that fascism is just another form of socialism.
You may have encountered the leftist definition of fascism: “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.” Sorry, but that is false. Many have recognized that this definition of fascism is the left wing attempt to escape the blame for what they, mostly through Hitler, have done to the world. You can tell that this is a left-wing definition when they add “far right wing” to the above definition. See my book Socialism for an explanation of the above erroneous definition.
Let us now address some of the needed, basic definitions to understand the current situation. Socialism is of more than one type, of course. The most common type of (genuine) socialism is Marxist-Leninist socialism. That is a system which places blame for the world’s woes on business organizations, viz., the corporations. According to Karl Marx, corporations, like other kinds of firms, exploit workers and generate the hatred of the proletariat, the working class. When hatred is at a fever level, a violent revolution pursues the goal of expropriating the expropriators, i.e., sending all capitalists to Siberia work camps or to a firing squad. This alleged exploitation is the source of hatred underlying genuine Marxist-Leninist socialist advocates and countries. This kind of socialism insists on nationalizing every business firm in the country so that the state owns all the “means of production” and manages the entire economy on the basis of a stalinistic economic planning system, a bureaucratized set of planning agencies that cannot effectively manage an entire economy.
In the United States, big business and the multinational corporations were for a very long time aligned politically with those who favor the free market system. Business managers wanted business free from excessive government intrusion in their affairs. Managers favored capitalism, markets, and individual freedom, along with private property. Because people are people, it is necessary in such a system to have laws and institutional arrangements that assure the honesty and fairness of business in the market place. But otherwise, the government was perceived not to have any business micro managing the country’s businesses.
That was all some years in the past. We have watched as American business has decided that wealth isn’t all they should pursue; business should share in the status of the Hollywood and athletic celebrities. They have opted for an alliance with the government in opposing conservative views in any form or medium.
In my book, Socialism, I wrote two long, involved chapters on how this change has occurred. Our business schools have spent decades indoctrinating students with the notions of “stakeholder theory.” The teaching was that corporations and their leaders should display social responsibility. They should be woke, they should favor socialism, and when hired as managers they should be prepared to pursue their own private, social interests rather than pursue the interests of the owners of the firm (a phenomenon economists have named “moral hazard”). Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning advocate of free minds and free markets, called this straightforward socialism, because when indoctrinated managers pursue their own interests to channel the owners’ resources to “social” causes favoring the “stakeholders” rather than the stockholders, they are simply performing the socialist function of redistributing incomes.
Such managers are not Marxist-Leninist socialists and they are not fighting against the exploitation of the working class. The argument that revolution must overcome the class struggle never took off in the United States, since we have never been a class society. Social mobility pretty well took care of the problem of social classes and radicalism in America. But as we learned from Hitler, one need not fall back on economic issues to justify socialism. One can also hate ethnicities as well as social classes. As Hitler could hate the Jews, Americans can be trained to hate Caucasians, who stood by (for a time, anyway) watching blacks be enslaved. So we whites can be “woke” if we can learn self- loathing and convince ourselves we are guilty of white supremacy. It took some time for racists to infect so many blacks with hatred of whites.
We have recently learned that the government and the democrat party have become rather completely corrupted in their relations to the powerful American high tech firms. The weaponized, socialist government agencies have insisted on cooperation in their pursuit of a single-party government, correctly perceived as the path to dictatorship. With the full cooperation of the tech firms, who have since inspired so many of the non-tech firms to follow their lead, they are attempting to swampify the national politics of the United States. Moreover, it appears they are approaching complete success in establishing a fascistic variant of socialism as the future of our country.