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Alabama Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville is quoted as saying:
I tell people, my dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of socialism. Today, you look at this election, we have half this country that made some kind of movement, now they not believe in it 100 percent, but they made some kind of movement toward socialism. So we’re fighting it right here on our own soil.
Over at MSNBC, Steve Benen responds:
It’s true that Tuberville’s father fought in France during World War II, but if the senator-elect thinks the war was about “freeing Europe of socialism”, he probably ought to read a book or two about the conflict.
Apparently, reading a book or two about World War II is not a prerequisite for writing commentary at MSNBC. I wonder which of the following points Mr. Benen has overlooked:
- Our primary opponents in the European conflict were known as “the Nazis”.
- Naziism is/was a dialect of socialism.
I’d elaborate, but I’ll keep this short just in case Mr. Benen drops by this blog. Apparently he doesn’t like to read very much.
I know that the Nazi was a German acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but I think it’s less than obvious that much emphasis was put on the word Socialist either in what they espoused or, more particularly, in what they did. To me, I think it’s pushing things to call Nazism a “dialect” of socialism, unless you have a very broad definition of socialism that might include, say, the Republican Party. So, for those of us who like to read, would you mind elaborating?
My politics are not your politics, but I normally find what you have to say interesting, informative, and challenging.
But this just seems to be… wrong.
I think it’s pretty widely accepted that the Nazi’s use of ‘socialism’ in their name was misleading.
The Snopes article on the subject is a pretty good summary:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/
Full Fact comes to similar conclusions:
https://fullfact.org/online/nazis-socialists/
And the Encyclopedia Britannica article opens with
“Were the Nazis socialists? No, not in any meaningful way, and certainly not after 1934.”
https://www.britannica.com/amp/story/were-the-nazis-socialists
Jim and Gary: I take socialism to mean collective ownership of the means of production. I take fascism to be a brand of socialism in which the means of production are nominally held privately, but subject to a great deal of collective decisionmaking about how they are deployed.
The notion of “ownership” is a bit slippery. If you are, on paper, the owner of a resource, but the state makes 50% of the decisions about how you can use that resource, do you really own it? What if we change 50% to 10%, or 80%? I don’t think there’s much to be gained by trying to pin this down to three decimal places. Fascism in general, and naziism in particular, rests largely on a great deal of collective decisionmaking — frequently with the goal of keeping prices high. It strikes me as quibbling to say that this is not socialism because some other brands of socialism incorporate a little more or a little less collectivism, or because of a linguistic choice about what constitutes “ownership”.
Jim and Gary: I’ll add this. It strikes me as silly, in a context like this, to try draw fine distinctions between different forms of collectivism and decide which ones go in the “socialist” pile. I’m sure there are reasonable people who disagree with me, and I know there are plenty of reasonable people who agree.
Even if you are one of those who disagree, it does not follow that everyone you disagree with (e.g. Tommy Tuberville) is ignorant about World War II. Sometimes people just disagree.
Wow, those essays use some twisted logic. The Nazis called themselves National Socialists, not Nazis. There were very much anti-Communist.
Much of the confusion seems to be from those who believe that Communists were the true socialists, and therefore Nazis were not true socialists. Some confusion also comes from nationalists being considered right-wingers today.
Just look at the NS 25-point program. Many of the points are explicitly socialist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program
Occasionally people today say that WWII was fought to liberate the Jews from the concentration camps, but very few thought that at the time.
“I take fascism to be a brand of socialism in which the means of production are nominally held privately, but subject to a great deal of collective decisionmaking about how they are deployed.”
Steve, that seems to be an awfully broad definition of fascism. A large part of the US economy fits into this definition of fascist (and thus socialist), including much of the medical sector, much of the agriculture sector, much of education,…
Arguing over definitions is generally a fruitless exercise, but if your definition of fascism is so broad that it includes large amounts of the US economy (and probably just about every other economy), so that Al Qaeda, say, can be said to be fighting against fascism, and thus also socialism, I don’t think the conversation gets very far.
Roger, it’s true that many of the 25-points are explicitly socialist, but that was put together in 1920 when the Nazis were a small ragtag bunch. If you look at what they actually did when in power, I think the socialist parts were pretty much ignored.
Gary: The US economy partakes of many things, including various snippets of socialism on a much much smaller scale (and more importantly, in a way that is far less integral to the fundamental workings of things) than in Nazi Germany. I don’t think it’s useful on those grounds to call the US a socialist country. I do think it’s useful to call a country socialist if socialism is built into the whole fabric of its political and economic system, as was the case in Germany.
The essence of fascism is collusion among producers, usually to keep prices high, with government acting as an enforcer. In exchange for that service, producers essentially cede many of the rights of ownership to the government, which is by any reasonable definition a form of socialism. We have some of that in the US, and at various times in the past have had more of it than we currently have. But it’s not integral to the way our economy works, in the sense that if we cut it out completely, things would still function (and in fact would function better). The German system was fascist (and therefore socialist) to its core, and we were in Europe to fight it.
If you think that’s wrong, so be it. It does not follow that everyone who thinks it’s right is an ignoramus.
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
Adolf Hitler, In a speech (1 May 1927), as quoted in Adolf Hitler : The Definitive Biography (1976) by John Toland
Jim cited several confused discussions of Nazi and socialism that seem to generally argue along these lines: (1) Nazi is extreme right wing and socialism is extremely left wing, ergo Nazis cannot be a socialist variant; or (2) Hitler used the term “socialist” but didn’t understand its meaning, ergo Nazism isn’t a variant of socialism.
None of Jim’s citations address the economics of the Nazi regime and whether it reflected in practice a variant of socialism. For some more thoughtful discussions that actually address the economic variant of socialism in Nazi Germany:https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarianhttps://fee.org/articles/were-the-nazis-really-socialists-it-depends-on-how-you-define-socialism/amp
I think the salient point is that regardless of whether Nazi Germany can be sensibly considered socialist, WW2 had very little to do with Germany’s economic strategy and much to do with their foreign/military policy. Steve Benen seems completely correct in this respect.
Chris: A fair point. But imagine this:
A political candidate openly embraces Naziism, in particular its racial theories. A senator-elect says “76 years ago, my father fought the Nazis, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to take this lightly”. A blog commenter responds: “Oh, but we weren’t fighting the Nazis because of their racial theories; we were only fighting them because of their foreign/military policy”. I think that blog commenter would have a valid point. But I still think the senator-elect’s reaction would be entirely understandable and reasonable.
In other words, I think these things could all be true (I won’t argue here which ones are *actually* true):
1) Nobody in the west cared about the Final Solution; we fought the Nazis only because they were a military threat.
2) Nevertheless, following our victory, we realized that the Nazis were really really bad and took pride in having stopped their badness (perhaps conveniently forgetting that this was never our motivation in the first place). This virtuous victory becomes part of our national heritage.
3) In view of 2), it becomes very natural for anti-Nazi politicians to invoke our virtuous battle against Hitler’s Nazis.
I think nobody could blame those politicians for taking that rhetorical route, and that there’s nothing fundamentally dishonest about it.
Likewise, I think we can congratulate ourselves on stopping fascism, just as we congratulate ourselves on stopping the final solution, whether or not that was part of our motivation at the time. I think a blog commenter like yourself could object that our self-congratulation is not historically accurate, and that you could well be correct, but that there would still be an important sense in which Benen had this all wrong.
Well Tuberville is pretty clearly using “socialism” to mean things like free health care and free college (“we have half this country that made some kind of movement”), so Benen is right that it’s idiotic to say that we went to war to stop those things from spreading across Europe. (Not to mention that if that was our goal, we failed miserably, since those things are ubiquitous in Western Europe and indeed most developed democratic countries besides ours.)
Nevertheless, I find more than a little disquieting to compare a political struggle inside a country with an all-out war between enemy nations, fought with tanks, bombers and (ultimately) nuclear weapons.
Senator-elect Tuberville’s real gaffe can be found at the bottom of the MSNBC article:
“You know, our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three of branches of government. It wasn’t set up that way, our three branches, the House, the Senate and executive.”
This is a guy who will take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution” in a couple months, so hopefully he’ll bone up on that topic before then.
WWII socialism and WWII fascism are quite similar insofar as they’re both totalitarian in character; neither holds any similarity either with Bernie Sanders’ “socialism” nor with Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism, both of which aren’t remotely similar to the pre-eminent totalitarian systems of the WWII-era.
The US did not fight WWII to prevent Germans from having universal healthcare and a higher marginal tax rate.
That wasn’t even an incidental goal.
WWII socialism and fascism were totalitarian collectivist ideologies. Nothing comparable exists today.
In the case of fascism, the rich (other than those of Jewish descent) were able to arrange themselves quite nicely with the regime, which after all repressed labor unions as a matter of priority.
Lots of interesting comments here, but I just have to say that although I disagree with Landsburg’s analogy here, I commend him for actually defining what he considers “socialism” to be: government taking over the means of production. So often in political talk these days, people on the right just have this amorphous idea of socialism being any government program they dislike. Of course, when I ask them if they’d be ok with cutting the largest programs by far that we spend money on (social security, Medicare, and military), lots of them in my experience (not all though) don’t want to cut any of these programs.
Steve is essentially wrong, although he can technically defend his position.
There is the point that the war was not fought to remove fascism, but because of german aggression. This is true to an extent but makes it even more removed that the war was fought to remove socialism. If we accept this then Tuberville’s dad not fight to remove either socialism or fascism. This is probably true, he probably fought because he was called up and told to fight, although plenty of people did volunteer to fight fascism. I don’t think anyone claimed to volunteer to fight socialism.
Steve has a definition of Socialism that is defendable for an economist, but it is very simplistic and far from universal. Under Steve’s definition, to the extent that WWII was about fascism, it was therefore just as much about socialism.
Technically this is correct, but it is also very misleading.
Socialism is not ususually defined that way. Nazi germany arrested 11,000 people for “illegal socialist activity” in 1936. They did not think of themselves as socialist. They made a very clear distinction and the concentrations camps were filled with socialists before Jews.
Tuberville’s dad was fighting in that war against those Germans, the Germans who had fought a bitter internal struggle against socialism. Tuberville’s dad almost certainly did not consider he was fighting “to free Europe of socialism.”
One problem is that the definition of socialism so narrow it becomes almost meaningless. Any autocratic government with enough power would be socialist, including a monarchy. A country with a small group of wealthy aristocrats served by a vast army of serfs would be socialist, although that society is almost exactly the opposite of socialist principles. In short, this definition is not a very useful one. Of course, Steve can cling to it and defend his position: if this is socialism, then Nazi germany was socialist. The definition is simply not the one most people use and ignores a great many aspects of socialism and fascism.
Another problem with Steve’s narrative is it is exactly the same as the far-right narrative, albeit I hope for different reasons. That it plays into the hands of extremists and racists does not make it wrong, but perhaps might lend an element of caution. What they want you to hear is that Nazism and socialism are the same. Steve is not saying they are the same, but it would be easy for the casual reader to take away that message. Blurring the huge distinctions between socialism and nazism to only one factor obscures the real and dangerous aspects of Nazism and the far right is very keen to do this.
My thought is that making the argument is fine, but a bit more explanation and context would help a lot. A discaimer such as my deifinition looks only at economics and says nothing about the politics and ideology that produce the economic result.
Harold:
My thought is that making the argument is fine, but a bit more explanation and context would help a lot. A discaimer such as my deifinition looks only at economics and says nothing about the politics and ideology that produce the economic result.
But socialism is an economic arrangement, and I think that’s pretty much standard usage. It’s true that in political rhetoric, some things get called “socialism” whereas what the speaker really means is “reminiscent of socialism in ways that make it bad for many of the same reasons that socialism is bad”, but the same is true about the words “dictatorial” and “fascist” and “genocidal”. Those are rhetorical flourishes, not changes in the meanings of words.
In fact, I think Tuberville is right whether or not you stick with actual definitions. Naziism was indeed a form of fascism, and fascism is indeed a dialect of socialism. But perhaps that isn’t what Tuberville meant. Maybe what he meant was “my father fought against Naziism, which has a lot in common with socialism and is bad for a lot of the same reasons that socialism is bad”. I think that would also be a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have meant (though I always prefer precision).
I think you are dead on right when you say that Turberville’s father probably went for none of these reasons, but because he was called. But again, it’s perfectly standard to look back with pride on sacrifices that had good consequences, even when people weren’t fully thinking about consequences at the time. Why did firefighters enter the World Trade Center as it fell down around them? Maybe not because they were trying to save lives, but because they’d been so thoroughly trained that instinct took over. They still saved lives, and they’re still heroes. And if our fathers (Tuberville’s, mine and maybe yours) went to war for prosaic reasons, they still saved the world, and I think it’s okay for us to look at them as heroes.
At the end of the day, if Turbeville was trying to say that he hates governments that take over the means of production and remembers fondly those WW2 soldiers who fought against such a government (Germany, axis allies), fine. He sure as hell has no case to think that’s what anybody in any real power on the left today in the USA is trying to pull off, apart from national emergencies (which the USA has always done). He surely I hope is not equating, say, Medicare for All, with Nazi socialism. If he is, he’s completely insane.
Here are a few short paragraphs from an NBER volume published in 1944 about the Nazi economic system. Nomenclature aside, it was clearly a command economy with the price system suspended. And, as Landsburg said, not ownership of the means of production, but their absolute control.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9476/c9476.pdf
I can accept the ‘fascism is a flavor of socialism’ argument so if Tuberville had said ‘fought against socialist regimes’ then his claim would be defensible (if a little odd), but if his dad fought to ‘free Europe of socialism’ he was fighting under a misapprehension.
The USA’s main ally was the communist (and mostly European) Soviet Union and I don’t think there was any serious plans to overthrow that regime as part of the war aims.
In addition the formal declaration of Allied war aims included ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of governments under which they will live’. This is clearly compatible with democratically elected socialist governments and indeed some Europeans countries did opt for that in post-war elections.
Rob Rawlings (#22):
The USA’s main ally was the communist (and mostly European) Soviet Union and I don’t think there was any serious plans to overthrow that regime as part of the war aims.
But there were most definitely serious plans to make sure the Soviets did not gain control of western Europe, including making considerable sacrifices to make sure, for example, that they did not gain sole control of Berlin. So the US war effort did have a substantial (and costly) component aimed at containing Sovietism, even if not overthrowing it.
Steve (#23)
Yes, I would agree with that but in my view it is not sufficient to make it correct to say that one of the USA’s war aims was to ‘free Europe of socialism’
Rob Rawlings (#24): Yes, but perhaps you’d be comfortable with “one of the USA’s war aims (in fact primary war aims” was to limit the influence of socialism in Europe insofar as it was feasible”, and if you do accept that, then I think that Tuberville’s quote counts as an acceptable paraphrase, given the context.
Steve (#25).
I would be fine with your revised statement is you had written ‘authoritarian socialism’ rather than just ‘socialism’.
The reason I think this is an important distinction is because the US wars aims (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Charter) appear to me to be perfectly compatible with democratic countries freely choosing to implement socialist policies if they choose to
If the US population opts in an election for a party with a socialist agenda then that seems well within the spirit of their right to ‘choose the form of governments under which they will live’ – which was an explicit US war aim.
So by failing to distinguish between ‘Authoritarian Socialism’ which the US undoubtedly wanted to either destroy (in the case of fascism) or limit (in the case of communism) and ‘Democratic Socialism’ (in my view perfectly compatible with US war aims) I think Tommy Tuberville’s words are not defensible.
BTW: I have no idea how well read he is on WWII so I’m not saying he is ignorant – just that having spent the best part of an hour thinking about what he said I find that I do disagree quite strongly with the spirit of his statement.
So why did the USA enter WWII?
Just casually googling for an answer, some say Pearl Harbor, but the USA was supplying warring countries before that. Other obscure explanations are also given.
A big one is that FDR argued that America is an Arsenal of Democracy. This was a belief that democratic capitalism must be defended against the expanding authoritarian socialism.
For several years, this meant siding with the Communists against the Nazis, but I doubt that most Americans saw much difference between the Communists and the Nazis. All of the socialists were enemies.
“But socialism is an economic arrangement, and I think that’s pretty much standard usage.”
I think you are wrong in your definition as allowing a select group of autocrats governing production as being socialism. Socialism may be an economic arrangement, but it is much more than that. It is about collective ownership, and control of production by an elite government is not that. But that at the moment is not the most important thing. We could discuss this productively, but right now there is a more important factor.
When one finds oneself saying the same thing as the extreme right, I think it sensible to put some clear water between you and them.
Back in the period we are discussing, the eugenicists were saying lots of things that were entirely defensible by science. What was lacking was a clear statement from scientists that the term “fittest” was being used in different ways by the scientists and the eugenicists. A very simple equivocation fallacy that could perhaps have saved a lot of problems if the scientists had expressed the science clearly. I think many scientists did not do so because they also believed in the eugenics project. Nonetheless, the science never did actually support it – it was always a political project.
When you as a responsible economist are saying the same things as the far right extremists, I think a clear announcement of where your analysis differs from theirs would go a long way to avoid being inadvertantly coopted by this group. Just like saying “fittest” does not mean the same to the biologist as the politician, “socialism” does mean the same to the economist as the politician – and certainly not the far right groups.
In this context, that would amount to acknowledging that although you view Nazism as a dialect of socialism, you do recognize that Nazism and Socialism as commonly discussed are not equivalent. Though you view Nazism as a subset of Socialism, that does not mean that they are the same and Nazism has many particularly objectionable characteristics that are not true of socialism generally.
Maybe you were unaware of the far right talking points on the equivilence of socialism and Nazism and how this is an important part of their indoctrination strategy.
But now you are aware, and like a scientist in the 1930’s, it allows you to put clear water between you and the extremists, if you care to take that opportunity.
Clarification on #26.
Tuberville: ‘I tell people, my dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of socialism’
Steve: I wonder which of the following points Mr. Benen has overlooked:
– Our primary opponents in the European conflict were known as “the Nazis”.
– Naziism is/was a dialect of socialism.
I take Steve’s point to be that if one accepts the two things to be true then Tuberville is correct to claim his dad indeed fought ‘to free Europe of socialism’.
I agree with Steve that the two things he lists are true but disagree (assuming for the sake of the argument that when he says ‘my dad fought’ we can assume ‘The USA army fought’) that this leads to the conclusion that Tuberville is correct.
Here are the reasons :
1. Showing that the main opponents in the war were socialist is not sufficient to justify the claim that the war was fought to ‘free Europe of socialism’. Socialism may have been an attribute of the enemy that was irrelevant to the reason the USA was at war with them. Weight is given to this consideration when one considers that one of the USA’s main allies (the USSR) practiced an extreme form of socialism (albeit I accept Steve’s claim that a war aim was indeed to limit USSR power secondary to defeating Nazi Germany) .
2. In addition, the stated war aims (announced early in the war – https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_16912.htm) appear to allow counties to adopt socialism if that is the form of government they choose and this is in contradiction with the claim that the war sought to ‘to free Europe of socialism’.
Rob, in that document FDR and Churchill declare that they want “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”! No, this is not letting the Germans keep the government of their choice.
@Henry #30
Take that up with Churchill and Roosevelt, or whoever may speak for them today – I’m just linking to what was said at the time. The point is that ‘free[ing] Europe of socialism’ was not (as far as I can see) ever a stated goal of the USA.
Following on from Rob Rawlings, it might help to isolate the arguments presented here. Substitute dialect instead of form if you wish.
Argument 1
1. Every political system that results in means of production being substantially controlled by entities other than private owners is a form of socialism.
2. In Nazi Germany, the means of production was substantially controlled by the State rather than private owners.
Conclusions: Nazi Germany was a form of socialism.
I believe this is a valid structure. If we accept the premises we must accept the conclusion. Steve does accept the premises, so for him he has a sound and valid argument. However, the first premise is certainly not accepted by people who call themselves socialists. If you do not accept the premise then the argument is not sound. So there we have a first point of disagreement.
Argument 2
1. In WWII the principle aim (in Europe) was to defeat the Nazi regime.
2. Soldiers are fighting to achieve the principle aim.
3. Tuberville’s dad was a soldier in the war.
Conclusion: Tuberville’s dad was fighting to defeat Nazism
We can and have quibbled a bit about premise 2, but I think we can accept that under some considerations this premise is sound and the argument is valid.
Argument 3
1. Tuberville’s dad fought to defeat Nazism
2. Nazism is a form of socialism.
Therefore Tuberville’s dad fought to remove a form of socialism from Europe.
Again, a valid structure. If we accept premise 1 (from argument 1) we premise 2 (from argument 2), we must accept the conclusion.
The failure of the argument is the extension from a form of socialism to socialism entire.
Argument 4
1. Nazism is a form of socialism
2. Removing a form of something is the same as removing all forms of something
Conclusion: removing Nazism is the same as removing socialism.
The logical structure is not valid. It is very much like the classic example:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
The illustration of the invalid argument is:
All men are mortal
Socrates is mortal
Therefore Socrates is a man.
We can quickly see this is not correct, if for example Socrates is a dog.
So even granting the questionable premises, we still cannot arrive at the conclusion that the war was fought to remove socialism from Europe. The key insight is that to say “remove a dialect of socialism” is not the same as saying “remove socialism”. One could be quite happy to allow other dialects of socialism to remain.
Now I see this it seems obvious. When I read Rob Rawlings comment “I take Steve’s point to be that if one accepts the two things to be true then Tuberville is correct to claim his dad indeed fought ‘to free Europe of socialism’” I agreed with it, but I now see it is not correct.
To labour the point a bit, we could fight to eradicate poodles, but that does not mean are fighting to eradicate dogs.
I’m a bit late to the party here but more or less agree with Harold #32.
Using Steve’s definitions Nazism is a type (subset) of Socialism and Socialism is a type (subset) of economic system.
Steve if Tuberville had generalized more than he did and substituted “economic system” for “socialism” and said something like… “I tell people, my dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of an economic system. Today, you look at this election, we have half this country that made some kind of movement, now they not believe in it 100 percent, but they made some kind of movement toward an economic system. So we’re fighting it right here on our own soil”.
Would you view this differently to how you view the comment he actually made? If so why?? In both cases the issue seems to be that he’s substituting a superset of Nazism for Nazism. Which supersets are allowed?
I don’t think Steve’s argument is coherent for reasons unrelated to the definition of socialism.
Consider this claim:
Tuberville’s dad fought Europe to free Europe of vegetarian leaders.
My evidence is:
– Our primary opponents in the European conflict were known as “the Nazis”.
– The Nazi party was led by a vegetarian.
Doesn’t seem to work so well, does it?
In essence, Steve is conflating a fact about the war with the reason for the war.
#34 Justin. I think your analogy fails because it was said that the war was fought to remove Nazism, but never vegetarian leaders.
My argument 2 would have to be
Premise 1: The principle aim in WWII was to remove vegetarian leaders from Europe.
As opposed to the one I stated:
1. In WWII the principle aim (in Europe) was to defeat the Nazi regime.
We could argue the truth of both premises, but I think mine (and I think, Steve’s) is much more defensible.
While I also think Steve’s argument fails, it is not for that reason.
#33 Venn diagrams are our friend here. We have a big circle “economic systems”. Wholly inside is “socialism” and in Steve’s view, wholly inside this is “Nazism.”
I think many people would view Socialism and Nazism as overlapping circles not wholly contained within the circle “economic systems”.
In neither case does removal of Nazism require removal of socialism.
What trips us up is that in (my interpretation of) Steve’s model, removing socialism does imply the removal of Nazism. We tend to get these mixed up unless we are very careful.
Extending this to Justin’s analogy, we have a circle “vegetarian” slightly overlapping with “European leaders”, giving us at least one European leader in the intersection. Overlapping both is Nazis, with only one person in the intersection of all three circles. Removing Nazis does not require removing either vegetarians or vegetarian leaders. So perhaps the analogy is better than I first thought.
There is a lot of nitpicking here about what Tuberville said, but no one really rebuts it.
It is a historical fact that millions of Americans believed that socialism was a great threat to the USA in 1941. Our leaders frequently talked about war between Democracy and National Socialism. While we were somewhat allied with USSR, there were military efforts to contain Communist socialism as well. There is nothing remarkable about saying Tuberville’s dad fought against socialism.
If Tuberville is wrong, then why did we fight WWII? Were soldiers fighting against socialism or not? Was the recent election a movement towards socialism or not?
Harold’s real complaint is that Tuberville is a Republican who is supposedly playing into a right-wing narrative. I don’t even know what that narrative is. But if you want to play that game, I say that Harold is playing into a Commie apologist narrative. The Commies are the ones who like to deny that National Socialists are true socialists. They are the ones who invented the term “Nazi”, and they did it to disguise the fact that the Nazis were socialists, and to promote the idea that Communism is true socialism.
Steve wishes to define socialism in a way that relies only on strict economic terms, and most socialists would not agree with that definition. This would allow one refutation Steve’s argument on definitional terms.
However, we can grant Steve whatever definition he wants to use for the sake of his argument, but the argument still fails.
By defining fascism as a subset of socialism, he precludes a logical argument that removing fascism is removing socialism. At most we can be removing a subset of socialism, which logically does not entail removing socialism.
His argument fails under either objection. Either Nazism is not Socialism, in which case the argument fails trivially. Or Nazism is a subset of socialism, in which case his arguement fails logically.
The defense of Tuberville fails whichever way we look at it.
Personally, I think we are overthinking Tuberville’s comment. Given that he does not apparently understand the branches of government, I doubt he had thought very deeply about how Nazism and socialism either are or not similar. I think he was just spouting off sentences he thought might be well received.
Steve’s defense of his comments is valliant, if ultimately doomed to failure.
When you’re considering what the Nazis thought about socialism as an ideology, it’s probably worth pointing out that when the Nazis came to power, among the first things they did was to round up and imprison the actual Socialists.
The Nazis had words like “socialist” and “worker” in the name of their party because it was fashionable at the time and they thought they would make themselves more popular that way, by pretending to be about making the life of “workers” better, although that wasn’t what they were really after. As a Nazi, actually working to, e.g., increase workers’ rights was a safe method of making yourself very unpopular indeed in party circles.
Effectively, the Nazi ideology wanted to unite people not based on their class (Marx’s proletariat, the mainstay of socialism) but based on their race, so they were about elevating ethnic (and non-Jewish) Germans – whether workers or not –, where the actual socialist movement tried to unite workers everywhere, across national and “racial” boundaries.
Ironically, the kind of “crony state-influenced capitalism” that would best describe the (pre-war) Nazi economy is most closely related to the crony Trump-capitalist model the US would eventually end up with under a continuing Trump dynasty.
“Ironically,
I presume you are using that word ironically.
Harold keeps insisting Steve’s definition isn’t standard usage. The dictionary disagrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism?src=search-dict-hed
Well, judging by the War Production Board, rationing, price controls, etc., which the U.S. adopted in response, Americans weren’t completely opposed to socialism, at least on a temporary basis.
#42. I hope I did not say Steve’s definition was not standard usage. That was not my intention. In this case there is no standard usage, which is backed up by the usage guide in the definition you link to. Definition 2 in the example you provide says a system where there is no private property and the means of production are owned by the State, so Nazi Germany did not qualify under that definition.
My view is that definition fights are generally pointless. Steve defined it the way he did, and we can grant that without accepting that this is what everybody means. I concede that under this definition Nazism is a dialect of socialism and the USA was fighting to remove a dialect of socialism from Europe.
However, since the argument appears to center around what other people meant by socialism, we cannot avoid some discussion of this topic. The question here is did he believe he was fighting to remove even a dialect of socialism from Europe – that is, this is what he was fighting for as in the motivation or justification for fighting.
I think it unlikely because although Nazism is a form of socialism under the definition used in this argument (which we grant), there was a difference in public perception between socialism and Nazism. This will not be resolvable definitively. We could go back to old texts to see how these things were talked about. Did people generally talk of Nazis as socialists? That is a difficult task, so for my argument it is just as well that it works better if we do grant the definition he prefers and we don’t need to consider what other people may or may not have thought and believed.