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No, leftists are not like Nazis, they’re more like their ideological forbearers By Rizzuto Mon Aug 17, 2009 - A quote I stumbled across in The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek really drove something home for me; that modern liberal ideology, although not necessarily Nazi-esq, shares a certain kinship with the so called intellectuals in pre-totalitarian Germany who provided the ideological seeds that would eventually give rise to the Third Reich. First, a little context for the quote. In the thirteenth chapter of the book, entitled The Totalitarians in our Midst, Hayek explains that although Nazi Germany seems so distant a culture from what was going on in England at the time, similarities had arisen between it and pre-totalitarian Germany. While the average English citizen focused on the more superficial aspects of Nazism as indicative of the ideology (uniforms, funny salutes, etc.), statism was slowly creeping into the mainstream of English political thought. This creeping statism was marked by a growth in the: “veneration for the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’ sake, the enthusiasm for “organization” of everything, and that “inability to leave anything to the simple power of organic growth.”It’s with the adoption of these beliefs that the English people (as the Germans had already done) began to leave behind classical, individualist liberalism that had guided much of the Western World until that point. Nazism was, in essence, an authoritarian version of socialism, as the German intellectuals believed that the only way for socialism to truly work was to drop the façade of classically liberal individualism. As German intellectual Oswald Spengler would say in his seminal tract Prussianism and Socialism, “There are in Germany many hated and ill-reputed contrasts, but liberalism alone is contemptible on German soil.” The divergence of liberalism into two paths (one being of the classic individualist type associated with Conservatives and libertarians, and the other of a more “organized” state run stripe that we associate with modern liberalism) can in fact be traced back to these ideological forbearers of Nazism. More specifically, their belief in the superiority of Prussian top-down socialism introduced by Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in the 1870’s (please see this post at Newbusters to view firsthand the American left’s veneration for Bismarckian socialist reform, as exemplified by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.) To be clear, I don’t think this quote represents America today as a whole, or even those who self identify as liberals. Our unique history makes statism a repugnant idea to the majority of people. Rather, I believe it represents a certain segment of our political and intellectual class; namely the far leftists and college elites who believe in the superiority of a more “organized” or “planned” system of economics and governance.
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