In Part 4 of 4 of this series, we will look at the remaining characteristics of Nazism. Why does it matter? Because you must always determine if where you stand is on the right side of history and you must be able to educate and guide others as to the direction they need to go.
Part 4: Progressivism, Atheism, Darwinism, Eugenics, and Conclusion
Progressivism
Like today's progressives, early progressives saw individual rights as standing in the way of equality. For them, the government's primary function was to protect its citizens from capitalism, that private property was antithetical to the progressive movement, and that a collective body with collective responsibilities would bring about equality. In essence, they wanted socialism.
They believed that the existing constitutional system was outdated and that the legislative power of Congress should be subordinate to the executive branch.
They also desired to have states and local governments relinquish more power to the centralized government.
As I covered in part 3, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were not only authoritarians but they were progressives, as well.
“Government, in Wilson’s progressive view, did not exist merely to protect rights. “We are not,” Wilson insisted, “bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.” The limited government enshrined in both the Declaration and the Constitution may have been an advance for the Founders, Wilson conceded, but society had evolved since then. Separation of powers was inefficient and hindered modern government from promoting progress. “The only fruit of dividing power,” Wilson asserted, “was to make it irresponsible.” A strong executive was needed, Wilson believed, to translate the interests of the people into public policy.”
— New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton W. Folsom Jr.
“Roosevelt served in the Wilson administration and believed deeply in Wilson’s progressive view of the Constitution. When Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes was swearing in Roosevelt for his second term, he apparently read with great emphasis the words “promise to support the Constitution of the United States.” Roosevelt met Hughes’s challenge and repeated these words with force. Later the president said he wanted to shout, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it….” In a fireside chat on Court packing, Roosevelt dropped his argument for judicial efficiency and called the Constitution “a system of living law.” He added, “We must have Judges who will bring to the courts a present-day sense of the Constitution.”
— New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton W. Folsom Jr.
Tellingly, Roosevelt, like Joe Biden, also entertained the idea of packing the Supreme Court. To have control of the court makes the authoritarian's job that much easier.
Apparently, authoritarians and progressives have much in common. Could it be that hatred for the US Constitution stems from the desire to impose their ideology on everyone else without any opposition, like a dictator?
Likewise, Democrats, in the US also, prefer a more centralized government. This is exactly what socialism is.
Again, to implement socialism, the citizens would necessarily need to have their rights taken away. This would supposedly help the planners evenly distribute the duties required of the subjects of the state, as well as the portion of necessities allotted to them.
Progressives were generally atheists, believed in eugenics, and social Darwinism.
Atheism and Darwinism
Mussolini was an atheist, as were dictators Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il, Kim Jong-un, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and the list goes on. Communist/Socialist Nations are always controlled by atheists and eventually require their citizens to worship the government.
Most of the atheists, in the US, who register to vote, register as Democrats. Of those, most subscribe to Darwin's theory of evolution which was another fascination common of the Nazi faithful.
Eugenics
Nazism had a great fascination with eugenics, as do progressives.
Eugenics is a set of beliefs that the genetic makeup of the human species can be improved by removing those deemed inferior. This is primarily done via marriage prohibition, forced sterilization, abortion, and eventually via extermination. The criteria for determining who was inferior or unfit was generally decided by handicap, mental capacity, criminal tendency, or race.
Eugenics was the excuse, used by the Nazis to justify exterminating the Jewish people.
In the US, one of the most famous eugenicists was progressive Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger believed that people she deemed unworthy should not be allowed to have children. As an atheist and a racist, Sager was a model eugenicist. She felt that the entire population of people of African descent, at least in the United States, needed to be reduced via her "Negro Project." She even accepted an invitation to speak to a Klu Klux Klan group about her views on eugenics.
Progressive champion, John Maynard Keynes, the chief economic proponent of Socialism of the 20th century, served on the British Board of eugenics, in 1945.
It is quite an accomplishment to be the person with the legacy of influencing billions in a century to follow an economic policy of failure and to also be a leading proponent of a belief that murder, sterilization, or abortion (which is also murder) of people you deem unworthy of life.
Woodrow Wilson and FDR, being progressive, were also supporters of eugenics.
Conclusion
On the political spectrum, the farther right you go, the less government control there is, the more to the left you go, the more government control there is.
The most prominent characteristics of German National Socialism are nationalism, racism, authoritarianism, atheism, Darwinism, progressivism, eugenics, oligarchy, and socialism.
Those characteristics are synonymous not with the right but with the left.
So, why has Nazism been placed in the right column by so many? Here is a clue.
In Germany, as well as in Russia, the socialists were considered to be on the right.
As Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned in a Soviet Russian Gulag for 17 years, writes,
“After August 30, 1918, the NKVD ordered the localities “to arrest immediately all Right Socialist Revolutionaries and to take a significant number of hostages from the bourgeoisie and military officers.”
— The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
However, everything is to the right of Communism.
Communism and Socialism are not only very much related, but both are also to the far left in US politics. As a matter of fact, evidence shows that the farther to the left that a government goes the more deaths by the government there seems to be. As bad as Nazism was, Communism killed 10 times as many people as Nazism. That number is well over 100 million victims.
Why have we been misled? As noted at the beginning of this series, it was the communists who first spread the propaganda that Nazi socialism was right-winged. The most logical deduction is that it is communists who are continuing to push the fallacy so that we forge ahead toward the nightmare that is communism.
Presumably, they think they are doing the right thing.
However, Democrats, in the US, claim to want to take monopolistic power away from private enterprise. Yet, ironically, they want to create a corporate monopoly that is run by government bureaucrats rather than qualified private sector businessmen.
Under that system, which, by the way, is socialism, the citizens will be kept equally poor and the only people who will get rich are the oligarchical politicians who hold office.
Socialism is the antithesis of everything that made the United States great.
So, the next time you think about calling someone a Nazi, ask yourself how many of the characteristics, which make up Nazism, describe yourself.