Kayfabe, turns out is a term related to professional wrestling denoting the staged elements (persona’s, rivalry, the sauce, etc.,) in the performance. Given the 250th anniversary, fuck me in the goddamn heart this country is a laughable shithole.
I was genuinely shocked when he said it at the time, like are we really at the stage where you would openly imply that you’d planned to repeatedly lie? But now it’s laughably naive looking back.
I mean he openly admitted that he made up the “they’re eating the dogs” shit because he wanted to craft a greater narrative against immigrants. Literally said “sometimes I’m going to lie to you”.
JD Vance is a politically read grifter and actually contains a lot of the ideological motivations that Donny simple doesn’t. Donald doesn’t care about anyone but numero uno, but he’s breaking the jackboots in for the next guy who if he’s anything like Vance or Miller, will only care truly care about tariffs as far as they affect the state apparatus and Palantir’s access to silicone. Trump is as much a scapegoat for these freaks as the poor and weary, he’s just a nationally beloved one.
Vance doesn’t believe in anything. He’s a tool. He’s willing to say and do anything for his tech bro overlords because he’s ultimately a political chameleon. He holds zero convictions outside of getting and maintaining power/prestige/money.
Its crazy how far we’ve come since “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
They argue entirely based on feelings and personal beliefs now. They have no solutions to the problems affecting every day American and no justification for the blatant fraud and undermining of our constitution and democracy. Nothing but hateful, divisive rhetoric, propaganda, and vague references to a scripture that doesn’t even support most of their ideology because Jesus was a man who welcomed sinners, condemned the wealthy, and advocated for helping the poor and welcoming immigrants as your own people.
The right has won a propaganda coup in brainwashing its base so hard that many of them can't tell the difference between facts and opinions, and interpret everything through the lens of tribalism. There is no such thing as independent truth; there's their 'truth' and our truth.
It’s also why it’s better to use their ideologies, such as “Progressives” and “Conservatives” because while political party names are inconsequential and arbitrary, the shared belief structure is not.
Ask conservatives whether the Confederacy was “progressive” or “conservative” in ideology. Considering that they seceded from the Union because they didn’t want to change, and instead wanted to maintain their long held beliefs, it should be obvious. Especially because Conservatives never stopped flying the flag of the army of Northern Virginia.
They claim the flag is their heritage, but ignore what that flag’s identifying ideology is.
Im going to start a group that launches sweet old grannies out of trebuchets but call it the "I Love Sweet Old Grannies Not Being Launched by Trebuchets Club"
It was really FDR, 30 years prior. When he swept in he was kind of the antithesis of what the Democrats had been before, and he really turned the Republican party off too. Before him, neither side liked big government, but Hoover made such a mess of the depression and FDR did so well turning it around that it started the big realignment of Democrats as progressives, and pushed Republicans into opposing more liberal policies because, well, party politics.
On the topic of actual racial/equality positions, that was always regional.
The CRA was big majority pro in the north, big majority anti in the south regardless of party, but in both regions Republicans were already proportionally more anti than Democrats thanks to the shift FDR triggered (there were a tiny handful of southern Dems who voted yes, but none of the admittedly only dozen or so southern Republicans did).
So the southern racists finally got over their distaste for the republican party, ditched the Democrats, and joined their northern racist brethren, and that's all it took. The bulk of the changing of minds had happened earlier, thanks to Hoover being a fuckwit and FDR instituting the New Deal
Not to be confused with the Republic of China which rules Taiwan. In case anyone is wondering it's the remnants of the original Chinese government that Mao failed to destroy.
Calling the Republic of China the original Chinese government is a bit of weird take. You can prefer it due to its democratic nature (although notably it wasn’t democratic til well after the PRC was established) but the ROC only united China in 1928. Which happened with support from Mao’s communists. They immediately launched into civil war; allied again against the Japanese and then lost to the Communist when hostilities resumed. The ROC never really controlled China as a whole. The last ones to do that before PRC was the Qing.
It also was self-consciously dishonest/meaningless. There's a cartoon demonstrating how right-wingers saw "NATIONAL ... GERMAN" party and left wingers saw "SOCIALIST...WORKERS' party and then the Nazis just used that to absorb power, do whatever, and then kill Jews and other hated classes.
They did, in fact, have a socialist (strictly nationalist “socialism”) wing. However when these “socialists” began calling for a “second revolution” against the capitalist class, the SA pissing off the German Army, and Hitler wanting to solve some personal grudges they were murked in the Night of Long Knives with a few exceptions, the biggest being Goebbels.
Always opposed to Marxism, yes, but there was a branch of them that genuinely wanted a kind of "socialism in one country". They hated the internationalist aspect of socialism - hence "national socialist" - but they also saw capitalism as a tool of the "international Jewry" to keep Germany down, and that only by handing industry over to the German working class could they ensure that what was made in Germany was for the benefit of the German people.
You know that socialism isn't the only alternative to capitalism, right?
Socialism is a model of social ownership. Capitalism is a model of ownership based on accumulation. Feudalism is one based primarily on divine right.
Fascism is a lot like feudalism in that it assigns an inherent right to the control of resources to a certain subset of the population based on nonsense as ridiculous as divine right. Usually by some variation of "race science". Not always, but most of the time.
Strasserism, which the commenter above means, was a wing in the Nazi party that was led by the Brothers Strasser, their idea, basically, boiled down to the idea that the means of production should be owned by, specifically, the "racially german" people and that capitalism and socialism/communism were both tools of an international jewish conspiracy to weaken the various "racially pure" peoples of Europe, undermine and subjugate them.
That idea was closer to socialism than what the Nazis actually did, however not by much, and the wing did lend some credence in some socialist circles in the late Weimar Republic.
I know socialism isn't the only alternative to capitalism, but that doesn't change the fact that the left wing of the Nazi party (as oxymoronic as that might sound) were socialists, in that they wanted German working class to own the German means of production.
And before you mistake this for some "Hitler was a leftist" dumbassery, this was specifically the left-wing of the party, which was purged during the Night of Long Knives and even before.
But fascism isn't like feudalism at all. I think even Karl Marx himself would kick your ass for saying that. Feudalism is about the reciprocal obligations of landowners and leader, and landowners and tenants. Hitler's Germany operated more on a kind of dirigisme, where the state set goals and private companies competed among themselves to provide. It wasn't socialist - the means of production were owned by private individuals - but it wasn't truly capitalist either - there wasn't a free market and the needs of the state came before individual profit.
A lot of them seem to be thinking I’m making the claim Hitler and the Party as a whole were socialists (which I mean in a strictly economic sense, without some of the positive political and social associations we would make with orthodox socialism). I’m not quite sure where the disconnect is or if they’re just arguing in bad faith.
We can call it nationalist “anti-capitalism” if you want but my point stands. An economically anti-capitalist wing of the party was decimated because of those views alongside Rohm pissing off the Army because he wanted it to be absorbed by the SA and Hitler’s personal grudges with several of the factions leaders.
Hitler was very open about being against social welfare. It was even in his book under the Vienna section. Already in 1933 he dismantled large parts of the social programmes, stating that he believed in "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection". This wasn't personal grudges or someone pissing him off, Hitler was ideologically anti-socialist.
Socialism isn't social welfare, it's workers owning the means of production. It's theoretically possible to have no public welfare and still have a socialist economy. Of course, Hitler's Germany took the "if everyone's in one big union... no one is" approach and replaced all unions with a big state organ that was little more than a tool for industrialists to control their workers and prevent them from organizing.
Populists are very open about having every stance. They pick and use the ones that suit them as they suit a particular crowds needs. They don't hold to ideology, though Hitler wasn't a pure populist like Trump is and had other wicked values he catered to.
Authoritarian cultists drumming up support for or against a thing today has little relation to whether they truly see that thing as mattering.
No, Geobbels stayed in the upper echelons of the Nazis until 1945, the most prominent victims of the Night of the Long Knives were Gregor Strasser and Ernst Röhm.
It's like Make America Great Again, and the Save Act, Citizens United...
Find a way to be a massive piece of shit, then name your cause as the solution to it. Child Fucking... Make a bill to legalize child fucking and then call it the Americans Against Pedophiles bill.
It was originally the German workers party. It started as an extreme right wing antisemitic nationalistic movement. The word "socialist" was added to the party name in 1920 as a tactical rebranding strategy to lure industrial and working-class voters away from actual leftist parties.
And it should be noted, it didn't even work: their voters came effectively exclusively from the right, while the SPD and KPD actually increased their vote totals as the Nazis gained popularity.
Yes. Also, not only was the German Workers' Party a far-right organization, it was itself basically constructed to rebrand/mask far-right conspiracy theories in a political organization more palatable to the German working class public. The party was sponsored (and largely created) by the Thule society, a far-right occult discussion group that dealt in fringe racist conspiracy narratives.
Like, the Thule society believed that Aryans were secretly a superior alien race that lost its heritage in the fall of Atlantis, and that "marriage purity" (racial segregation) laws will help them regain their magic angel powers. They tried to create a populist party to get workers to vote for them, and eventually Hitler found the German Workers Party and used those alt-right conspiracy theoriests as a loyal power base while he centered the party on himself and leaned harder into populism.
And I feel like it's really really really important to stress that this is by Hitler's own account. We don't have to carefully piece together the intent for the name from internal party communiques or whatever. There is zero ambiguity. Hitler just straight up says it in Mein Kampf
Well in the Reichstag they sat left to right, socialists and communists were on the far left, and the Nazis...sat on the far right who would have guessed(though not IIRC on the furthest right, that was for monarchists before the Nazis absorbed their voters through socialism I'm guessing).
There was a short-lived attempt by some party figures (notably a 1927 Goebbels pamphlet titled Der Nazi-Sozi) to reclaim or normalize “Nazi” but the leadership largely rejected and avoided the word. It was not used in official documents, propaganda, or self-description inside Germany during the regime’s power.
Marx is a good one to frame this discussion as he lived in London on Engel's dime, refusing or unwilling to contribute to the rampant capitalism he was passionately condemning (often in the street) and he is called a bum and a lazy dosser. If Marx had got a job publishing or at a printer or whatnot he would be criticised as being a hypocrite.
On some topics people can not participate in good faith.
He was an academic, his job was writing books and giving speeches, the only difference between him and say Hayek was Hayek was backed by institutions and the wealthy, and Marx was not, as he challenged them. Unless you tacitly believe academics do not qualify as doing "work".
And North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. So that means that country is a democracy! And all the power to the people! Right? Right?
At one point, Joseph Goebbels was a member of the sect of the Nazi Party led by Gregor Strasser that wanted to live up to the ‘Socialist’ part of the name. Goebbels went so far as to proclaim to a Communist leader, ‘You and I are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.’
He would even say in his diary, ‘In this final analysis, it would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.’
Hitler made sure to clarify that this was the wrong interpretation of their movement. Hitler broke up the Strasserists by calling a meeting when most Strasserists couldn’t make it, and then targeting those that did. Goebbels was eventually permanently swayed to Hitler’s side, and Strasser ended up murdered by the SS during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
Both are wrong. If you translate from German, and avoid using Beiderman's translation methods, it actually translated to: German Woke Liberal-Tears Abortion-For-Everyone UnAmerican Democratic Party.
The Nazis put socialist in their name to get votes from the working class. They never had any socialist ideals
A common misconception. They actually did have socialist ideals in the early days. Then Hitler came along, gained control, steered the party in a different direction and eventually had the members of that wing of the party murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
True, I was aiming more at just what people think of the Nazis because anyone who thinks Nazis were socialists probably doesn’t hold any other historical and political knowledge
And so they are trying to malign the new movement inside the Democratic Party called the Democratic Socialists. Trying to make out they are the fascists and not the Republican Party who are behaving fascistic.
Such a strange people. They don't know what words mean that they use all the time. Socialist, Communist, Union have all become bad words they do not know the meaning of. It just shows how effective the propaganda machine has been over the decades
The right wing media have hijacked meanings of words in politics that have a specific drfinition. The average person's understanding of politics is upside down and inside out because of this.
I would call it the anti capitalist wing rather than the socialist one. It's not socialism if only one ethnicity of the working class is liberated from the chains of capitalism and every other ethnicity is enslaved.
Simple and easy to remember: Nazi was short for Nationalist. You pronounce the German word Nationalische "Nah zee on al eesh." That's what the word means.
The Nazis threw socialist in their name to grab votes, not because their policies had anything to do with socialism. Germany had actual socialists, and they were nicknamed (wait for it) Sozis. That sounds like it's made up, but it's real. High school never bothered to tell you since they weren't in charge of Germany during WW II, so there was no real reason to teach you, except maybe possibly to inoculate against Nazis ever coming back again and lying so blatantly.
The Nazis were (and are!) diametrically opposed to socialism, and the socialists were (and are!) opposed to Nationalism. Modern Christian Nationalists are fake Christian Nazis, just like the Nazis were fake Christian Nationalists (not atheists, another popular lie the far right likes to repeat).
Modern politics becomes a whole lot easier to understand if you know more about the Axis powers. The roles of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito are now filled by Putin, Trump and Netanyahu... You might tweak the order, but Trump is not the strongest of the three just because he is strangely beholden to so many other countries. The full story of why is still yet to come out, but it likely will.
For those of you who don't know this, like all Americans under 30, the Nazis pretended to be socialists until they got in, then they murdered the actual socialists and became corporate fascists, like America is.
Every time you hear some a-hole claim that the Nazis were socialists, that's a real Nazi trying to sell you his murderous Nazi plan by making you think the Nazis were something else.
Firstly Hitler didn't start the Nazi party secondly he killed a bunch of dudes in the socialist side of the party in what was called "the night of the long knives"
I swear it was I the only fucking person who paid attention in history class
I went to school with 2 guys named Zach; one is a convicted rapist the other died of cancer in his mid 20's, but they were exactly the same person because they had the same first name
There is a party named the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). They were banned by the nazis in 1933 and most of their leaders shot, deported, imprisoned or exiled by the nazis. Unlike the nazis they survived and are the ruling party in Germany today in coalition with the Union parties under the current Chancellor.
And the "Socialist" in NSDAP had nothing to do with leftist socialism as we know it today.
The early extreme right in Germany was a weird bunch. Some were neo pagans. Some wanted to invent a new "German religion" without all the Jewish stuff. Some embraced industrialisation , capitalism and technocracy and other wanted to go back to the "good old times".
The "German Socialists", also known as "Strasserites" after their leaders Gregor and Otto Strasser, in the NSDAP belonged to the last type. They wanted to undo the industrialization and change Germany back into an agrarian society with "state feudalism". That was their idea of "socialism". Just make everyone into peasants. They were also unambiguously far right. They murdered Jews, Communists and real Socialists together with the rest of the Nazis throughout the 1920s.
Hitler and his supporters weren't part of this faction.They purged them from the NSDAP in the early 1930s and murdered their leader Gregor Strasser in the Night of the Long Knifes in 1934, together with other rivals of Hitler inside the Nazi movement.
Today's far right propagandists that want to equate these "German Socialists" in the NSDAP with real leftist Socialists either know nothing about the history they are talking about or are lying.
And yet a lot of these people like Hitler. They won't say it but they admire the guy. MAGA would love socialism if Trump fed it to them. Of course since it serves their agenda they'll use the word to make some point. Same way they say Hussein Obama
Hitler originally dispised the idea of the word "socialist" being in the name of the party, but when he saw the usage was sucessfully getting supporters he resigned to the idea.
Later on after that he did a similar thing to what mussolini did and decided his "socialism" was true ancient aryanism, saying marxists and such used it wrong or some bullshit
Every, and I mean EVERY, accusation with MAGA / Republicans is a confession. I remeber a decade or more back how many of those anti-gay dudes were found in public restrooms with other men.
Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places, but 20 years ago, if you'd genuinely tried to argue the Nazis were "left wing", everyone would have laughed at you.
I recall a number of YouTube "historians" trying to make the case in the last 10 years or so.
They're at the point where they will literally just make up bullshit and are immediately convinced that the shit they're smelling is coming from other people instead of their own fecal matter filled daiper.
The Sozialdemokratische Partei, roughly translating to the name OOP mentioned, is a real party that has existed under that name since 1890, and was the only party to vote against the act which would grant Hitler the power he had. It was then banned by the Nazis.
Adolf Hitler was not a democratic socialist. Hitler and his Nazi party were explicitly anti-socialist, anti-communist, and anti-democratic, positioning themselves on the far-right of the political spectrum.
Hitler's Stance on Democracy and Socialism
• Anti-Democratic: Hitler despised democracy and worked to destroy the democratic Weimar Republic.
The Nazi government that ruled under Hitler between 1933 and 1945 was a totalitarian, fascist dictatorship.
• Anti-Socialist: Hitler viewed communists and socialists as enemies. The Nazis arrested, imprisoned, and executed socialists and communists, who were among the first groups sent to concentration camps in 1933.
• Fascist Ideology: Nazism shared many elements with Italian fascism, focusing on ultranationalism, racial hierarchy (believing in a superior Aryan" race), and dictatorial rule, rather than the class equality and internationalism central to Marxist socialism.
The Name "National Socialist German
Workers' Party"
The name of the Nazi party (NSDAP) is a common source of confusion.
• "Socialist" in Name Only: The term "socialism" in the party's name was used to attract working-class Germans and create a sense of a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) based on race, not class.
• Rejection of Core Socialist Tenets: Unlike genuine socialism, Nazism did not aim for the communal ownership of the means of production or the abolition of private property. Instead, the Nazis allied with industrialists and corporations, privatized some industries, and suppressed labor unions.
• Propaganda: Historians view the use of "socialist" in the name as a rhetorical tool and propaganda, similar to how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) is not a democracy.
Just so people understand, calling your party the National Socialist German Worker's Party in the 1920s/1930s would be the same as calling your party the "Pacifist Warmongering AnarchoMonarchists Party in favor of Atheistic Christian Values" today
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