No, Socialism and Fascism Are Not the Same

Lumping them together is intellectually sloppy and historically illiterate

“The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.” — Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

Fascism-Nazism was the most evil movement in history. Paragons of hatred, they managed to supply us with our most enduring counterexample against the plausibility of moral relativism, even if Adorno is right that the very grammar of language struggles to articulate depths of anguish equal to the abyssal gravity of Auschwitz. The association between fascism and evil runs so deep that tarring opponents with the label has proven irresistible to partisans of all stripes, from left to right—this despite scholars of fascism pleading with us to take greater care when describing something as “fascist.”