Abraham Lincoln once observed that we all declare for liberty, but in using the same word, we do not all mean the same thing. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, he said, and the sheep thanks him as a liberator while the wolf denounces him as a destroyer of liberty. Words matter. When words are bent, voters are misled.
We have been told for years, in leading newspapers and in classrooms, that Adolf Hitler was a man of the “Right,” and therefore a distant cousin of the American conservative. The label is then hung, election after election, on whichever Republican is handy. Is it true? Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said.
Start with the name. Hitler never called himself a fascist. He called himself a National Socialist, and he led the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Names can lie, so look at the platform. The party’s 25-point program of 1920 demanded the nationalization of trusts, profit-sharing in large industries, the abolition of unearned income, the confiscation of war profits, land reform, and a large expansion of old-age pensions. Read that list without naming its author, and ask which side of the aisle wrote it.
Then look at what the regime did. It abolished independent unions and herded workers into a single state labor front. It capped corporate dividends. Under the Four-Year Plan of 1936, the state set prices and wages, rationed raw materials, and told industry what to build. Owners kept the deeds to their factories, but only so long as they obeyed. Hugo Junkers lost his own aircraft company in 1933, and Fritz Thyssen, who had bankrolled Hitler, saw his property seized in 1939 after he broke with him. It is a lease.
Hitler hated the communists, and they hated him, but rivals are not opposites. In August 1939, Hitler and Josef Stalin signed a pact and carved up Poland between them. When they fell out, they fought over who would own the collective, not over whether the collective should own the man. One organized it by class, the other by race. Both agreed that the individual belongs to the state. Two wolves may fight over the same sheep. They are wolves nonetheless.
But he was a nationalist, comes the reply, and nationalism belongs to the Right. Hitler’s nation was not a people joined by language, law, or creed. It was a people joined by blood, and no one could enter it who was not born to it. The American nation is the reverse. Lincoln said immigrants with no ancestors at the founding could still claim the Declaration of Independence “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” of the men who wrote it. A nation you may join by believing in it is the opposite of a nation you must be bred into.
Now set American conservatism beside these regimes. Its creed is limited government, a written constitution, separation of powers, free markets, private property, free speech, freedom of worship, and an armed citizenry. Every item is a fence around the power of the state. Hitler tore down every such fence he found. Measure politics the sensible way, with total state power at one end and individual liberty at the other, and Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong stand together at one end. The American founding stands at the other.
The cost is written in graves. The Holocaust murdered 6 million Jews and millions of others. Stalin’s famine starved millions of Ukrainians. Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed at least 30 million Chinese. The Khmer Rouge killed as much as a quarter of Cambodia in four years. The flags differed. The method did not — all of them wolves.
ELON MUSK IS RIGHT: HITLER WAS A SOCIALIST
What has this to do with November? I am not calling any candidate a Hitler or a Stalin. That is the very trick this piece rejects. But more candidates each year wear the socialist label with pride, and promise that the government will run our healthcare, our housing, our energy, and our lives. Their intentions may be kind, naïve, or nefarious. Every road that ended in those graves began the same way: government seizing power over the economy in the name of the people. The voter’s question is about power. How much does this candidate mean to hand to the government, and what fence will still stand when that power passes to someone less kind?
Lincoln’s wolf has not gone anywhere. He has only learned to speak more softly, more deftly. He no longer denounces the shepherd. He tells the sheep that the shepherd is the wolf. Our Constitution’s fences were built by men who knew a wolf when they saw one. This November, judge candidates by what they do, not by what they call themselves. Ask each one: Do you mean to mend the fence, or to take it down? Check his teeth — the wolf will reveal itself. Then call things by their right names, and vote accordingly.
Dory Wiley is a Dallas-based writer and speaker on American history.