The modern left has invented its own private dictionary. In that dictionary, “Nazi” and “fascist” no longer refer to specific historical ideologies with specific features. They mean whatever the speaker currently dislikes. A tax policy, immigration policy, or even a random Tuesday can be called “fascist.”
But words have actual meanings. This applies to Nazism, fascism, socialism, and communism. When those meanings are applied honestly and consistently, the historical record shows that all four ideologies end in the same place. A totalitarian state emerges in which almost everyone is poor except a small ruling elite. That elite remains in power through informants, secret police, and mass surveillance used to marginalize, imprison, or kill anyone who opposes it.
Start with the definitions themselves. Nazism is National Socialism, the totalitarian ideology of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the full name most people never hear. It combines dictatorship, state direction of the economy and society, extreme nationalism, racial hierarchy, antisemitism, and territorial expansion.
Fascism is a totalitarian nationalist system in which the state suppresses political opposition and directs political, social, and economic life, often while allowing nominal private ownership under state control.
Socialism is a political and economic system favoring collective or state control of production and distribution. Regimes calling themselves socialist have ranged from electoral welfare states to one-party dictatorships.
Communism is a Marxist political and economic system seeking collective ownership and a classless society, but every communist state established in practice has become a one-party dictatorship marked by repression, censorship, and the destruction of fundamental freedoms.
Fascism’s economic core is conditional private ownership. A company may keep a private name, but it must carry out state policy; its leadership is installed and supported by the state, and it loses that ownership the moment it falls out of favor with the government. This is exactly how China and Russia operate today. In China, Communist Party committees sit inside private companies, the state controls financing and market access, and executives who cross the political leadership lose their companies and their freedom.
In Russia, oligarchs keep their wealth and their companies only for as long as they remain loyal to the Kremlin. Those who cross Putin face exile, prison, forced sale, or outright confiscation. That makes both countries closer to fascism than most other countries in the world today. In China’s case, it is genuinely a coin toss whether the system is better classified as fascist or communist. China has eight minor political parties, but they exist under the constitutional principle of Communist Party leadership. None of them is permitted to campaign to actually govern.
This is where the left’s other favorite objection collapses. Liberals who support socialism, including Mamdani-style socialism, accuse conservatives of ignorantly conflating socialism, communism, and Marxism. But Marxist theory teaches that socialism is the transitional stage leading to communism. Conservatives who use these terms interchangeably are using them much as communist governments themselves have always used them.
The Soviet Union was governed by the Communist Party and called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. China is governed by the Communist Party and officially calls its system “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Vietnam is governed by the Communist Party and officially describes itself as a socialist republic. Cuba is governed by the Communist Party, and its constitution describes its system as socialist.
Supporters of democratic socialism argue that, despite including the word “socialism,” their system is fundamentally different because it is democratic. However, numerous communist dictatorships also included the word “democratic” in their official names, including the German Democratic Republic, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Democratic Kampuchea, and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. Calling a system democratic does not make it democratic.
For all the rhetoric in socialism and communism about liberating workers, all four systems deprived workers of independent representation. Nazism, fascism, communism, and one-party socialism all eliminated independent labor unions and replaced them with organizations controlled by the state or ruling party. Nazi Germany dissolved the unions and created the German Labour Front. Fascist Italy replaced independent unions with state-controlled syndicates. Soviet unions enforced Communist Party policies and production quotas rather than independently representing workers. China’s All-China Federation of Trade Unions remains the only legal national union organization, while independent unions are prohibited. Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and the former Eastern Bloc followed the same model. The objective was not merely economic regulation, but the elimination of any labor organization capable of resisting the state.
Communism and one-party socialism also remove the incentives and choices that allow workers to improve their lives. When hard work brings no meaningful financial reward, workers have less reason to produce more. Communists argue that capitalism reduces the worker to an automaton serving a wealthy employer. In practice, communism makes the worker an automaton serving a totalitarian state.
In a market economy, workers can change jobs, negotiate higher wages, relocate, pursue an education, work overtime, take a second job, start a business, or sell what they produce. Communist governments control, restrict, or prohibit these options, leaving workers dependent on the state for employment, housing, income, and permission to improve their circumstances.
Venezuela is the clearest modern example. Once among the wealthiest countries in Latin America, it became one of the region’s poorest under socialism despite possessing the same enormous oil reserves and receiving extraordinary revenues during years of high oil prices. The collapse did not result from a lack of resources to sell. It resulted from nationalization, price controls, expropriation, corruption, monetary expansion, and the destruction of private production.
The agricultural record is worse. In Cuba, farmers remain poor and undernourished while growing food because the state controls production, purchasing, prices, and distribution. Farmers must surrender much of what they grow and receive the same government rations as everyone else rather than being free to consume or sell their produce.
In the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, collectivization, confiscated harvests, and production quotas caused farmers to starve to death beside crops that remained in the fields or had been seized and transported elsewhere by the state. Systems built in the name of workers and farmers ultimately stripped both groups of control over their labor, their crops, and, in the worst cases, their ability to eat.
These systems also eliminated independent media and suppressed opposition parties so completely that elections, when held, could not remove the ruling party. They restricted citizens’ ability to travel abroad and closely monitored foreign visitors, particularly those from countries with opposing ideologies. Whatever names these governments gave themselves, they did not permit independent institutions capable of challenging state power.
All four systems extended state control into the home. Nazi, fascist, communist, and one-party socialist governments used schools and youth organizations to indoctrinate children, required teachers and textbooks to follow party doctrine, and placed loyalty to the state above loyalty to parents.
Communist Russia and Maoist China went further, waging sustained campaigns against religion and family autonomy while encouraging children to denounce parents, teachers, and neighbors accused of opposing the revolution. China’s one-child policy gave the state extraordinary control over marriage, childbirth, and family life.
Nazi and fascist governments took a different route to the same result. They preserved religion and the family when convenient but placed both under state control and punished religious leaders, parents, and institutions that resisted.
Socialism promises to protect the population from the abuses of fascism and Nazism, but instead subjects people to similar abuses under a different banner. Socialists in America present citizens with a false choice between voting for socialism and voting for fascism. The actual choice on the ballot is between socialism and a democratic republic that guarantees freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and political affiliation.
Socialists claim that traditional American values are fascist and rooted in white supremacy, but true American values are codified in the Constitution. The left urges Americans to vote for socialism to protect the Constitution and preserve democracy, even though socialism would undermine the constitutional rights and democratic institutions it claims to defend.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/lefts-private-dictionary-fascism-socialism-totalitarianism/
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