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“Hitler was a left-wing socialist.”
Five words. That is all it took for Elon Musk, on Saturday 8 August, to throw nearly a century of political history into the bin and replace it with the most primitive form of etymological reasoning: Hitler’s party was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, therefore Hitler was a socialist, therefore Hitler was left-wing.
The man who had already performed a Nazi salute in January 2025 is now explaining where the Nazis belonged on the political spectrum.
Our age certainly has a taste for farce.
The problem is not merely that the claim is false. It is historically illiterate. It assumes that a political word has a fixed, universal meaning that can be carried intact from Weimar Germany to the United States of 2026. As though “socialism” had always referred to exactly the same doctrine, the same parties and the same relationship with the economy. As though the ideological battles of the 1920s and 1930s had never happened.
That is precisely where Musk’s nonsense collapses.
Socialism was not a trademark owned by the left
Today, in ordinary political language, “socialist” instinctively points towards the left. In early twentieth-century Germany, the SPD was socialist, the labour movement was deeply shaped by Marxism and German communism had itself emerged from that tradition.
Nobody serious disputes that.
But believing that the word was therefore somehow reserved exclusively for the left means projecting our contemporary political vocabulary onto an intellectual landscape that operated very differently.
The interwar period was one enormous battle over the meaning of words. Liberalism, revolution, people, worker, socialism: concepts circulated, were contested, appropriated and turned against those who had previously used them.
Germany’s nationalist right was no exception.
As early as 1919, Oswald Spengler published Preußentum und Sozialismus, Prussianism and Socialism. Spengler was not a misplaced Marxist. He belonged to the intellectual world of the nationalist right and what would later be described as the “Conservative Revolution”. His “Prussian socialism” glorified discipline, duty, national community and the subordination of individual interests to a supposedly higher collective order.
In 1934, the economist and sociologist Werner Sombart published a book entitled Deutscher Sozialismus, “German Socialism”. Again, there had been no miraculous conversion to social democracy. Sombart opposed his model both to liberalism and Marxism, imagining an organic society organised around duty and authority.
His project was not identical to Nazism, and the regime would eventually keep him at a distance. That is precisely why the example matters: the language of “socialism” circulated far beyond the Marxist left.
That was the political world in which “National Socialism” appeared.
Not the world of 2026.
Hitler himself explained what he meant by “socialism”
There is a particularly awkward document for Musk’s argument: Hitler himself.
In 1923, journalist George Sylvester Viereck asked Hitler why his movement called itself socialist when its programme appeared to contradict socialism as the term was commonly understood.
Hitler’s answer reads almost like an explanatory note addressed, a century later, to anyone tempted to take the NSDAP’s name literally.
He argued that Marxism was not socialism and declared: “I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.”
He then described his own socialism as national, patriotic, racial and compatible with private property.
There it is.
Hitler did not say: “I am a Marxist, only with a few more German flags.”
He said the opposite. He was fighting Marxists for ownership of the word socialism in order to fill it with nationalist content.
The fundamental unit was no longer the international working class but the German people. Class conflict was to disappear into national community. And that community was defined in racial terms.
The central idea became the Volksgemeinschaft, the “people’s community”. Nazism claimed it would reconcile the German worker and the German industrialist inside a single national body, placed under the authority of the Führer, while symbolically and eventually physically expelling those whom this racial community defined as outsiders.
Jews, Roma, political opponents and other groups declared undesirable were excluded from it.
The word socialism was indeed there.
Its meaning simply was not the one Musk is pretending it had.
And the Nazis were far-right. Full stop.
We could stop here. The claim is that crude.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explicitly describes the Nazi Party as a far-right movement: racist, antisemitic, anti-democratic and violently anti-Marxist. It also points out that the party specifically sought to draw German workers away from socialism and communism and towards its own nationalist project.
Once in power, Hitler banned the SPD and the KPD, imprisoned social democrats and communists, destroyed independent trade unions and eliminated political pluralism.
The Nazi programme of 1920 certainly mixed social demands, attacks on capitalism, ultranationalism and antisemitism. That is precisely why historians do not classify political movements by circling one word in their name with a red pen.
They examine ideology, enemies, conceptions of society and what a movement actually does when it gets into power.
By that standard, this debate was settled a very long time ago.
Musk is not doing history. He is playing with it.
Perhaps this stupidity could be forgiven if it came from some man at the end of a bar explaining that North Korea must obviously be democratic because its official name is the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”.
Elon Musk owns X.
His posts can instantly reach tens of millions of people. When he writes that Hitler was a “left-wing socialist”, he is not participating in an obscure academic dispute. He is spreading one of the favourite tricks of contemporary attempts to rewrite fascism: take the vocabulary used by fascists themselves, impose our present-day meaning onto it, and then triumphantly announce that the far right was actually the left.
It is intellectually pathetic.
And coming from a man who performed a Nazi salute in front of cameras watched across the world, the joke is beginning to stink.
The Nazis called themselves National Socialists. Nobody disputes that. Hitler even claimed to defend a form of “socialism”.
That is exactly what Elon Musk fails to understand: open a history book and you quickly discover that the word did not have, in interwar Germany, the single fixed meaning he is assigning to it today.
Nazism was not left-wing socialism.
It was Nazism.
And it belonged to the far right.