Many people who identify as “socialist” today, including AOC and Bernie Sanders, are actually closer to being fascists than being socialists.
Socialism means government ownership of the means of production. Neither AOC nor Sanders advocates outright government ownership of major industries.
What they and many other “socialists” support is extensive government control of the economy while leaving ownership largely in private hands.
That’s closer to fascism than to socialism. But both are left-wing ideologies, as Thomas Sowell explains here 👇
Thomas Sowell explains why fascism and Nazism are left-wing ideologies:
“Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely—and correctly—regarded as being on the political left.”
“Jonah Goldberg’s great book ‘Liberal Fascism’ cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.”
“Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.”
“It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot—and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.”
“What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people—like themselves—need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.”
Source: “Socialist or Fascist?” (2012)