Vernon Bogdanor argued that: ---------------------- "Social democrat was originally a term applied to anyone from the Left who rejected the nineteeth-century liberal economy; it was applied to Karl Kautsky and H. M. Hyndman as well as to Eduard Bernstein and Anthony Crosland. Today, however, it forms but one element in the socialist spectrum, the revisionist element which began with the German social democrat, Eduard Bernstein, the hero of Berman's story. Revisionist social democracy was not, she believes, a mere "half-way house between Marxism and liberalism, cobbled together from elements of incompatible traditions"; nor were social democrats merely "socialists without the courage of their convictions"; nor should they be defined, as they were by Crosland, in terms of particular values such as equality. The essence of social democracy lies rather in "a distinctive belief in the primacy of politics", and an appeal to social and communal solidarity through mass political organizations people's parties."
"These, however, are features that social democracy shares with its ideological enemies, Fascism and National Socialism. Social democracy and Fascism, so Berman believes, share a common genealogy, although, of course, social democracy is distinctive in being the only democratic movement of the three. The cover of The Primacy of Politics provocatively juxtaposes posters from the Swedish social democrats between the wars and the Nazis. Both promised work for all. For social democracy, like Fascism and National Socialism, arose out of the crisis of liberalism and Kautskyite Marxism at the end of the nineteenth century, philosophies which denied the primacy of politics and therefore seemed to countenance quietism, an approach which proved disastrous during the Depression. Thus, although, in both Germany and Italy, the socialists were the strongest political party after the First World War, they proved unable to defend democratic institutions." "Moreover, social democracy found itself in retreat in the inter-war years everywhere in Europe except for Scandinavia, because it failed to appreciate the force of patriotism. The doctrine that the worker had no fatherland might, Bernstein conceded, have been true for the German worker of the 1840s "deprived of rights and excluded from public life", but by the beginning of the twentieth century, by which time he had voting rights and rights to social security, it had lost much of its truth; and it was given the coup de grâce in 1914 when the German SPD voted for war credits and the Second International disintegrated. "On August 2, 1914", declared Adrien Marquet, the French "neosocialist" who later identified himself with Fascism, "the notion of class collapsed before the concept of the Nation"." ---------------------- In the case of Germany, the Nazis were able to successfully implement social democratic economic and social policies that the German business community would have accepted, if an SPD-lead government had attempted to implement. And the reason for that IMO, is that the Nazis had also taken care to smash the trade unions, thereby alleviating any fears on the part of big business in Germany, that such policies would lead to excessive (from their standpoint) wage hikes. The Nazis were able to, in effect, offer social democracy without Social Democrats. And the business community was willing to put up with this.
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