[lbo-talk] INSTANT POPULISM: A short history of populism old and new

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Thu Dec 2 13:49:49 PST 2010


On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:


> Somebody: Nazism was more traditional and agrarian than you give it credit
> for. The NSDAP received its highest vote percentages in rural Protestant
> parts of the country, in a few counties on the order of three-quarters of
> the population. On average, they did 10 percentage points better in rural
> Protestant regions as compared to the national average. And of course, their
> social base in the cities was the traditional self-employed middle class.
>
> We're blinded by the autobahn, the blitzkrieg, and rocket into thinking of
> the Nazis as ultra-modern. But in reality, in social origins, they're in the
> same family as all the right-wing militarist regimes in the post-colonial
> nations after World War II. Nazi Germany had a higher percentage of the
> population employed in agriculture than Columbia, Iran, or Brazil today;
> that is to say, it was still in transition from being an agrarian society.
>

Perhaps we're talking past each other... it now strikes me as possible that, while I am talking about the leadership and what they did with the support they built within the German public, you are talking about the sectors of the German public recruited to vote for and materially support the party. I don't think we disagree about where the political support came from. However, my sense is that the planning and execution of the autobahn, the blitzkreig, the rockets, the explosive industrial might and the death camps came not from the rural Protestant parts of the country but came, instead, from the top down... I know nothing about the agricultural policies of the Nazis, do you know about their orientation to tractors, fertilizers, pesticides and/or productivity increases?



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