Here we are using an early word for fascism for the purposes of including into it nationalist socialism with as little semantic controversy as possible.
International and national socialism, phalanxism, take the same assumption and provide two different takes on it: that the old order is dead or should die, that the old ideas of hierarchy will or should die with it, and that it will or should be replaced with what we will call a primal government. A primal government is one that explicitly and legalistically takes first priority in human order. Everything starts from, and exists exclusively at the pleasure of, a central government. Central being a country, an association of countries, whathaveyou. The highest level of governmental authority over a given locality.
This is the basic assumption. It is true for democratic socialism, red communism, storm troopers, Phalanxists, Italian fascists, neonazis (with some striking exceptions) and even British big tent style RINO style “conservatives.”
Some of these routes are more circuitous than others. So we will focus on the two main routes: phalanxism and red communism.
Arriving at the demolishing of the old order and the supremacy of the government, then, the disagreement is this: reds want a throw-back “Enlightenment” veneer, and phallanxists want a synchretic “folkloric” veneer. Neither of these two things are actually compatible with socialism. What matters here is the outward form, the “feel” that the supreme government will have.
Even 99% of policy would look the same, and here we include the end-goals of social democracy.
This is why it should surprise no one that relations between the different breeds of socialist are becoming increasingly less antagonistic (back when many or all of them had shots at control over a superpower state, the knives of competition came out). It’s also why it becomes increasingly difficult to describe them apart when some state or another adopts or, rather, gets adopted by it.
Opposed to socialism is real conservatism, traditionalism, and the libertarian, individualist mentality that naturally goes with those. Even royalism is fairly individualistic, because the links that tie a monarch to a realm are mostly personal, a matter of personal debt. There is no supreme “state” government structure that stands as an arbiter, just historical contracts and maybe divine sponsorship.
Free markets are not a political ideology, or even a policy. They are simply what happens when people are largely left to their own devices. “Capitalism” doesn’t exist outside of the socialist mythology. There are just boring things like banking. In this sense, one of the few things I think socialists got right is calling true conservatism “Reactionism.” People go about their lives and business, and here comes this revolution. Conservatism is just a reaction to it.
