Elana Kagan Quotes (approvingly) Natioanal Socialist (nazi) Economist

This is an important post by Libertarian Republican. It shows how Left usually is. They were the racists in the Civil War (separatists and segregationists), they were the eugenicists/Nazi’s of the 20′ through WWII, they were the people standing in front of schools not wanting black kids in the same school as their kids, and they elected a black nationalist President. So the following on Kagan should come as no surprise:

One of the longest standing and most respected conservative journals Human Events, recently uncovered some shocking information on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. She repeatedly cited a 20th century European Marxist-turned-Nazi Werner Sombert in her college thesis paper…

[….]

and now

  • Kagan and her citing of Marxist/National Socialist Werner Sombart in her college thesis paper = zero mainstream media coverage.

Here is a larger portion of the Human Events article:

During World War I, however, Sombart endorsed Germany’s “heroic” war against the “capitalist spirit” represented by England. In 1934, Sombart published Deutscher Sozialismus, which advocated the “total ordering of life” as an expression of the German Volksgeist, or “national spirit.”

In the introduction to her 1981 thesis, Kagan addresses a question famously asked by Sombart: Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? — “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”

“The Socialist Party of the United States could not lay claim to the kind of pure proletarianism that Sombart considered essential to any socialist movement; indeed, most of the party’s members did not even consider this a worthy goal,” Kagan wrote on Page 3 of the thesis. “But the American socialists ‘failure’ to build a movement that even resembled Sombart’s idealized notion of a class-conscious party . . . did not render their party any less significant. Nor did such a failure render their party any less successful. In the first two decades of the twentieth century the American socialist movement, whose very existence Sombart refused to consider, grew if not by leaps and bounds at least by inches.”

In the final pages of her thesis — To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933 — Kagan returns to Sombart’s theories, writing: “Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties? In answering this question, historians have often called attention to various characteristics of American society that have militated against widespread acceptance of radical movements. These societal traits — an ethnically divided worked class, a relatively fluid class structure, an economy which allowed at least some workers to enjoy what Sombart termed ‘reefs of roast beef and apple pie,’ — prevented the early twentieth century socialists from attracting an immediate mass following. Such conditions did not, however, completely checkmate American socialism.”

Even before he embraced National Socialism, Sombart’s socialist theories reflected an anti-Semitic tendency that identified Jews with capitalism, a theme explored in his 1911 book, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (“The Jews and Economics,” which was published in a 1913 English translation titled, The Jews and Modern Capitalism). In his 1915 book Handler und Helden (“Merchants and Heroes”), Sombart praised the “heroic” German character, contrasting them with “Trading Peoples,” especially Jews, whose “commercial” habits Sombart depicted as prevailing among the English.

The influence of Sombart, who died in 1942 at age 78, was scornfully cited in Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. In Chapter 12 of that book — “The Socialist Roots of Nazism” — Hayek said that Sombart “had done as much as any man to spread socialist ideas and anticapitalist resentment of varying shades throughout Germany.”

Hayek also mentioned this in note #13 in the first chapter of The Road to Serfdom:

  • Historian of the development of capitalism Werner Sombart (1863-1941) was perhaps the last of the historical school economists. Hayek would view his move from left-wing socialism toward anticapitalism of the fascist variety as exemplifying a natural tendency.