Elon Musk, Nazis and the steady creep of fascism

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/02/2025 (238 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At the risk of adding to the cacophony that in a few paragraphs I will be disparaging, let’s start with the question that is consuming so much of our current discourse.

Is Elon Musk a Nazi?

Musk was powerful enough when he was a humble poly-CEO bent on using corporate influence to indulge his main character syndrome.

But now, given his activity in the Trump administration, it is becoming reasonable to say that Musk is the hand most firmly on the levers of power in the world’s most consequential government.

So we probably ought to get to the bottom of whether or not he’s a Nazi, right?

The problem is that’s exactly the conversation he wants us to be having.

Take Musk’s much-discussed Nazi salute at the inauguration, for example. Obviously that was not a “roman salute” or an innocent gesture from an autistic man giving his heart to the crowd. Only the painfully gullible or disingenuous would contend such.

But neither was it a man overtly welcoming in the Fourth Reich, utterly oblivious to how unpopular open Nazism would be. This was an act of trolling. He threw out a blatant Sieg Heil, while maintaining just a sliver of plausible deniability, because the frenzy that ensued was the point.

Everyone who was horrified by the brash display of Nazism, breaking against the paradoxically unyielding wall of flimsy Musk defences, it left people breathlessly talking for days about the symbolism of a gesture.

In a world where political factions no longer bother to meet in objective reality, it was a flexing of muscles, showing the futility of the people still clinging to the idea that we can reign this in with cries of “have you no decency, sir?”

So is Musk a Nazi? Ultimately this is the sort of semantic question that can be weaponized by the very people it is meant to inhibit, distracting from the actual work that can be done to stop fascism’s rise to power.

But since I posed the question, I suppose I owe a brief opinion on the matter. I think Nazism is a very specific thing, and while there are some clear historical throughlines from the Third Reich to the Trump/Musk administration, I personally hesitate to brand all ethnonationalism as Nazism.

But mostly I do so to avoid getting bogged down in semantic debates, not belief that it’s important to differentiate fascism from Nazism.

However, Musk’s personal social media mouthpiece, X, continues to flirt with Holocaust denialism, featuring a pro-Hitler advertisement with denialist talking points as recently as this month.

And Musk himself recently spoke at a rally for Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany political party and urged them to move on from guilt surrounding the Holocaust.

This is where I think we get into the specific territory that contemporary Nazism actually is.

Now, does affixing the label of Nazi to Musk or Trump accomplish anything? Or are such semantic debates simply a preoccupation that serves as a distraction from, and catharsis in lieu of, the real work that might inhibit the influence of someone like Musk?

However much the current crop of fascism takes from Nazism, I would contend that the real way to combat fascism is to ensure a social climate where people aren’t so marginalized that they look in such places to retake control of their lives.

And people aren’t wrong to be feeling that hopeless right now.

We’ve had our supposedly reasonable political parties telling us that everything is fine while the extractions of capitalism continue to make our material conditions worse and worse.

Our centrist politicians insist that unbreakable norms and procedures prevent them from making revolutionary policy that might protect us from growing wealth disparity, environmental degradation and decaying social bonds.

Ironically, it is the Musk/Trump administration that has fully exposed this lie, as they steamroll through the fantasy of law and decorum to shape their country in a twisted vision from an Ayn Rand fever dream.

They’ve shown us that the rules were never barriers to keep our political class from achieving the progressive vision they truly desired. They were excuses to protect the status quo, assurance that only that barest of incremental progress would ever be allowed, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the extraction of shareholder profits.

But you can only take more than you give for so long, until finally liberalism in service of capital yields a fertile ground for fascism. Now America is broken and might never recover.

But in their destruction, maybe we can finally see through the illusions that led them down such a fraught path. Because fascism can only gain a foothold in a world where material conditions have slipped to the point where people are left asking “what other options do I have?”

We have seen that this status quo which measures progress through stock market performance and GDP does not produce a population spiritually satiated enough to resist such urges.

Fascism will never stop creeping forward until we offer a better option.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author.