Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

Smol Bean Fascism: Why Liberalism Won

17 October 2025 · 3 min read

I think the actual reason why there is a culture of revived interest Hitler is much more telling of Liberalism's supreme victory, even among the far right quasi-Hitlerites, true nazism is rare, usually they have some kind of quip as to why Hitler was really a smol bean liberal, I've called this "Smol Bean Extremism" or "Smol Bean Fascism" before but basically my point here is that it is virtually impossible to find actual people who vehmenently believe the actual historical nazis and their ideaology, if you look you find either edgelords who are usually underage children or third worlderers and various Anglosphere lumpenprole1, or you find people who say they are nazis openly but when you ask them what they practically mean as nazism they'll talk about how there's a conspiracy to hide the truth about Hitler and actually he was a socialist and a progressive2 and they'll paint you this picture of a smol bean, misunderstood Hitler, that was actually a Liberal but he wanted to free everyone from slavery. Fascism has been reduced to a kind of kitsch nostalgia3.

This latter form is actually really interesting, it's probably the dominant form of online neo nazism. These people use Hitler and nazism in an almost cargo cultist way4, the same way many MAGA people use Trump as a figure of rebellion, or how the old colonial Americans would idolize and invoke Tecumseh5, or how the even older Anglo-Saxons would invoke King Arthur, the Celtic King of Britannia6 which her people had violently deposed.

There is a fascinating and bizarre through line within all English history, we conquer someone and then, for whatever reason, a subculture develops within our culture and makes its way into our collective psyche where we begin to idolize the one that we have defeated. This is the noble savage myth7, yes, but the noble savage myth misses this constant cultural continuum within our culture going back millennium.

So what do I mean by "Liberalism has won"? My point being, if you take many of these smol bean neonazis at their word, and frankly it may sound insane but I think you should, they wouldn't even support and would very obviously fight against a Hitler figure if they really did manifest. You might not believe this but it is true, and you don't need to believe them specifically, but just look at the cyclical generational trend of English history. Most of these people, I would even argue the majority, are LARPing an aestheticized alienation. The liberal marketplace consumes everything, even the taboo. The spectacle devours its own opposition.8 Zizek speaks of this.

There is a pathological urge to humanize the vanquished and to feel guilt, the way that woke leftists act about how our ancestors treated the indigenous these people act about how we treated Germany and her people in the war. This reveals something fundamentally similar in their psychology here. This is the Anglo-Saxon moral grammar.

I had an old thread I wrote that's main thesis was "Everyone is a liberal and everyone wants to be a liberal9, fascists communists too!" and here I see it repeating. This is why I really am not worried about the future, I do not think there is any existential threat, the actual trend of our historical culture and society is the same as it has always been, progression with two steps forward one step back. Even reactionaries dream with Liberal syntax.

You must really understand our history to understand the future, and the history tells us that it is simply a season and a new season will come later, that the bitter cold of winter or the tempestuous heat of summer are only blips, only possible of savoring in their juxtaposition. Have fun, enjoy life, these are good times, so too are they interesting.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Lumpenproletariat was coined by Marx and Engels in the 1840s for the underclass lacking class consciousness: vagrants, petty criminals and the like. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Marx accused Louis Napoleon of mobilising it through the Society of 10 December, "the refuse of all classes." For Marx it was a tool of reaction, not revolution, which is the sense she gives it here. source ↩
  2. The claim has a seed of fact: the party's name was National Socialist, and some early members, like Gregor Strasser, wanted a socialist programme. But Strasser was killed in the purge of June 1934, and Germany's economy under Hitler went the other way: Germà Bel's study (Economic History Review, 2010) shows the Nazi state privatised firms in the 1930s, against the trend of every other Western capitalist country. Bel gives two motives: political support and rearmament finance. source ↩
  3. Susan Sontag's essay "Fascinating Fascism" (New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975) is the classic account of this turn. She warned that when fascism's message is neutralised by an aesthetic view of life, "its trappings have been sexualised." Her point is the same: the uniforms and symbols survive after the programme has gone. source ↩
  4. Cargo cults arose in Melanesia, notably after World War II, and imitated colonists' rituals in the hope of bringing "cargo" of goods. The John Frum movement on Tanna in Vanuatu, with its bamboo airstrips built for American planes, is the best-known case. The term itself was coined by outsiders, planters and administrators, and is now used for copying the form of a thing without its cause. source ↩
  5. Tecumseh (c. 1768–1813), the Shawnee leader who united tribes against the United States, was killed fighting at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, and later Americans honoured him: William Tecumseh Sherman was named for him. An earlier case of the same habit is the Boston Tea Party (16 December 1773), where Sons of Liberty dressed as Mohawks to say they were no longer English. Philip Deloria's Playing Indian (1998) argues that this wearing of the dispossessed's clothes declared a distinct American identity. See note 7. source ↩
  6. Arthur became an English possession through the Normans and Plantagenets, not the Saxons. Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136) made him a conqueror-king, and in 1278 Edward I opened what Glastonbury Abbey said was Arthur's tomb and reburied the bones. Edward is reported to have claimed to have "recovered Arthur's crown" after defeating the Welsh prince Llywelyn. source ↩
  7. The phrase "noble savage" comes from John Dryden's play The Conquest of Granada (1672); Rousseau, often credited with it, never used it. The idea is older. Montaigne's "Of Cannibals" (1580) praised the Brazilian Tupinambá, and Tacitus's Germania (AD 98) held up the unspoiled Germans as a rebuke to Rome. Her point, that the English do it again and again after each conquest, extends this tradition to Britain. source ↩
  8. Guy Debord called it recuperation in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): the spectacle takes up radical ideas and images, turns them into commodities, and puts them safely back into mainstream society. Herbert Marcuse described a similar mechanism in One-Dimensional Man (1964), "repressive desublimation," in which consumer gratification contains resistance. This is her "smol bean": the taboo bought, sold and made cute. source ↩
  9. Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) argued that America, with no feudal past, was born liberal and so produced no strong conservative or socialist movement. Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?" (The National Interest, 1989) made the same claim worldwide: that Western liberal democracy might be the final form of government. Her thread says it of the neo-Nazi too. source ↩