I feel like its hard to know what “Selfemployed” means in the historical context. Is this like small shop keepers etc?
edit: Thanks for pointing out there are multiple slides, completely missed them
The petit bourgeoisie are the same in every epoch. The most rabidly conservative. Same thing happened with Trump in the USA. His strongest supporters are small business owners. Think general contractors, restaurant owners, shopkeepers and the like. Exactly the same as here. EDIT: some context for people who are unfamiliar with the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
TIL. It’s fascinating how, in today’s world, our white collar workers are a foot soldiers of left leaning progressivism
If only a third of Catholics and 4/10ths of protestants voted for the Nazis, who the heck elected them?
I’m going to take a wild guess and say not the Jewish population.
Oh I’m dumb, it’s probably because they didn’t have a two-party system, so you only needed a small portion of the votes and maybe a Reichstag in flames
Guys – **THIS DATA IS NOT REAL**
It is an estimate based on an indirect source of a 2008 study that does not have its methodology openly stated here.
The first thing you want to be doing when you see crap like this is ask what value does this hold if the data is suspect and almost always, the answer is “It is worthless”
Interestingly, the unemployed people voted less than the working people.
The Nazi party got just shy of 44% of all the votes cast, so the figures on the graph do not represent an outright majority.
There is a lot of historical precedent for the tyranny of the petit bourgeois, as some have called it.
Often during unstable times they will side with fascists as they are most scared of protecting what little capital they have, often they are the most reactionary because of this
The category of self-employed, also known as the “petite bourgeoisie,” has historically aligned itself with the ruling class, even though their material position is far closer to that of the working class. They aspire upward, seeing themselves as “temporarily embarrassed bourgeois” rather than as part of the exploited majority. This aspiration leads them to defend the very system that keeps them precarious, often clinging to conservative politics and private property rights as if they were already big capitalists.
In Marxist terms, this is their contradictory position: socially and economically, they share much with workers, but ideologically, they are drawn to the ruling class because of the hope (however misguided) of becoming them. We saw this in Nazi Germany, we’ve seen it dozens of times since, and we’re seeing it here right now. Yet, many can’t or won’t connect the dots.
In 1932, Germany was suffering worse than the rest of the world from the worst economic meltdowns in modern history, and 33% of Germans voted for Fascism. Germany, and the rest of the world would suffer, but at least there was some excuse for the desperation of German voters.
In 2024, the USA was recovering better than the rest of the world from the pandemic, and 49% of Americans voted for Fascism. The USA and rest of the world will suffer, and American voters have no excuses.
So…Evangelical Small Business owners were the most enthusiastic Nazis…that tracks.
If I remember correctly from reading the paper and some other related ones, occupational support varies between Protestants and Catholics as well as across the rural/urban divide. NSDAP (Nazis) did very well with farmers in rural spaces that were scared of communists in the city… sound familiar?
The German petite bourgeoisie voted for a right-wing authoritarian in 1933, fearing they would lose their position to Bolsheviks and trade unionists.
The American worker voted for a right-wing authoritarian in 2024, fearing they would lose their position to foreign industry and immigrant labor
It’s always the small business tyrants
Voting is secret, how is this known?
He was unpopular with Catholics and never consolidated political power in Bavaria like he did elsewhere.
Yet every week on Reddit there is a front page thread blaming Catholics for Hitlers rise.
Okay, my great grandfather was a Protestant WWI veteran who was from Stuttgart and worked in a machine shop when he came to the US. He became a US citizen I think in 1931. Can these graphs tell me how he would have voted I wonder? Do I want to know?
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Data Source Link: [https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/OMYW0P](https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/OMYW0P)
Tools: SQL, Python (pandas, matplotlib, pyplot)
I feel like its hard to know what “Selfemployed” means in the historical context. Is this like small shop keepers etc?
edit: Thanks for pointing out there are multiple slides, completely missed them
The petit bourgeoisie are the same in every epoch. The most rabidly conservative. Same thing happened with Trump in the USA. His strongest supporters are small business owners. Think general contractors, restaurant owners, shopkeepers and the like. Exactly the same as here. EDIT: some context for people who are unfamiliar with the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
TIL. It’s fascinating how, in today’s world, our white collar workers are a foot soldiers of left leaning progressivism
If only a third of Catholics and 4/10ths of protestants voted for the Nazis, who the heck elected them?
I’m going to take a wild guess and say not the Jewish population.
Oh I’m dumb, it’s probably because they didn’t have a two-party system, so you only needed a small portion of the votes and maybe a Reichstag in flames
Guys – **THIS DATA IS NOT REAL**
It is an estimate based on an indirect source of a 2008 study that does not have its methodology openly stated here.
The first thing you want to be doing when you see crap like this is ask what value does this hold if the data is suspect and almost always, the answer is “It is worthless”
Interestingly, the unemployed people voted less than the working people.
The Nazi party got just shy of 44% of all the votes cast, so the figures on the graph do not represent an outright majority.
Original paper:
https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/ordinary-economic-voting-behavior-extraordinary-election-adolf-hitler
There is a lot of historical precedent for the tyranny of the petit bourgeois, as some have called it.
Often during unstable times they will side with fascists as they are most scared of protecting what little capital they have, often they are the most reactionary because of this
The category of self-employed, also known as the “petite bourgeoisie,” has historically aligned itself with the ruling class, even though their material position is far closer to that of the working class. They aspire upward, seeing themselves as “temporarily embarrassed bourgeois” rather than as part of the exploited majority. This aspiration leads them to defend the very system that keeps them precarious, often clinging to conservative politics and private property rights as if they were already big capitalists.
In Marxist terms, this is their contradictory position: socially and economically, they share much with workers, but ideologically, they are drawn to the ruling class because of the hope (however misguided) of becoming them. We saw this in Nazi Germany, we’ve seen it dozens of times since, and we’re seeing it here right now. Yet, many can’t or won’t connect the dots.
In 1932, Germany was suffering worse than the rest of the world from the worst economic meltdowns in modern history, and 33% of Germans voted for Fascism. Germany, and the rest of the world would suffer, but at least there was some excuse for the desperation of German voters.
In 2024, the USA was recovering better than the rest of the world from the pandemic, and 49% of Americans voted for Fascism. The USA and rest of the world will suffer, and American voters have no excuses.
So…Evangelical Small Business owners were the most enthusiastic Nazis…that tracks.
If I remember correctly from reading the paper and some other related ones, occupational support varies between Protestants and Catholics as well as across the rural/urban divide. NSDAP (Nazis) did very well with farmers in rural spaces that were scared of communists in the city… sound familiar?
The German petite bourgeoisie voted for a right-wing authoritarian in 1933, fearing they would lose their position to Bolsheviks and trade unionists.
The American worker voted for a right-wing authoritarian in 2024, fearing they would lose their position to foreign industry and immigrant labor
It’s always the small business tyrants
Voting is secret, how is this known?
He was unpopular with Catholics and never consolidated political power in Bavaria like he did elsewhere.
Yet every week on Reddit there is a front page thread blaming Catholics for Hitlers rise.
Okay, my great grandfather was a Protestant WWI veteran who was from Stuttgart and worked in a machine shop when he came to the US. He became a US citizen I think in 1931. Can these graphs tell me how he would have voted I wonder? Do I want to know?
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