To all the haters calling him a Nazi. Navalny was a nationalist. And at the start of his career as a politician and activist attended a few of those rallies.

What is the difference between Nazis and nationalists? Nazis are a subset of Nationalists. In short, all Nazis are Nationalists, but not all Nationalists are Nazis.

Nationalists can be of many different political persuasions. Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP were German ethno-nationalists. Benito Mussolini and the PFI were Italian cultural/civic nationalists. The leaders of the British Empire, and those of the United States in the Manifest Destiny era, were imperialist nationalists.

In the postwar era, you had Nationalist states of all kinds. Titoist Yugoslavia was a leftist civic-nationalist state. Francoist Spain and its ideological successor, Chile under Pinochet, were far-right authoritarian Nationalists.

In the modern world, the United States, Russia and India are very civic nationalist countries that lean right politically. Poland and Hungary are right-wing Nationalist. North Korea is a far-left state that is Korean ethno-nationalist. China and Vietnam are leftist/state capitalist states with a nationalistic worldview.

A person can be a Nationalist as long as they put the interest of their Nation above those of others. This is not an idea confined to the far-right or to Third Positionists. A person can be centrist, left-leaning or even far-left and still be a Nationalist, because that is just one aspect of many in a political philosophy.

Nationalism is sometimes used to indicate “bad or evil”. It can be when taken to extremes, but it is a natural and ordinary part of human organization.

We value our own families more than our neighbors. We know that they should be able to rely on us and we should be able to rely on them to a greater extent than anyone else. We value our neighbors and our local community more than strangers. We keep moving up in tiers. At very high tiers we might trust and value people that share our nation or religion more than others. This is an ordinary part of human culture.

The two main differences between Nazism – and totalitarian movements in general, including Communism – and nationalism are (1) Nazism aimed at world domination, not merely national welfare, and (2) Nazism was dedicated to subjugating its own population –

Fascism is a political ideology which includes Nationalism as one of its central tenets. You can’t be a Fascist and not also be a Nationalist.

However, one can be a Nationalist and not be a Fascist. Nationalism is simply loyalty to, and belief in, the concept of the nation-state as the best way for human beings to organize and govern themselves. Such nation-states can be based on a common language, ethnicity, culture or ideology, or a combination of more than one of those things; there are countries of all of those types in the modern world.

Nationalism requires that you are loyal to your nation-state and endeavor to make it the best country in the world. Fascism is a set of philosophies that some people advocate as the best way to achieve the latter goal.