Hitler blamed Germany's parliamentary government for many of the nation's ills. The Nazis and especially Hitler associated democracy with the failed Weimar government and the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Hitler often denounced democracy, equating it with internationalism. Since democratic ideals espoused equality for all men, it represented to Hitler and his Nazi ideologues the notion of mob rule and the hatred of excellence. Not only was democracy antithetical to their social-Darwinist abstractions, but its international-capitalist framework was considered an exclusively Jewish-derived conception. Hitler also thought democracy was nothing more than a preliminary stage of Bolshevism.