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What Puts Nazism on the Right?
This is a sincere question to which I’ve never had a satisfactory answer. I may have even asked it here before. We all know what Nazism is, but I think we need to define what we mean by “Right,” and specifically the American Right. I know some people prefer the quadrant model of political ideology to the linear one. Libertarian to authoritarian on one axis and communism to free markets on the other. But, where’s the overlap between Hitler’s Germany and American conservatism?
Do law-and-order righties fall on the far right of the axis in opposition to the chaos-and-destruction (2020 summer of love) lefties? I don’t think law and order is all that authoritarian, at least in America. If laws are just and equally applied (increasingly not the case), that would appear to be in a sweet spot near the political middle.
Economically, I don’t see American conservatives as radically free-market fundamentalists, although there are some who seem to hold that position. Personally, I’m more of a fair trade kind of gal. I see tariffs as useful to counteract those who would exploit our entrepreneurial capitalism by dumping their products and putting our industries out of business (cough China cough). But economic fascism seems more related to the hand-in-glove state and corporate cooperation the Left adores (see Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Education, . . . ).
So where’s the overlap with Nazism? Here’s what I think. I think the Left uses the Nazi/fascist slander to suggest that American nationalism (sometimes associated with patriotism or love of homeland) is just like the poisonous ethnic nationalism of Nazi Germany — Hitler’s Aryanism. It’s the basis for charges of “inherently racist” and “white supremacist.”
It’s an absurd notion. Is all nationalism Nazism? Are the French Nazis for loving their culture and language? How about the Swedes or the Spanish? It’s particularly slanderous given that America has never been ethnically pure and hasn’t even aspired to it, except in pockets where Democrats and the KKK (but, I repeat) held sway.
None of which is to say that patriots are required to believe America is faultless. I happen to believe there’s a fatal flaw in our Constitution — a sin of omission that allows the federal government to buy votes by redistributing our tax dollars. That’s a limit on government power (the raison d’etre of our Constitution) I’d like to see, but I’m not an idealist on the matter.
When American right-wingers assent to the idea that Nazis and fascists are on the Right, they’re submitting to the notion that American patriots are racist white supremacists. I dissent. And don’t even get me started on how any form of moral, academic, or artistic excellence is now considered “white supremacy.” As if nonwhites are incapable of high achievement. Who’s the racist now?
Published in General
The Jews were never really German, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they were never fully German. They are an alien ethnic and religious group, stateless for almost 2,000 years. Yes, they fought for Germany in WWI.
It is perfectly normal, and even rational, to distrust foreigners and outsiders. This is the way that cultures and civilizations preserve themselves.
It is very difficult for people of different cultures to live together in harmony. People don’t like it, and I think that this is quite proper, and should not be dismissed as some sort of bigotry. Why can’t a people with a common language, culture, and religion have their own place, and do their own thing? Why should they have to tolerate foreigners moving into their territory, bringing their alien languages and ways with them?
Assimilation seems possible, but it is often slow and difficult. The Jews, by the way, are remarkable for their ability to not assimilate. There are probably some other similar examples, perhaps the Chinese minorities in some of the Southeast Asian countries.
The assimilation of blacks in the US has not gone well. We seemed to be making good progress through the 1990s and maybe even the early 2000s, but since then, race relations have worsened significantly. This should not be surprising. Most, though not all, blacks seem to continue to have a strong sense of group identity, which creates a permanent us-vs-them mentality.
It seems to me that anti-Nazi propaganda has led to an unrealistic view of the world, a pollyanna-ish belief in a multicultural utopia. I think that it’s more realistic to allow each national group to have its own country, though this can be tricky for smaller and weaker groups, which can have problems with self-defense.
That would make a great debate topic. I’d pay real money to attend one.
What, precisely, was “poisonous” about German ethnic nationalism in the Nazi period?
I think that ethnic nationalism is a good thing. It’s normal and natural. Based on German accomplishment, it was understandable for them to believe that they were an exceptional people. They were, and are.
The Nazis killed large numbers of Jewish and Gypsy civilians. This was horrible, of course. The Nazis didn’t slaughter large numbers of other civilians in countries that they conquered, whether it be France or Norway or Poland. So the issue doesn’t seem to be a generally bad ethnic nationalism among the Germans, but rather a dislike of these two particular groups.
This should not be surprising. We were very harsh on the Indians, you know, though it did not reach the sort of systematic slaughter that the Nazis directed at the Jews and Gypsies. We drove the Indians out and restricted them to reservations. This is common in a clash of cultures.
TL/DR Jerry. Short answer: because when someone is standing in front of me, I don’t have an expectation about their intelligence, morals, or abilities based on their skin color. I may read other social cues, but skin color doesn’t tell me much. We are individuals made in the image and likeness of God. Right?
And your argument gives lefties the rationale to call conservatives racist, white supremacists. Obviously. 🙄
Winston Churchill knew a little bit about politics. I read somewhere when I was young that his assessment of the Nazis and Fascists was that some leaders realized that international socialism, or communism, didn’t have much appeal to those who had strong national and ethnic identities. The genius of those political leaders who created fascism was, in Churchill‘s words, to fuse nationalism with socialism. I believe he went on to say that it was the most evil ideology ever created.
6 million dead Jews? Go away, Jerry. This is not the thread you’re looking for.
I guess that I should try to answer the question in the OP.
I don’t think that the Nazis fit well on the Left. The Right-Left dichotomy is a simplification, and even the four-quadrant model is a simplification. These can be helpful, but reality is more complex.
I think that the analysis is complicated because many Americans believe (incorrectly in my view) that Libertarianism is on the political Right, and they also believe (incorrectly) that Libertarianism was the founding American political system. Libertarians are probably the most radical people on the Left, rejecting law, authority, and tradition in favor of everyone doing their own thing. Taken to its logical conclusion, Libertarianism leads to Anarchism.
The Communist and other Marxist folks want to overthrow the established order. In more recent decades, they are strongly libertarian in their views on social policy, but not on economic policy.
It seems to me that Nazism and Fascism, as recognized ideologies, emerged in opposition to Communism. These ideologies were generally populist — pretty conservative and traditionalist socially, while moderate on economic policy. It’s a popular position, even in the US. It’s the libertarians who hardly exist at all. Libertarian rhetoric, though, is quite attractive to many people, though it seems immature to me.
Libertarian rhetoric brands anyone that disagrees with it “authoritarian” or “totalitarian,” because it is fundamentally in opposition to all legitimate authority and governance. This rhetoric seems very influential, even among people who are generally pretty conservative or populist. It seems, to me, that many people don’t think this through very clearly, as they tend to think that government action that they like is perfectly acceptable, while any policy that they don’t like is a tyrannical imposition on their sacred Liberty.
@arizonapatriot Jerry, I agree with your analysis and your conclusion. Some, however, charge racism not only if actions follow but just to accept these facts as valid. I think, in some ways, affirmative action is a valid course, not to offset prior racial discrimination, but as an effort to give those operating with lower IQ the best opportunity for future success, but participation would be based on IQ not race.
It’s a matter of balance – if you’re going to make a political spectrum, and one side has clear examples of monstrous behavior, you have to give the other side a monster too.
It wouldn’t be fair to point out that all the murderous regimes since, say, 1800 are either leftists or none-of-the-above, or that slavery was a Democrat institution from the beginnings of the party.
So I guess somehow we’re ‘Nazis’ because someone has to be.
It was also used by the USSR to distinguish between their western allies and their Nazi enemies. Since the allies were evil capitalists the USSR needed a way to justify this alliance to the Soviet people, and the “fascist” bogeyman was their method.
And our American leaders of the Right now recognize our present government as fascist and make no effort to distinguish that from socialism or communism. Our government today is moving directionally to the Left while becoming more and more fascist.
Except the results of that are bound to reflect race, and therefore be classified as inherently racist and hence unacceptable, which must be “corrected” by government force.
I see a lot of common characteristics that seem to fall on the opposite sides of the line that divides us. Is there a way to divide our governing functions to accommodate that? It looks kind of like objectivists versus subjectivists, work with discovered facts or make some up.
You say that, and I agree, but the rest of your comment is more over-simplification, using labels you define yourself, with little evidence of the assertions.
You introduce the idea of libertarianism and immediately peg it onto this crude left/right paradigm which you have already dismissed as a simplification. So you are defining something that is nuanced by a less specific category rather than a more specific category.
Your opinion of where libertarians fall on the political spectrum is unfounded and misleading since indeed libertarians – if we must use the right/left model – are split between the two groups. There are the libertine left (want sex, drugs and indulgence) and the libertarian right, which values the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which is by any model libertarian.
We can define the founders as “conservatives”, and they were (like most) in those days, but they wanted a government that was free, and they placed safeguards to keep the state from interfering with individual freedom and liberty. That’s libertarianism in a nutshell.
Again an oversimplification with no evidence other than “it seems to me”. That fascists and communists didn’t like each other is more a war between siblings than opposites, and there’s no evidence that they emerged as an opposition. Populism isn’t itself an ideology, it’s more a political method that can be used by any ideology.
I don’t know what you mean by “moderate” in economic policy. Is that where fascism doesn’t sieze your property, like the commies do?
Hogwash.
Yes, liberty is sacred. I guess not to you. This is quite an unfair interpretation of people who just don’t agree with your sense of what the state should be able to control.
I stop reading when Jerry goes on his libertarianism to anarchy kick. It’s really too bad because he has some really good and valid views to contribute.
This is my view as well. Living in the United States is a voluntary act. It is also a cooperative act most often requiring compromise to different degrees in which those who choose to participate must compromise at differing levels because of the differing beliefs held. That’s not easy but anyone is free to leave. What is unfortunate in this modern time is leaving gets much more difficult because of ties, many financial, with the government, the breaking of which punishes the individual but never the government, not to mention the fact that there is nowhere else a proven sustainable free society, so where does one go who is done compromising.
Germany did not become a state until 1871, so 2000 years is a long time.
Back in 2008 there was a political test on the Internet. It showed the standard quadrant and people were invited to take the test to see where they fell. I knew exactly where I would fall and that was in the quadrant that said small government conservative with libertarian tendencies. Now the funny thing was that all of those people I knew who consider themselves libertarian took the test, and fell exactly where I knew they would: In the quadrant that basically said “nanny state liberal”.
Their idea of a libertarian was that they could do whatever they wanted, and the government would cover for their mistakes. I would hate to be one of the original libertarians and see how the ideas and values they supported have been degraded.
The Germans killed a lot of civilians in Poland and, especially, in Russia. For example, Hitler ordered that Leningrad be surrounded and not permitted to surrender, and the civilian population eliminated via starvation and disease. His general plan for western Russia was to denude it of Russians so Germans could move in. They needed lebensraum, you see. And the Russians were untermensch who had no right to life.
The Nazi and fascist labels don’t apply to many on the American Right. (They do apply to a few. One of my college roommates was a George Wallace supporter who, over the course of two years, slid way-y-y over to George Lincoln Rockwell.)
That doesn’t mean that those labels made no sense in Europe, the home of throne-and-altar, blood and soil conservatism.
Did they imprison and kill capitalists? Then they were Communists.
Did they maintain a stock market and banking system to the very last day of WWII? Nazi.
Did they kill every priest they could lay their hands on? Communist.
Did they do a big propaganda thing about being the saviors of Christianity? Nazi.
Yeah, there’s a big difference. Just ask the German conservatives, who threw in their lot with Hitler because he supposedly knew the right medicine to get rid of trade unions and Red rioters.
The church of my grandparents’ generation urged prayer on behalf of Franco’s forces in Spain to defeat the Left. They clearly knew which side Franco was on–the Right.
In 1930s Germany conservatives played almost no role in the developing political picture, except to be crushed under the heel of the Nazis. They were monarchists and aristocrats, and Hitler kept some of them around because he needed them for the military. Otherwise, they lost their property and their titles and became non-entities. A number of them were hanged along with other opponents of the Nazis in a building on Stauffenbergstrasse in Berlin. There’s a memorial to them there.
The Nazis had a typical leftist social political agenda including cradle to grave welfare (for ethnic Germans), central control of the economy and education, control of labor unions, and so on. Their principal program was inspired by socialism, and it showed it.
A lot of people don’t even know that there was such a thing as the German monarchy or that they had a peerage at that time.
I really don’t know that conservative and liberal really apply in quite the same way in the founding era. I know that right and left don’t apply since those turns come out of the French revolution which is still a ways off from the American founders. The founders were let’s not forget revolutionaries, so they really weren’t for “conserving” the status quo. Except perhaps to conserve what they considered the traditional rights of Englishmen. They really were though doing something quite radical at the time. They certainly don’t fit the old conception of European conservatism, i.e. Throne and Altar, since in many ways they reject both, but they certainly aren’t the year 0 tear it all down and start over group that becomes the European left, which eventually spawns facism, nazism, and communism. I think the distinctions of the founding period are quite a bit different and alien to us today.
The current day brownshirts are anti-fascist because they identify as anti-fascist.
It’s only fascist when we do it.
A video from Claire Lehmann: Nationalism is the antidote to racism.
Kudos!
You recognize that the OP’s question is one of etymology–a branch of history–not philosophy. The other 55 Commenters didn’t.
Nazism and Communism were never polar opposites. They were competing strains of the same cancer.
I think a better understanding of the spectrum is statist vs non-statist. The Nazis, Soviets, the CCP are high on the statist level. Pols like Coolidge, Rand Paul, and Goldwater are on the non-statist end.
Universal Basic Income is a linchpin to these goals.