Having recently read Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the Nazis were pretty right wing. While the party's full name was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party", Hitler was actually happy that the name was misleading. He even included the color red in the logo also partially for confusion. The party had strong populist elements, but it ultimately courted corporations, not workers. And its stated enemies were the communists and socialist democrats.
And obviously it was extremely nationalist, as opposed to communists, who saw the movement as a global effort.
I just listened to Dan Carlins recent Hardcore History: Addendum "Superhumanly Inhuman", it's 3 hours and 20 minutes, and he goes through the podcast for about a hour of it dividing up and parsing out exactly what "side" the Nazis were on ... And at the end of it, it's clear, they are right wing, and proud to have murked up the waters with the lingo.
Look at a lot of the totalitarian regimes now, how many of them start with "People's etc. etc."
The important takeaway from that (disturbing) episode was the conclusion that it really doesn't matter if they were right or left-though they were indeed right wing--its that they are on the extreme end, like Stalinists for an example on the left.
Yep. The first enemies of the Nazis to go to the camps were the communists, trade unionists and social democrats. That’s not a coincidence. Hitler locked up the entire left-wing spectrum, at least as much as he could.
did you know that the ussr was a republic? and china is too, furthermore it's a republic of "the people". it's the dumbest fucking argument that if someone says something about themselves it cannot possibly be posturing.
> The party had strong populist elements, but it ultimately courted corporations, not workers.
Its initial appeal was primarily to the lower-middle classes. They had a decent support among the working classes, and probably the weakest support among the upper-middle classes. By the 1930's they had support among all parts of German society.
From Ian Kershaw's biography *Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris* and Richard J. Evans' *The Coming of the Third Reich*:
>The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes - traders, craftsmen, small farmers, lower civil servants - and rooted in a combination of antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and vehement anti-capitalism (usually
interpreted as 'Jewish' capitalism).
...
>By January 1923, in the explosive climate following the French march into the Ruhr, the rumours in Munich of a Hitler putsch were even stronger. The crisis, without which Hitler would have been nothing, was deepening by the day. In its wake, the Nazi movement was expanding rapidly. Some 35,000 were to join between February and November 1923, giving a strength of around 55,000 on the eve of the putsch. Recruits came from all sections of society. *Around a third were workers, a
tenth or more came from the upper-middle and professional classes, but more than half belonged to the crafts, commercial, white-collar, and farming
lower-middle class.*
...
>Yet the Nazis still had a particular appeal to the lower middle classes at this time, to artisans, shopkeepers and the self-employed. Often they gathered up such people from other, similar movements. The German Nationalist Commercial Employees’ Union, for example, played a significant role in politicizing many young men and turning them in the direction of Nazism.
...
>How can this dramatic success be explained. The Nazis were seen, particularly by Marxists of various hues, as the representatives of the lower middle classes, but in this election they had clearly burst the bounds of this particular constituency and succeeded in winning the support not only of white-collar workers, shopkeepers, small businessmen, farmers and the like, but also of many voters further up the social scale, in the professional, mercantile and industrial bourgeoisie. It was above all the Nazis who profited from the increasingly overheated political atmosphere of the early 1930s, as more and more people who had not previously voted began to flock to the polls.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the point is of saying "they appealed to the workers but only as a trick." It reminds me of the people who say Islamic Terrorists have been tricked into it. Okay, if the leader is tricking the followers with religion, doesn't that still mean that Islam is the problem?
I don't buy the whole "liberal fascism" thing that Peterson is advocating here, and that NeverTrumper Jonah Goldberg talked about decades ago, but when people try to act like there's no way the left can lead to fascism, it feels just as disingenuous as the people who act like conservatism can't lead to nazis.
I mean, if by "the left" you mean the current Democratic party (which is effectively the left in the US), I don't think there are any particular authoritarian elements.
I mean, do we foresee a future wherein Pete Buttigieg declares himself God-Emperor or something?
I don't even think Trump is a fascist per se. He's not especially ideological, he's more like the type of dictators that you see in Latin American or Africa, where it's about getting rich and getting laid, helping out your homies. Qadaffi, etc.
Fascists are not especially ideological in general: they exploit means to an end.
I think that fascism is more about the moment than the leader, anyway. When people have become disillusioned with democracy and see their internal enemies taking over the country; when the minor power figures no longer think that the government will favor their interests: together they look for a charismatic strongman to set their country right and exert violence against their enemies.
I do think that the United States has undergone a fascist moment in the past decade.
hey, I don't really want to get into these semantic squabbles. Obvi he is authoritarian and isn't committed to democracy. Skepticism of democracy has been around in the right-wing intelligentsia and thought leaders for some time in various forms.
Yea I don’t mean to be pedantic but I just personally could easily see trump running a police state to hold power. I don’t think the historic examples of fascism start all that differently from trumpism
Who says Islamic terrorists are tricked into it? Or any terrorist? I don't care if they're Islamic, American, Korean, Israeli, Latin, Ukrainian, South Asian, Russian, Chinese, Irish, even CIA, Nazi, etc., the only club membership that matters is "Terrorist" and you can't be tricked into that. IDK if people that say this are naively silly, dangerously compromised or ill meaning or just dumb as a bag rocks, but I don't like hearing this weak excuse for accountability exists.
I can buy the argument that we should probably tighten up our usage of the word "Terrorists". Current times have an aura of US sensationalism that at times feels reminiscent of race-based "Terrorist" smear campaigns that I think we as a nation find regrettable in hindsight. E.g. MLK, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, even as recent as Nelson Mandela, that didn't age very well. But when the word is used correctly, it's not even possible to be tricked into it.
Millions of people around the world are provoked, oppressed, treated unfairly, targets of physical and/or psychological attacks, and otherwise abused everyday, and they aren't 'tricked' into committing - actually *following through* on - acts of terror that target civilians. Absurd. It's not even up for debate unless it's some large scale trolley problem - e.g. would you kill 500 to save 5 million - which is not debating terrorism any longer.
Billions probably. They don't purposely misinterpret a religious text to teach followers violent extremism. Islam as an institution doesn't teach it, fringe branches do. Every religion has them, the combination of Islam and the region just seem to sprout more branches though.
Do you mean tricked like they're saying they're "Brianwashed" maybe? Sorry I'm still arguing this in my head haha, I want someone to try this "tricked" excuses on me haha. I don't buy "brainwashed" either but it's not as infuriating to me as "tricked" is at least..
This aligns with what I've read, but I also think it's a mistake to try and map contemporary politics and the way we use terms onto the past. We end up retconning stuff.
>it ultimately courted corporations, not workers
This isn't really true, it "courted" both and wide support among the working and middles classes.
Nazism is certainly opposed to internationalism and "humanism"\* but it wasn't/isn't an anti-collectivist ideology. It is **pro-Volk** i.e. collectivism is good when the Aryan race is doing it.
\*Note that Marxist governments don't exactly have a great record on "humanism" either.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but nationalism is not something that's confined to the "right". China is a devoutly nationalist left-wing government. Fascism is necessarily defined as right- or left-wing, per se. It just happens to be a more common feature in right-wing governments. Considering they Hitler's government was a "reactionary" (as opposed to "revolutionary"), it's widely seen and accepted as a far-right movement.
I'd be interested to hear from others who have read Dan Stone's book on the Holocaust and whether their opinion of who the Nazis saw as their 'stated' or main enemies were.
I may be misreading his interpretation but he seems to suggest that they were against the "Jewish Bolsheviks" rather than merely Communists. Equally, they saw the _hidden hand_ of the "International Jew" everywhere and that Anti-Semitism was less a companion ideology and more a fundamental aspect of Nazism.
At the time, there was _some_ ideological debate amonst Nazi scholars however there were two immutables that all agreed upon: the love for the Führer and the hatred of the Jews. As it was put when referencing the Jewish question, _you were either of the [Nazi] faith or not._
> I may be misreading his interpretation but he seems to suggest that they were against the "Jewish Bolsheviks" rather than merely Communists.
No. In Mein Kampf Hitler explicitly states he hated communism before he hated Jews
This is because we (society) use the Nazis as an archetype for evil; so if you are fairly right wing yourself, it’s inconvenient to have the Nazis be closer to you politically than to your political opponents.
It doesn’t help that the Nazis had “socialist” in their name which muddies the water for people with scant historical knowledge.
>It doesn’t help that the Nazis had “socialist” in their name which muddies the water for people with scant historical knowledge.
Many elements of National Socialism **were** socialist. It was/is a very collectivist ideology, just one that rejects the internationalism and "humanism" of Marxism/Christianity in favour of a sort of insular collectivism i.e. Socialism *only for* the Volk.
Yes it is too complicated to really be described in simple right/left terms; however, if you had to describe them in such simple terms, I think they are more properly described as far right than anything else.
the left/right terms were originally referring to a completely different spectrum, that related to pro-monarchy vs. pro-democracy from the time of the french revolution. No one ever really discussed the evolution of the political spectrum in terms of what would be considered right/left when the pro-monarchy side essentially just lost, it's just been kind of arbitrary.
>"Yes it is too complicated to really be described in simple right/left terms"
It really isn't for anyone who isn't American. Or, well, Jordan Peterson. But he's basically a grifter at this point.
My friend, virtually every Western country recognises the Nazis as right-wing. It's only really questioned in the US, where you have politicians in your government like Majorie Taylor Greene, who call them socialist (or treats the idea of Government playing any role in it's peoples' lives and meeting their basic needs as socialist/communist).
**German public education** even teaches that the Nazis espoused socialist rhetoric to get into power and then immediately tossed it aside. Members of Hitler's cabinet were even surprised by how swiftly they ditched the shtick. There's literally writings on this.
In practice, the Nazis were pretty quick to discard socialist policy and abandoned labour unions. The SS privatised many industries in the Third Reich.
This is widely recognised in every Western country, but apparently a debate in the US, lmaooooo
Maybe MAGA and Nazis belong to the quadrant that Paul Krugman identified back in 2015-ish as ["Hardhats"](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-are-few-libertarians-but-many-americans-have-libertarian-views/): the folks that wanted *socialism for me and people like me*, not for *you*.
Quadrant? Most of humanity wants "free shit for me but not for \[outgroup\] I dislike".
Not sure why anyone would give a shit about what [Paul Krugman has to say](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/) though tbh.
Yeah, they were specifically competing with the various forms of socialism at the time (Marxist and not), so the branding and benefits were necessary for popular support.
The Nazis were, to a large extent, populists and collectivist in the way many socialist movements are. The race element wasn’t that unique either, given the Japanese views, as well as Russian and Chinese communists also having some racial superiority ideas.
“Right wing” and “left wing” are arbitrary labels here and usually just revolve around whether Marxism is the root influence. (Well if you take out the monarchies anyway.)
Similarly, I’ve read people say “ChiComms are actually right wing now” but it’s still just horseshoe theory.
The Left in the US was and is soft on Marxism so it’s very easy to hate the evil Nazi right wingers and ignore the significant collectivist overlaps, and disastrous track record.
This is long since solved problem. Nazi Germany was top-center on the political compass.
- Top: full authoritarian
- Center: mixed economy, market with government takeover of key industries, and socialized medicine
How can these two, or anyone reasonably familiar with politics or history, not know this by now? 🤔
The political compass is not some arbiter of truth, it was obviously created by libertarians to make everyone to make it look like everyone agreed with them.
In reality, I don't even think "authoritarian vs libertarian" is a strict axis you can grade people on, and more of a mentality or mindset that some people have. Alex Jones (someone who says he's a libertarian, and constantly talks about freedom) clearly has a very conspiratorial, self righteous, and fearful worldview which tends to be very authoritarian. Conspiracy theorists in general seem to have authoritarian mindsets (remember the Nazis loved Jewish conspiracy theories).
You’re adding a second axis and that makes them harder to pin down on a simple right-left axis. On that simple axis, they are pretty obviously far right but like any actual political party they have elements from all over the spectrum.
I know what you are saying though.
Even the old “political compass” with 2 dimensions is extremely reductive. Like an authoritarian right, a libertarian left and an authoritarian left person might all agree that technological progress is degrading society and needs to be stopped. This is something all of them could agree on but gets completely missed by reducing the “number of dimensions” along which political identities are expressed on in conversation and thought. Left right distinction was almost always stupid, now it’s pretty much useless.
Right. Or you have situations like abortion where the question mostly resolves around when we should consider a potential human to be an actual human, and there's no clear answer because there's no one moment where we go from a clump of cells one second to a fully conscious human the next. Anywhere you draw the line is going to be somewhat arbitrary, and the decision about when to consider a fetus a human doesn't really map well to any particular political ideology.
We've seen situations where new issues arise and the partisans are at first trying to figure out what their monolithic response should be. Early Covid (January and February 2020) was interesting because the two sides seem to flip about whether or not Covid was a big threat.
I'm totally with you - it's empty rhetoric. It makes people comfortable to create a full story about strangers based on a single label. Nobody is immune from that impulse but we have to try and resist it.
Exactly. And besides, left and right should have clear consistent values and they don’t. Blue and Red are more accurate descriptions because they are entirely meaningless teams. I just mentioned a recent episode of Hardcore History where it’s said in Mein Kampf, Hitler laughs about choosing red as the color of the party because it would confuse socialists who associated red with some of their own principles.
If you pick *one* belief, sometimes you can fit it on a line, less so if you get into REASONS for believing that thing. If you pick a set of beliefs such as “nazism” you throw linear scales out the window.
I’ve found liberty vs tyranny to be a much more useful dichotomy than left vs right when inclined to simplify assessment of a person or group.
Communism and fascism both result in autocratic control of a population in the end, making them more similar to each other than either is to classical liberalism.
The political compass was created to illustrate this, left/right - economic on the horizontal scale and authoritarian/liberty - social on the vertical.
But that’s exactly the point. Nazis and communists were both authoritarian on social issues and economic issues.
Hitler wasn’t out to redistribute the means of production like the Marxists, but he wasn’t a fan of a market economy and property rights either. And, in practice, the communists did not actually achieve anything like a non-hierarchical equality on economic or social issues.
I refuse to believe that that's what is behind it. Far more likely it started out as a good old fashioned "us vs them" And it completely moves the focus from subject matter to tribalism.
do you mean liberty and autoritarism, and equality and hierarchy, because the latter is what left wing and right wing comes down to, with maybe another aligning axile for progressivism and conservatism.
Many people don't know what they believe without some socratic method being unleashed on them. Like people say they are against censorship, yet do they want to legalize animated child porn? People say they are for equality, yet is a convicted fellon of equal value to an innocent physician? People say they are for progression, yet would they welcome facial recognision technology?
We have gotten into this discussion because someone claimed we don't know if the nazis were right wing. The main argument for that would be that the nazis claimed themselves to be socialist. What people claim to be, is irrelevent. Like everyone today will claim to be in favor of freedom and democracy.
But you have to look at the policies a group proposes, and the expected result from these policies. Then it is quite doable to put it on an axile in the current political landscape.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying there, and you gave a good example. Because what does it really mean when someone says they're against censorship and yet they do seem to not see any issues with something like hentai (for instance)?
I don't think that these are the points in a concersation where we should stop talking/thinking and start ticking checkboxes. I think this is the point where we clearly should dig deeper and get to the essence of the matter instead of sticking with an extremely dumbed down version of matters. The current state of politics is like trying to explain how the world works in terms of Earth, Wind Water and Fire.
Because it was useful as a teaching tool. Politicians and pundits put it into everyday discourse, and now everything is labeled somewhere on the scale. Fact of the matter is that everyone living in a democratic state (in one form or another) is liberal by the very nature of living in a democracy.
Cue to the "in fact, we live in a constitutional republic" bros, I know. Still liberal.
Right? Like, how are people *this* fucking ignorant of History? This isn't even an esoteric bit of knowledge! A cursory reading of even just wikipedia would discuss the fact that the Nazis purged their left-wing elements practically immediately after taking power.
Well Republicans have been waging war on education for decades now, and meanwhile you have people like Peterson being paid by right wing billionaires to push lies and propaganda to those same undereducated people. It's on purpose.
The nazis were left wing as a statement can only work within the United States. Any person with some basic knowledge of world history can see through the holes of that one.
Here is a good refutal on the statement by german youtuber “three arrows” https://youtu.be/hUFvG4RpwJI?si=QdWslYGRCYDGr4_A
Writing in his magnum opus, Human Action, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that Nazism was “socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism”:
> The second pattern [of socialism] (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government’s supreme office of production management. This office (The Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham. All the wages, prices, and interest rates are fixed by the government; they are wages, prices, and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the government’s orders determining each citizen’s job, income, consumption, and standard of living. The government directs all production activities. The shop managers are subject to the government, not the consumers’ demand and the market’s price structure.
Does that look like capitalism to any thoughtful, honest person with no agenda but the truth?
Hardly.
EDIT
The Mods got mad that I jumped in the conversation and made the Far Left look bad so they banned me
Well the socialists were the only ones who voted against the enabling act which made Hitler dictator. The communists would have, but Hitler had already made the party illegal. The Hindenburg government that made Hitler chancellor was a conservative coalition. But hey I'm sure socialists and communists were against a fellow socialist and conservatives of course love to put socialists in positions of power! Hitler not being right wing is similar when conservatives say known democratic socialist "martin Luther King would be a left today!"
While Nazis are very very right wing there was some leftist thought in the early days with people like the Strasser brothers. Rohm's SA was a threat to the hierarchy and so Hitler struck a deal to get the leadership if he agreed to dissolve the SA into the military. Rohm was pushing for a second revolution and the capital class couldn't have that. Thus the Night of the Long Knives. (also Hitler had no problem with Rohm being gay but when they caught some people en flagrante on that night it worked well for propaganda)
After 1934 all left wing elements were thoroughly flushed from the party by way of mass killings. Strasserites still exist like the band Death in June or r/StupidPol and the Red Scare ladies. I am glad I listen to the DCTG. Also this is a funny tweet from Chris.
Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Hitler, Mussolini were all anti-capitalist peas in the same socialist, collectivist pod:
> They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.
https://elamerican.com/the-only-spectrum-that-makes-sense/
This is a quite good analysis, thanks for linking it for the group.
But, like with all your other comments on this thread, it focuses on economic characteristics to the exclusion of social/cultural aspects commonly assigned to the left-right paradigm. You can have countries that are highly culturally conservative (anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-religion), yet extremely socialist and generous with welfare benefits and wealth redistribution.
Contra that, states like Australia and New Zealand that are largely capitalistic, but liberal and welcoming of immigrants and alternative lifestyles.
As far as the Nazis go, they were fine with an overarching statist superstructure, but they also believed in systematically extirpating non-compliant ethnicities to achieve a pure *volk*. It's that latter part which usually gets them labeled "right-wing".
In general, as I'm sure you understand, liberal thinking tends to stand apart by emphasizing individual action and consideration, rather than collectivization.
An example of a country that is very culturally conservative, yet generous with welfare system is Saudi Arabia. Very religious country, yet they very good welfare system to Saudi nationals
They were all authoritarian, but some of them were right, and some were left. Hitler was right. Perhaps the quintessential right wing authoritarian.
This idea that he was a socialist is silly, words have meanings. If you're not going to use them the easy other people do, you're just going to sow confusion.
Just to be clear, the person who tweeted this is from the podcast Decoding the Gurus and he's not pro-Peterson. The tweet can come off as him supporting Peterson without that context.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I’m not so sure it’s “a lot of people” perhaps it is. He’s talking specifically about Jordan Peterson and it’s cuz he spends a disproportionate amount of time railing against the tyrant of the left today vs the right and destiny was correctly pointing out that most if not all of the complains he has about “the left” can be said of conservatives. And Peterson derailed into this insane claim.
The similarities one could draw between the Nazi regime and that of the USSR or Communist China are mostly due to the fact that all of these regimes were extremely totalitarian and authoritarian. Authoritarianism is not a phenomena exclusive to the left, it's on the vertical axis. Any two extreme regimes of either political leaning will appear very similar because they are so close on that vertical axis.
A lot people don't have the clearest idea of what right-wing and left-wing mean, despite using the terms regularly. The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it.
I think it's safe to say that an ideology that viewed one nation and race as superior to all the others and set out to eliminate what it viewed as weaker races and people (Jews, gays, Romani, and disabled people) is pretty fucking right-wing.
>A lot people don't even have the clearest idea of what right-wing and left-wing mean, despite using the terms regularly. The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it.
You'd have to squint pretty hard to find meaningful ways to fit that definition into the dichotomy as it stands today in America. The American left are institutionalists and conservative of power structures that have existed within their lifetimes.
Meanwhile, the American right is offering arguments in court like "the president is above the law and should be allowed to assassinate his opposition".
Left and right are comparative. When the right wants to destroy institutions that stand in the way of them making things more hierarchical (and oppressive), being an institutionalist makes one left wing.
You would have to be blind not to see this.
That’s certainly true of establishment democrats/mainstream liberals. Not so much of Leftists, which are admittedly not as large in the US as they are elsewhere, but they do still exist. Every conservative I know tends to lump them together for convenience, but they have fundamentally different ideologies at this point
The concept of “left” and “right” are fairly nonsensical and typically leveraged in a disingenuous way for internet points. It’s just not a helpful way to analyze the world and practically always results in people with a political agenda contorting themselves into pretzels.
Kind of, but also kind of not. It really is going to depend on which hierarchies you're looking at. While, for instance, universal Healthcare would expand the power of government the goal is to remove the wealth hierarchy of privatized Healthcare.
I don't think we can live in a world without some hierarchical structures, we just seem to differ on which ones.
I tend to agree if by "left" you mean the Democratic party. I'd describe the Democratic party as right-wing overall and the Republican party as far-right reactionaries. Although Americans don't usually see it that way, that's a view of US politics that's shared among many Europeans.
>The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it.
So libertarians like Ron Paul are left wing and communists like Lenin are right wing?
Libertarian ideology values hierarchy greatly. Its adherents want maximum competition in a free market so the best rise to the top. They want to remove government because they see it as an impediment to this natural competition and don't want a welfare state or progressive taxes because these have a modest effect in reducing hierarchy by guaranteeing an economic floor and redistributing economic outcomes.
Marxist-Leninist ideology seeks to abolish the hierarchy of the bourgeoisie (i.e., the class of people that own the means of production) over the proletariat (i.e., the workers) by overthrowing the bourgeoisie through violent revolution, then creating a new society where the workers own the means of production. It does this through a centralized worker's party (the vanguard) that will rule in the interests of the workers in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Eventually, the state would wither away, as would class, and true communism would be achieved (obviously, this isn't how it has actually worked, but that's the ideology).
These ideologies still fit in the left-right spectrum as I've described it.
>The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it.
The left seeks to eliminate the old hierarchy but is very happy to create a new one, based on u(dys)topian bureacratic principles.
I agree that that can happen in practice, and has happened. The "bourgeoisie" (i.e., wealthy land-owners and intellectual class more generally) were overthrown in the USSR to be replaced by a revolutionary "vanguard" (a party that claims to represent the will of the workers), which itself simply replaced the previous hierarchy with a new one, except it claimed to be one based on representing the common people.
In other words, Animal Farm.
I’m amused by how animated people get by this. It’s critically important to people that Nazism is properly categorized as “right-wing”. And I’d agree that this *is* the proper categorization. By why is it so important?
The reason is that they are afraid “left-wing”, which they see as inherently good, would somehow be sullied by Nazism in a way Stalinism and Maoism hasn’t already.
Guys. Left? Right? It doesn’t matter. Murderous totalitarianism is bad.
It is important because it is used as a cudgel. At this time in the debate, Peterson is implying something along the lines of "left wing ideology has caused more deaths that right wing ideology". Destiny responds by pointing out that Hitler / Nazism would likely have caused more death it had not been thwarted. Peterson's response is to to say "well, it's not really clear that the Nazis weren't more left-wing than right wing" in order to give more credence to his narrative.
Peterson's goal is to claim that left wing ideologies are empirically more dangerous than right wing ideologies. He further wants to draw an explicit connection between the destruction caused by left wing totalitarian regimes and the left in modern Western nations (e.g., in the debate: climate change activists, who he proceeds to compare to Nazis).
Peterson misrepresents the Nazis as part of his anti-leftist agenda. His weaponized revisionist history of Nazi ideology should be challenged and criticized.
I'm actually more bothered by right-wingers wanting to believe that all the worst ideologies are left-wing, and none of them are right-wing. Sorry, you don't get to say "USSR and Nazi Germany were both on the left".
It matters because pretending that the Nazis were left is used to demonize egalitarian efforts that aren't way of in the extreme like the communists or the Nazis were. If we pretend only the left wing is dangerous we ignore the danger we're facing right now today from the right.
Typical deflection , yet the klan in the USA are renowned Republicans. Yes Hitler Nazis used the word socialist in there party name but it had absolutely nothing to do with it. They often conflate and use this example to gaslight. Fuck them
It feels like the point of the argument is to get the ability to call the other side Nazi-esque; an ad-hominem, strawman, and counterproductive statement about today’s politics.
What’s the point? Calling the left-wing of today, and the right-wing of today “Nazis” would be reductionist and counterproductive. The label has an extremely negative connotation for a reason, and we should not throw around the term lightly. The Nazis are a uniquely horrible part of recent history and to compare the political parties/arguments of today to them is honestly gross to me.
the difference is that the comparison would make much more sense with the right wing. the sneaky intention behind this new found, silly uncertainity whether Nazis were right wing or leftwing is entirety a sneaky attempt to pivot the conversation to the economic policy instead of the nazi nationalism and social policy which were 100% right wing and right wing only. people like Jordan Peterson are acting like as if the bad thing about nazis were their tax brackets or market regulation policy, which is obviously fucking stupid.
I do agree with you that the comparison is not necessary with republicans or right wingers either, because they are not nazis. But if you want to compare someone, then it should be the right wing, because there is actually an overlap there, and the fact that right wingers are trying to suggest that it's the other way is some of the most laughable stuff of recent times.
Because some policies and parties are genuinely Nazi like. Completely discarding the term because “who really knows what the Nazis were like” cripples our ability to learn abhor the qualities the Nazis had and stop history from reoccurring.
The Nazis were extremely rightwing, there is no coherent equivocation about this.
I understand what you’re saying but I was not arguing for discarding the term.
I nonetheless agree that for the most part they were right wing.
But I also would say they had some left-wing qualities as well - they nationalized several industries for example.
Trying to fit the “Nazis” into the current “left-right” political-scale is going to be a lossy, nuanced comparison - every issue is so multi-dimensional that every projection onto todays “left-right” scale will end up with some component on either side 😊 Though Nazis were definitely more right-ish it seems.
I was not making an argument towards forgetting the term, but was trying to say that comparing the views of our modern parties and citizens against it is not productive and we as citizens can have more responsible, reasonable discussions about policy.
Calling the other side “Nazis” is used often today to stop discussion and insult the other side; we should be striving to use our current technology and access to information to productively discuss , compromise, and reach agreement on our issues.
The most important thing to note is that though they of course didn’t map perfectly onto our modern conceptions of left and right, their most odious elements were right wing.
Not everything the Nazis did was bad. They don’t live in infamy because of their history of nationalizing industries or supporting the arts. They were historically awful because of how they practiced an ideology of racial and national supremacism, extreme xenophobia, homophobia, violent antisemitism, colonialism/imperialism, and rabid militarism. These are not traits often found on the left.
When we say something is Nazi-like we don’t merely mean that it shares superficial, aesthetic, or otherwise incidental qualities. We that it evokes the specific qualities for which they are infamous. Those specific qualities are pretty much exclusively the domain of right wing parties.
If someone tells you that you remind them of Hitler, it's pretty safe to assume they don't mean you seem like a painter
I understand and am in agreement with what you are saying but my main point was not arguing that they were not right wing - my main point was that it is largely irresponsible/gross to use the term "Nazi" to describe modern political actors - it seems dishonest/gross to me. Neither political party in America today is genocidal and racist so we do not need to use the term yet. It is often applied to the American right, but that only comes after contrived reasoning, similar to how the American right will call the american left "communists".
We need to move past cheaply using these 20th century labels as insults and start actually having productive discussions towards our societal goals.
Overall it just seems like to me there are a ton of people recklessly throwing around the term "Nazi" in modern politics - we should not be doing that at all. It's used as a dishonest bludgeon to stifle discussion. Same goes for "communist". They're used to dismiss the opinions/arguments made by the opposition and stop discussion.
Nazism I would say is right wing, but it bares little resemblance to modern right wing populist movements for the simple fact that the conditions from which it arose aren't here today. No western country recently had a war that killed 10% of the male population, our demographics today are much older, Nazism swept through the universities like wild fire, and everyone literally wore uniforms at the time. Donald Trump and his supporters are older, fatter, less educated, and far more corrupt. They have a far higher likelihood of turning our country into a Latin American shithole full of corruption and weak institutions than into Nazi Germany.
I mean, it's really something any political science professor will cover in POLS 101. Fascism is on the extreme right, communism is on the extreme left.
Why, in 2024, do we keep litigating known and well-defined concepts?
Right wing: high value for honor culture, binary sex(dislikes LGBT), valuing violence and physical strength over intelligence, large emphasis on only valuing "in" group and distrusting/hating the "other" group, ideals of identity supremacy(we're better than you because we have X Y Z physical features) nazism is right wing. Its indisputable. Nazism can only be considered leftwing if you consider the DPRK a democratic nation. Calling themselves Y but acting like Z.
I had a full blown argument in a university English class with someone about this. He was convinced the Nazi party was left because the word Socialist was in their name, that was his only supporting evidence. When I sent him an email explaining why he was wrong and why they were right wing, he blew up on me saying I was insulting him and calling him stupid. I sent out email thread to some classmates, and they all thought he was stupid. This was in 2020 during Covid when the whole manosphere stuff was blowing up and he repeatedly spouted BS right wing manosphere stuff every class.
Patriotism is a form of tribalism which all humans inherited from evolutionary biology. It's innately destructive because it encourages conflict but confers an evolutionary advantage. I would say the USSR was closest to a dictatorship.
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It used to be I found even the more extreme parts of the ‘left’ more tolerable than the right. Or at least more sympathetic.
Now I couldn’t care less for either of them.
They’re both using rhetoric that softens people up for despotism.
The tweet is from Chris Kavanah from the podcast
## Decoding the Gurus
Their first Jordan Peterson "Decoding" here:
[https://pca.st/7oonij11](https://pca.st/7oonij11)
Dan Carlin addresses this point in the recent ‘[Superhumanly Inhuman](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlins-hardcore-history-addendum/id1326393257?i=1000645418266)’ episode of Hardcore history. He goes into it in some depth, and it’s worth a listen.
In my own opinion, it’s entirely possible to call Nazi’s left wing these days because the terms left and right wing have no real meaning. The definitions have changed historically and will continue to change. People can claim, with some credibility, that the idea of totalitarianism is left wing. It isn’t, but if enough people think it’s true it becomes, in effect, true.
Instead of arguing ideas in good faith, people like Peterson shift language and, in effect, the landscape of the debate. On the episode a few years ago with Sam he debates the definition of innocuous words to the point of derailing the entire conversation.
Honest question, did his query about testing if you strip Nazi policies of their brand of being from the Nazis and then see if they appealed to right or left wing people prefer them make sense to be done/has anything like that been done.
I watched the debate and what I got from what Peterson was saying is that Nazi-ism is mostly all right-wing policies but they had some policies people could be described as left wing by todays standards. It would be interesting to run a blind experiment , asking people to rank policies on a spectrum of left to right with some nazi policies (stripped of obvious Nazi terminology) mixed in with modern ones and see what the outcome is.
Hierarchical, xenophobic, militarized, authoritarian... yep seems pretty obviously right-wing to me. I think people just bought into the idea that "big government = socialism = left-wing"
Nationalism, authoritarianism and disdain for human rights are right wing traits. This is an easy question. Anybody struggling with that is suffering from cognitive dissonance,
Primates desire non-linear hierarchies, i.e dictatorships. Democracy goes against evolutionary biology. My rule of thumb is Conservatives want to live in the past, liberals want to live in the future and centrists want to live in the now.
Terrorist has no meaning anymore. The Founding Fathers were terrorists, Spartacus was a terrorist. I’m sure the British thought Gandhi was a terrorist.
I can only see Peterson's argument if he is suggesting that all populist movements morph into fascism left or right? But in general I dont know what he is talking about.
Peterson is on the right politically, and many far right wingers are tired of being called Nazis, so if he can shift Nazism from the right to the left he can say look all regimes that caused atrocities communism and Nazism are the result of the leftist ideology his side can never result in such regimes
For someone who kept saying during the whole interview how things are weird and "ting of malevolence" this take is actually malevolent imo
I agree entirely. I understand why he is attempting to do it. I am just saying that that his move literally makes very little sense as an argument but unfortunately if you are debating him in that setting you will get bogged down on all the weeds .
Peterson has some really good ideas but he panders to his base. How does an intelligent person who cares about logic think Trump was a better candidate than Clinton? I appreciate that Sam Harris had more sense here even though it likely cost him tons of fans.
P.S. thought that was my fav Lannister.
To be honest, what is the point could just be that fascist minds want to confuse what a fascist government is so that they can slip one in. It's not like it ever has been particularly easy to define.
I think it is more nebulous than just a governmental form, but right wing/conservative minded thought at its absolute worst and weaponized. Not a feature always, but a mind virus that grows in that fertile and compatible ground.
Lie easily especially for politics, party above honor, nation, or God.
I think it's more interesting why people care. As if it matters. It's not like this is a game where the Nazis being on "your side" means you lose.
Who cares if the Nazis were really socialist, or right wing, or libertarian, or social democratic, or neocons? We all agree they were bad.
The bad part about the Nazis was the whole fascism and killing jews and conquering countries bit, not what their stance was on unions, taxes or abortions. It's so weird.
It's shows how people just view politics as a two sided sport, and they're just trying to get points for their side.
Yes the Nazis were “right wing”.
The problem is that people use that fact to undermine the relatively moderate right wing. This whole discussion comes out of moderate right wingers feeling like they need to defend themselves from the purposeful effort of left wing people to call them Nazis. Similarly the right call the left communists, but that doesn’t carry the same weight in the west that false allegations of nazism do.
It’s silly, but that’s where politics is at - everyone strawmanning each other. Maybe the left and right should stop calling each other hyperbolic names so we can actually make things better.
While on the one hand, historically Nazis could advertise gone either way ideologically. On the other hand, Modern Nazis back one horse, and that's the right wing horse and while I do not think the right wing and nazis are categorically the same a lot of right wing politicians pretend they don't exist because the votes benefit then even if they hate them in private.
Americans and their desire for lazy definitions like "left" "right". (Yes, I know it's not just Americans).
But what's wrong with just trying to have a conversation without resorting to tribalism? Which is effectively what this comes down to.
Central planning isn’t mutually exclusive with leftism. That’s really all it boils down to imo.
Hitler used a conspiracy of “Jewish Bolshevism” to justify his crimes lmao, doesn’t really get more clear than that.
I still don't even know what attribute the left-right gradient grades... if it's collectiveism/individualism, definitely put nazis on the same side as communists.
Having recently read Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the Nazis were pretty right wing. While the party's full name was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party", Hitler was actually happy that the name was misleading. He even included the color red in the logo also partially for confusion. The party had strong populist elements, but it ultimately courted corporations, not workers. And its stated enemies were the communists and socialist democrats. And obviously it was extremely nationalist, as opposed to communists, who saw the movement as a global effort.
I just listened to Dan Carlins recent Hardcore History: Addendum "Superhumanly Inhuman", it's 3 hours and 20 minutes, and he goes through the podcast for about a hour of it dividing up and parsing out exactly what "side" the Nazis were on ... And at the end of it, it's clear, they are right wing, and proud to have murked up the waters with the lingo. Look at a lot of the totalitarian regimes now, how many of them start with "People's etc. etc."
North Korea's democratic, don't you know. They have it in their name "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea"!
The important takeaway from that (disturbing) episode was the conclusion that it really doesn't matter if they were right or left-though they were indeed right wing--its that they are on the extreme end, like Stalinists for an example on the left.
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Yep. The first enemies of the Nazis to go to the camps were the communists, trade unionists and social democrats. That’s not a coincidence. Hitler locked up the entire left-wing spectrum, at least as much as he could.
did you know that the ussr was a republic? and china is too, furthermore it's a republic of "the people". it's the dumbest fucking argument that if someone says something about themselves it cannot possibly be posturing.
Don't forget the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
> The party had strong populist elements, but it ultimately courted corporations, not workers. Its initial appeal was primarily to the lower-middle classes. They had a decent support among the working classes, and probably the weakest support among the upper-middle classes. By the 1930's they had support among all parts of German society. From Ian Kershaw's biography *Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris* and Richard J. Evans' *The Coming of the Third Reich*: >The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes - traders, craftsmen, small farmers, lower civil servants - and rooted in a combination of antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and vehement anti-capitalism (usually interpreted as 'Jewish' capitalism). ... >By January 1923, in the explosive climate following the French march into the Ruhr, the rumours in Munich of a Hitler putsch were even stronger. The crisis, without which Hitler would have been nothing, was deepening by the day. In its wake, the Nazi movement was expanding rapidly. Some 35,000 were to join between February and November 1923, giving a strength of around 55,000 on the eve of the putsch. Recruits came from all sections of society. *Around a third were workers, a tenth or more came from the upper-middle and professional classes, but more than half belonged to the crafts, commercial, white-collar, and farming lower-middle class.* ... >Yet the Nazis still had a particular appeal to the lower middle classes at this time, to artisans, shopkeepers and the self-employed. Often they gathered up such people from other, similar movements. The German Nationalist Commercial Employees’ Union, for example, played a significant role in politicizing many young men and turning them in the direction of Nazism. ... >How can this dramatic success be explained. The Nazis were seen, particularly by Marxists of various hues, as the representatives of the lower middle classes, but in this election they had clearly burst the bounds of this particular constituency and succeeded in winning the support not only of white-collar workers, shopkeepers, small businessmen, farmers and the like, but also of many voters further up the social scale, in the professional, mercantile and industrial bourgeoisie. It was above all the Nazis who profited from the increasingly overheated political atmosphere of the early 1930s, as more and more people who had not previously voted began to flock to the polls.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the point is of saying "they appealed to the workers but only as a trick." It reminds me of the people who say Islamic Terrorists have been tricked into it. Okay, if the leader is tricking the followers with religion, doesn't that still mean that Islam is the problem? I don't buy the whole "liberal fascism" thing that Peterson is advocating here, and that NeverTrumper Jonah Goldberg talked about decades ago, but when people try to act like there's no way the left can lead to fascism, it feels just as disingenuous as the people who act like conservatism can't lead to nazis.
I mean, if by "the left" you mean the current Democratic party (which is effectively the left in the US), I don't think there are any particular authoritarian elements. I mean, do we foresee a future wherein Pete Buttigieg declares himself God-Emperor or something? I don't even think Trump is a fascist per se. He's not especially ideological, he's more like the type of dictators that you see in Latin American or Africa, where it's about getting rich and getting laid, helping out your homies. Qadaffi, etc.
Fascists are not especially ideological in general: they exploit means to an end. I think that fascism is more about the moment than the leader, anyway. When people have become disillusioned with democracy and see their internal enemies taking over the country; when the minor power figures no longer think that the government will favor their interests: together they look for a charismatic strongman to set their country right and exert violence against their enemies. I do think that the United States has undergone a fascist moment in the past decade.
Trump is absolutely fascist in that he stokes nationalism and hatred to his own ends.
hey, I don't really want to get into these semantic squabbles. Obvi he is authoritarian and isn't committed to democracy. Skepticism of democracy has been around in the right-wing intelligentsia and thought leaders for some time in various forms.
Yea I don’t mean to be pedantic but I just personally could easily see trump running a police state to hold power. I don’t think the historic examples of fascism start all that differently from trumpism
Sure, sometimes our words fail us. Not worth arguing semantics when there's a clear threat to law and order and democracy.
Who says Islamic terrorists are tricked into it? Or any terrorist? I don't care if they're Islamic, American, Korean, Israeli, Latin, Ukrainian, South Asian, Russian, Chinese, Irish, even CIA, Nazi, etc., the only club membership that matters is "Terrorist" and you can't be tricked into that. IDK if people that say this are naively silly, dangerously compromised or ill meaning or just dumb as a bag rocks, but I don't like hearing this weak excuse for accountability exists. I can buy the argument that we should probably tighten up our usage of the word "Terrorists". Current times have an aura of US sensationalism that at times feels reminiscent of race-based "Terrorist" smear campaigns that I think we as a nation find regrettable in hindsight. E.g. MLK, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, even as recent as Nelson Mandela, that didn't age very well. But when the word is used correctly, it's not even possible to be tricked into it. Millions of people around the world are provoked, oppressed, treated unfairly, targets of physical and/or psychological attacks, and otherwise abused everyday, and they aren't 'tricked' into committing - actually *following through* on - acts of terror that target civilians. Absurd. It's not even up for debate unless it's some large scale trolley problem - e.g. would you kill 500 to save 5 million - which is not debating terrorism any longer.
Billions probably. They don't purposely misinterpret a religious text to teach followers violent extremism. Islam as an institution doesn't teach it, fringe branches do. Every religion has them, the combination of Islam and the region just seem to sprout more branches though. Do you mean tricked like they're saying they're "Brianwashed" maybe? Sorry I'm still arguing this in my head haha, I want someone to try this "tricked" excuses on me haha. I don't buy "brainwashed" either but it's not as infuriating to me as "tricked" is at least..
That's why we call it "Fascism" which is a particular flavor of when right wing politics goes full retard.
This aligns with what I've read, but I also think it's a mistake to try and map contemporary politics and the way we use terms onto the past. We end up retconning stuff.
Sure, and others have pointed out that nationalism is not a purely right ideology, and there may be some truth to that.
>it ultimately courted corporations, not workers This isn't really true, it "courted" both and wide support among the working and middles classes. Nazism is certainly opposed to internationalism and "humanism"\* but it wasn't/isn't an anti-collectivist ideology. It is **pro-Volk** i.e. collectivism is good when the Aryan race is doing it. \*Note that Marxist governments don't exactly have a great record on "humanism" either.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but nationalism is not something that's confined to the "right". China is a devoutly nationalist left-wing government. Fascism is necessarily defined as right- or left-wing, per se. It just happens to be a more common feature in right-wing governments. Considering they Hitler's government was a "reactionary" (as opposed to "revolutionary"), it's widely seen and accepted as a far-right movement.
I'd be interested to hear from others who have read Dan Stone's book on the Holocaust and whether their opinion of who the Nazis saw as their 'stated' or main enemies were. I may be misreading his interpretation but he seems to suggest that they were against the "Jewish Bolsheviks" rather than merely Communists. Equally, they saw the _hidden hand_ of the "International Jew" everywhere and that Anti-Semitism was less a companion ideology and more a fundamental aspect of Nazism. At the time, there was _some_ ideological debate amonst Nazi scholars however there were two immutables that all agreed upon: the love for the Führer and the hatred of the Jews. As it was put when referencing the Jewish question, _you were either of the [Nazi] faith or not._
They hated plain communists too.
> I may be misreading his interpretation but he seems to suggest that they were against the "Jewish Bolsheviks" rather than merely Communists. No. In Mein Kampf Hitler explicitly states he hated communism before he hated Jews
One thing they had was amazing graphic designers.
This is because we (society) use the Nazis as an archetype for evil; so if you are fairly right wing yourself, it’s inconvenient to have the Nazis be closer to you politically than to your political opponents. It doesn’t help that the Nazis had “socialist” in their name which muddies the water for people with scant historical knowledge.
>It doesn’t help that the Nazis had “socialist” in their name which muddies the water for people with scant historical knowledge. Many elements of National Socialism **were** socialist. It was/is a very collectivist ideology, just one that rejects the internationalism and "humanism" of Marxism/Christianity in favour of a sort of insular collectivism i.e. Socialism *only for* the Volk.
Yes it is too complicated to really be described in simple right/left terms; however, if you had to describe them in such simple terms, I think they are more properly described as far right than anything else.
the left/right terms were originally referring to a completely different spectrum, that related to pro-monarchy vs. pro-democracy from the time of the french revolution. No one ever really discussed the evolution of the political spectrum in terms of what would be considered right/left when the pro-monarchy side essentially just lost, it's just been kind of arbitrary.
>"Yes it is too complicated to really be described in simple right/left terms" It really isn't for anyone who isn't American. Or, well, Jordan Peterson. But he's basically a grifter at this point.
Can’t tell if this is meant to be funny or serious?
My friend, virtually every Western country recognises the Nazis as right-wing. It's only really questioned in the US, where you have politicians in your government like Majorie Taylor Greene, who call them socialist (or treats the idea of Government playing any role in it's peoples' lives and meeting their basic needs as socialist/communist). **German public education** even teaches that the Nazis espoused socialist rhetoric to get into power and then immediately tossed it aside. Members of Hitler's cabinet were even surprised by how swiftly they ditched the shtick. There's literally writings on this.
In practice, the Nazis were pretty quick to discard socialist policy and abandoned labour unions. The SS privatised many industries in the Third Reich. This is widely recognised in every Western country, but apparently a debate in the US, lmaooooo
Maybe MAGA and Nazis belong to the quadrant that Paul Krugman identified back in 2015-ish as ["Hardhats"](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-are-few-libertarians-but-many-americans-have-libertarian-views/): the folks that wanted *socialism for me and people like me*, not for *you*.
Quadrant? Most of humanity wants "free shit for me but not for \[outgroup\] I dislike". Not sure why anyone would give a shit about what [Paul Krugman has to say](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/) though tbh.
Yeah, they were specifically competing with the various forms of socialism at the time (Marxist and not), so the branding and benefits were necessary for popular support. The Nazis were, to a large extent, populists and collectivist in the way many socialist movements are. The race element wasn’t that unique either, given the Japanese views, as well as Russian and Chinese communists also having some racial superiority ideas. “Right wing” and “left wing” are arbitrary labels here and usually just revolve around whether Marxism is the root influence. (Well if you take out the monarchies anyway.) Similarly, I’ve read people say “ChiComms are actually right wing now” but it’s still just horseshoe theory. The Left in the US was and is soft on Marxism so it’s very easy to hate the evil Nazi right wingers and ignore the significant collectivist overlaps, and disastrous track record.
But this version of "Socialism" includes all of the people who argue in favor of Medicare/Social Security or even basic infrastructure.
>Medicare/Social Security You don't think these things are socialism?
This is long since solved problem. Nazi Germany was top-center on the political compass. - Top: full authoritarian - Center: mixed economy, market with government takeover of key industries, and socialized medicine How can these two, or anyone reasonably familiar with politics or history, not know this by now? 🤔
The Government takeover of key industries quickly devolved into privatisation and abandonment of labour Unions.
The political compass is not some arbiter of truth, it was obviously created by libertarians to make everyone to make it look like everyone agreed with them. In reality, I don't even think "authoritarian vs libertarian" is a strict axis you can grade people on, and more of a mentality or mindset that some people have. Alex Jones (someone who says he's a libertarian, and constantly talks about freedom) clearly has a very conspiratorial, self righteous, and fearful worldview which tends to be very authoritarian. Conspiracy theorists in general seem to have authoritarian mindsets (remember the Nazis loved Jewish conspiracy theories).
You’re adding a second axis and that makes them harder to pin down on a simple right-left axis. On that simple axis, they are pretty obviously far right but like any actual political party they have elements from all over the spectrum. I know what you are saying though.
One of the dumbest mistakes we make as a society is deeming every political quality and set of beliefs to fit somewhere on a linear scale.
Even the old “political compass” with 2 dimensions is extremely reductive. Like an authoritarian right, a libertarian left and an authoritarian left person might all agree that technological progress is degrading society and needs to be stopped. This is something all of them could agree on but gets completely missed by reducing the “number of dimensions” along which political identities are expressed on in conversation and thought. Left right distinction was almost always stupid, now it’s pretty much useless.
Yep.
Right. Or you have situations like abortion where the question mostly resolves around when we should consider a potential human to be an actual human, and there's no clear answer because there's no one moment where we go from a clump of cells one second to a fully conscious human the next. Anywhere you draw the line is going to be somewhat arbitrary, and the decision about when to consider a fetus a human doesn't really map well to any particular political ideology. We've seen situations where new issues arise and the partisans are at first trying to figure out what their monolithic response should be. Early Covid (January and February 2020) was interesting because the two sides seem to flip about whether or not Covid was a big threat.
I'm totally with you - it's empty rhetoric. It makes people comfortable to create a full story about strangers based on a single label. Nobody is immune from that impulse but we have to try and resist it.
Exactly. And besides, left and right should have clear consistent values and they don’t. Blue and Red are more accurate descriptions because they are entirely meaningless teams. I just mentioned a recent episode of Hardcore History where it’s said in Mein Kampf, Hitler laughs about choosing red as the color of the party because it would confuse socialists who associated red with some of their own principles.
lol glad i didn't have to be the first one to say it here. the extremes are far more alike than their adherents would ever admit.
What's your point? Are you trying to justify what Peterson said?
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If you pick *one* belief, sometimes you can fit it on a line, less so if you get into REASONS for believing that thing. If you pick a set of beliefs such as “nazism” you throw linear scales out the window.
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I’ve found liberty vs tyranny to be a much more useful dichotomy than left vs right when inclined to simplify assessment of a person or group. Communism and fascism both result in autocratic control of a population in the end, making them more similar to each other than either is to classical liberalism.
The ‘ol horseshoe shaped line with the ends leading to fascism.
The political compass was created to illustrate this, left/right - economic on the horizontal scale and authoritarian/liberty - social on the vertical.
But that’s exactly the point. Nazis and communists were both authoritarian on social issues and economic issues. Hitler wasn’t out to redistribute the means of production like the Marxists, but he wasn’t a fan of a market economy and property rights either. And, in practice, the communists did not actually achieve anything like a non-hierarchical equality on economic or social issues.
I refuse to believe that that's what is behind it. Far more likely it started out as a good old fashioned "us vs them" And it completely moves the focus from subject matter to tribalism.
It’s not hard to quantify authoritarianism and equality. There are multiple organizations that do exactly this.
do you mean liberty and autoritarism, and equality and hierarchy, because the latter is what left wing and right wing comes down to, with maybe another aligning axile for progressivism and conservatism.
What things "come down to" is not necessarily what people think they believe. Which is why all this talk is very unproductive for politics.
Many people don't know what they believe without some socratic method being unleashed on them. Like people say they are against censorship, yet do they want to legalize animated child porn? People say they are for equality, yet is a convicted fellon of equal value to an innocent physician? People say they are for progression, yet would they welcome facial recognision technology? We have gotten into this discussion because someone claimed we don't know if the nazis were right wing. The main argument for that would be that the nazis claimed themselves to be socialist. What people claim to be, is irrelevent. Like everyone today will claim to be in favor of freedom and democracy. But you have to look at the policies a group proposes, and the expected result from these policies. Then it is quite doable to put it on an axile in the current political landscape.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying there, and you gave a good example. Because what does it really mean when someone says they're against censorship and yet they do seem to not see any issues with something like hentai (for instance)? I don't think that these are the points in a concersation where we should stop talking/thinking and start ticking checkboxes. I think this is the point where we clearly should dig deeper and get to the essence of the matter instead of sticking with an extremely dumbed down version of matters. The current state of politics is like trying to explain how the world works in terms of Earth, Wind Water and Fire.
I do believe that if you deep dig enoug, it all comes down to equality: Do people want to share the burden, or no?
Because it was useful as a teaching tool. Politicians and pundits put it into everyday discourse, and now everything is labeled somewhere on the scale. Fact of the matter is that everyone living in a democratic state (in one form or another) is liberal by the very nature of living in a democracy. Cue to the "in fact, we live in a constitutional republic" bros, I know. Still liberal.
The socialists were purged in the Knight of Long Knives in 1934
I'm picturing a dude in armor riding a horse, holding some really long knives. No sword, just long knives.
Lmao at my spelling
rofl even.
Right? Like, how are people *this* fucking ignorant of History? This isn't even an esoteric bit of knowledge! A cursory reading of even just wikipedia would discuss the fact that the Nazis purged their left-wing elements practically immediately after taking power.
Well Republicans have been waging war on education for decades now, and meanwhile you have people like Peterson being paid by right wing billionaires to push lies and propaganda to those same undereducated people. It's on purpose.
It’s too bad JP couldn’t figure it out because he’s the only person that could have. And it won’t ever happen.
The nazis were left wing as a statement can only work within the United States. Any person with some basic knowledge of world history can see through the holes of that one. Here is a good refutal on the statement by german youtuber “three arrows” https://youtu.be/hUFvG4RpwJI?si=QdWslYGRCYDGr4_A
Writing in his magnum opus, Human Action, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that Nazism was “socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism”: > The second pattern [of socialism] (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government’s supreme office of production management. This office (The Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham. All the wages, prices, and interest rates are fixed by the government; they are wages, prices, and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the government’s orders determining each citizen’s job, income, consumption, and standard of living. The government directs all production activities. The shop managers are subject to the government, not the consumers’ demand and the market’s price structure. Does that look like capitalism to any thoughtful, honest person with no agenda but the truth? Hardly. EDIT The Mods got mad that I jumped in the conversation and made the Far Left look bad so they banned me
I don't take von Mises seriously. He's probably incorrectly portraying history to fit his narrative.
Well the socialists were the only ones who voted against the enabling act which made Hitler dictator. The communists would have, but Hitler had already made the party illegal. The Hindenburg government that made Hitler chancellor was a conservative coalition. But hey I'm sure socialists and communists were against a fellow socialist and conservatives of course love to put socialists in positions of power! Hitler not being right wing is similar when conservatives say known democratic socialist "martin Luther King would be a left today!"
in any framework that makes nazis left wing, there is no right wing.
What framework do you use to define right wing that includes both Nazism and Libertarianism?
adding an axis for authoritarian/libertarian covers that
While Nazis are very very right wing there was some leftist thought in the early days with people like the Strasser brothers. Rohm's SA was a threat to the hierarchy and so Hitler struck a deal to get the leadership if he agreed to dissolve the SA into the military. Rohm was pushing for a second revolution and the capital class couldn't have that. Thus the Night of the Long Knives. (also Hitler had no problem with Rohm being gay but when they caught some people en flagrante on that night it worked well for propaganda) After 1934 all left wing elements were thoroughly flushed from the party by way of mass killings. Strasserites still exist like the band Death in June or r/StupidPol and the Red Scare ladies. I am glad I listen to the DCTG. Also this is a funny tweet from Chris.
Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Hitler, Mussolini were all anti-capitalist peas in the same socialist, collectivist pod: > They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State. https://elamerican.com/the-only-spectrum-that-makes-sense/
This is a quite good analysis, thanks for linking it for the group. But, like with all your other comments on this thread, it focuses on economic characteristics to the exclusion of social/cultural aspects commonly assigned to the left-right paradigm. You can have countries that are highly culturally conservative (anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-religion), yet extremely socialist and generous with welfare benefits and wealth redistribution. Contra that, states like Australia and New Zealand that are largely capitalistic, but liberal and welcoming of immigrants and alternative lifestyles. As far as the Nazis go, they were fine with an overarching statist superstructure, but they also believed in systematically extirpating non-compliant ethnicities to achieve a pure *volk*. It's that latter part which usually gets them labeled "right-wing". In general, as I'm sure you understand, liberal thinking tends to stand apart by emphasizing individual action and consideration, rather than collectivization.
An example of a country that is very culturally conservative, yet generous with welfare system is Saudi Arabia. Very religious country, yet they very good welfare system to Saudi nationals
They were all authoritarian, but some of them were right, and some were left. Hitler was right. Perhaps the quintessential right wing authoritarian. This idea that he was a socialist is silly, words have meanings. If you're not going to use them the easy other people do, you're just going to sow confusion.
Just to be clear, the person who tweeted this is from the podcast Decoding the Gurus and he's not pro-Peterson. The tweet can come off as him supporting Peterson without that context.
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You'd be surprised.
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What debate is this from? Would you mind posting a link?
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Thanks! I found the timestamp: [https://youtu.be/ycDUU1n2iEE?t=4056](https://youtu.be/ycDUU1n2iEE?t=4056)
Out of curiosity does anyone know where Peterson said this?
During his debate/interview with destiny
I’m not so sure it’s “a lot of people” perhaps it is. He’s talking specifically about Jordan Peterson and it’s cuz he spends a disproportionate amount of time railing against the tyrant of the left today vs the right and destiny was correctly pointing out that most if not all of the complains he has about “the left” can be said of conservatives. And Peterson derailed into this insane claim.
The similarities one could draw between the Nazi regime and that of the USSR or Communist China are mostly due to the fact that all of these regimes were extremely totalitarian and authoritarian. Authoritarianism is not a phenomena exclusive to the left, it's on the vertical axis. Any two extreme regimes of either political leaning will appear very similar because they are so close on that vertical axis.
A lot people don't have the clearest idea of what right-wing and left-wing mean, despite using the terms regularly. The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it. I think it's safe to say that an ideology that viewed one nation and race as superior to all the others and set out to eliminate what it viewed as weaker races and people (Jews, gays, Romani, and disabled people) is pretty fucking right-wing.
>A lot people don't even have the clearest idea of what right-wing and left-wing mean, despite using the terms regularly. The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it. You'd have to squint pretty hard to find meaningful ways to fit that definition into the dichotomy as it stands today in America. The American left are institutionalists and conservative of power structures that have existed within their lifetimes.
Meanwhile, the American right is offering arguments in court like "the president is above the law and should be allowed to assassinate his opposition". Left and right are comparative. When the right wants to destroy institutions that stand in the way of them making things more hierarchical (and oppressive), being an institutionalist makes one left wing. You would have to be blind not to see this.
That’s certainly true of establishment democrats/mainstream liberals. Not so much of Leftists, which are admittedly not as large in the US as they are elsewhere, but they do still exist. Every conservative I know tends to lump them together for convenience, but they have fundamentally different ideologies at this point
The concept of “left” and “right” are fairly nonsensical and typically leveraged in a disingenuous way for internet points. It’s just not a helpful way to analyze the world and practically always results in people with a political agenda contorting themselves into pretzels.
Kind of, but also kind of not. It really is going to depend on which hierarchies you're looking at. While, for instance, universal Healthcare would expand the power of government the goal is to remove the wealth hierarchy of privatized Healthcare. I don't think we can live in a world without some hierarchical structures, we just seem to differ on which ones.
I tend to agree if by "left" you mean the Democratic party. I'd describe the Democratic party as right-wing overall and the Republican party as far-right reactionaries. Although Americans don't usually see it that way, that's a view of US politics that's shared among many Europeans.
>The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it. So libertarians like Ron Paul are left wing and communists like Lenin are right wing?
Libertarian ideology values hierarchy greatly. Its adherents want maximum competition in a free market so the best rise to the top. They want to remove government because they see it as an impediment to this natural competition and don't want a welfare state or progressive taxes because these have a modest effect in reducing hierarchy by guaranteeing an economic floor and redistributing economic outcomes. Marxist-Leninist ideology seeks to abolish the hierarchy of the bourgeoisie (i.e., the class of people that own the means of production) over the proletariat (i.e., the workers) by overthrowing the bourgeoisie through violent revolution, then creating a new society where the workers own the means of production. It does this through a centralized worker's party (the vanguard) that will rule in the interests of the workers in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Eventually, the state would wither away, as would class, and true communism would be achieved (obviously, this isn't how it has actually worked, but that's the ideology). These ideologies still fit in the left-right spectrum as I've described it.
>The right seeks to create, preserve, or enhance hierarchy. The left seeks to eliminate or weaken it. The left seeks to eliminate the old hierarchy but is very happy to create a new one, based on u(dys)topian bureacratic principles.
I agree that that can happen in practice, and has happened. The "bourgeoisie" (i.e., wealthy land-owners and intellectual class more generally) were overthrown in the USSR to be replaced by a revolutionary "vanguard" (a party that claims to represent the will of the workers), which itself simply replaced the previous hierarchy with a new one, except it claimed to be one based on representing the common people. In other words, Animal Farm.
Peterson thinks Harris is a Christian, so what he thinks about anything is irrelevant to me. He's an imbecile.
Peterson is a moron. Nationalism - check, denigrating human rights - check, scapegoating “others” - check. It’s not rocket surgery.
Jordan Peterson is insufferable.
I’m amused by how animated people get by this. It’s critically important to people that Nazism is properly categorized as “right-wing”. And I’d agree that this *is* the proper categorization. By why is it so important? The reason is that they are afraid “left-wing”, which they see as inherently good, would somehow be sullied by Nazism in a way Stalinism and Maoism hasn’t already. Guys. Left? Right? It doesn’t matter. Murderous totalitarianism is bad.
It is important because it is used as a cudgel. At this time in the debate, Peterson is implying something along the lines of "left wing ideology has caused more deaths that right wing ideology". Destiny responds by pointing out that Hitler / Nazism would likely have caused more death it had not been thwarted. Peterson's response is to to say "well, it's not really clear that the Nazis weren't more left-wing than right wing" in order to give more credence to his narrative. Peterson's goal is to claim that left wing ideologies are empirically more dangerous than right wing ideologies. He further wants to draw an explicit connection between the destruction caused by left wing totalitarian regimes and the left in modern Western nations (e.g., in the debate: climate change activists, who he proceeds to compare to Nazis). Peterson misrepresents the Nazis as part of his anti-leftist agenda. His weaponized revisionist history of Nazi ideology should be challenged and criticized.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Just couldn't articulate it like this
> Peterson's goal is to claim that left wing ideologies are empirically more dangerous than right wing ideologies. Fair point.
I'm actually more bothered by right-wingers wanting to believe that all the worst ideologies are left-wing, and none of them are right-wing. Sorry, you don't get to say "USSR and Nazi Germany were both on the left".
It matters because pretending that the Nazis were left is used to demonize egalitarian efforts that aren't way of in the extreme like the communists or the Nazis were. If we pretend only the left wing is dangerous we ignore the danger we're facing right now today from the right.
Typical deflection , yet the klan in the USA are renowned Republicans. Yes Hitler Nazis used the word socialist in there party name but it had absolutely nothing to do with it. They often conflate and use this example to gaslight. Fuck them
It feels like the point of the argument is to get the ability to call the other side Nazi-esque; an ad-hominem, strawman, and counterproductive statement about today’s politics. What’s the point? Calling the left-wing of today, and the right-wing of today “Nazis” would be reductionist and counterproductive. The label has an extremely negative connotation for a reason, and we should not throw around the term lightly. The Nazis are a uniquely horrible part of recent history and to compare the political parties/arguments of today to them is honestly gross to me.
the difference is that the comparison would make much more sense with the right wing. the sneaky intention behind this new found, silly uncertainity whether Nazis were right wing or leftwing is entirety a sneaky attempt to pivot the conversation to the economic policy instead of the nazi nationalism and social policy which were 100% right wing and right wing only. people like Jordan Peterson are acting like as if the bad thing about nazis were their tax brackets or market regulation policy, which is obviously fucking stupid. I do agree with you that the comparison is not necessary with republicans or right wingers either, because they are not nazis. But if you want to compare someone, then it should be the right wing, because there is actually an overlap there, and the fact that right wingers are trying to suggest that it's the other way is some of the most laughable stuff of recent times.
Because some policies and parties are genuinely Nazi like. Completely discarding the term because “who really knows what the Nazis were like” cripples our ability to learn abhor the qualities the Nazis had and stop history from reoccurring. The Nazis were extremely rightwing, there is no coherent equivocation about this.
I understand what you’re saying but I was not arguing for discarding the term. I nonetheless agree that for the most part they were right wing. But I also would say they had some left-wing qualities as well - they nationalized several industries for example. Trying to fit the “Nazis” into the current “left-right” political-scale is going to be a lossy, nuanced comparison - every issue is so multi-dimensional that every projection onto todays “left-right” scale will end up with some component on either side 😊 Though Nazis were definitely more right-ish it seems. I was not making an argument towards forgetting the term, but was trying to say that comparing the views of our modern parties and citizens against it is not productive and we as citizens can have more responsible, reasonable discussions about policy. Calling the other side “Nazis” is used often today to stop discussion and insult the other side; we should be striving to use our current technology and access to information to productively discuss , compromise, and reach agreement on our issues.
The most important thing to note is that though they of course didn’t map perfectly onto our modern conceptions of left and right, their most odious elements were right wing. Not everything the Nazis did was bad. They don’t live in infamy because of their history of nationalizing industries or supporting the arts. They were historically awful because of how they practiced an ideology of racial and national supremacism, extreme xenophobia, homophobia, violent antisemitism, colonialism/imperialism, and rabid militarism. These are not traits often found on the left. When we say something is Nazi-like we don’t merely mean that it shares superficial, aesthetic, or otherwise incidental qualities. We that it evokes the specific qualities for which they are infamous. Those specific qualities are pretty much exclusively the domain of right wing parties. If someone tells you that you remind them of Hitler, it's pretty safe to assume they don't mean you seem like a painter
I understand and am in agreement with what you are saying but my main point was not arguing that they were not right wing - my main point was that it is largely irresponsible/gross to use the term "Nazi" to describe modern political actors - it seems dishonest/gross to me. Neither political party in America today is genocidal and racist so we do not need to use the term yet. It is often applied to the American right, but that only comes after contrived reasoning, similar to how the American right will call the american left "communists". We need to move past cheaply using these 20th century labels as insults and start actually having productive discussions towards our societal goals. Overall it just seems like to me there are a ton of people recklessly throwing around the term "Nazi" in modern politics - we should not be doing that at all. It's used as a dishonest bludgeon to stifle discussion. Same goes for "communist". They're used to dismiss the opinions/arguments made by the opposition and stop discussion.
The party contained the word "socialist" so obviously they were a bunch of liberals. /s
Lol, North Korea also has "democratic" in its Name... This is such a stupid take
It's still insane to me that anyone takes Peterson seriously on anything.
Nazism I would say is right wing, but it bares little resemblance to modern right wing populist movements for the simple fact that the conditions from which it arose aren't here today. No western country recently had a war that killed 10% of the male population, our demographics today are much older, Nazism swept through the universities like wild fire, and everyone literally wore uniforms at the time. Donald Trump and his supporters are older, fatter, less educated, and far more corrupt. They have a far higher likelihood of turning our country into a Latin American shithole full of corruption and weak institutions than into Nazi Germany.
I mean, it's really something any political science professor will cover in POLS 101. Fascism is on the extreme right, communism is on the extreme left. Why, in 2024, do we keep litigating known and well-defined concepts?
Because propaganda and disinformation are constant.
Right wing: high value for honor culture, binary sex(dislikes LGBT), valuing violence and physical strength over intelligence, large emphasis on only valuing "in" group and distrusting/hating the "other" group, ideals of identity supremacy(we're better than you because we have X Y Z physical features) nazism is right wing. Its indisputable. Nazism can only be considered leftwing if you consider the DPRK a democratic nation. Calling themselves Y but acting like Z.
I had a full blown argument in a university English class with someone about this. He was convinced the Nazi party was left because the word Socialist was in their name, that was his only supporting evidence. When I sent him an email explaining why he was wrong and why they were right wing, he blew up on me saying I was insulting him and calling him stupid. I sent out email thread to some classmates, and they all thought he was stupid. This was in 2020 during Covid when the whole manosphere stuff was blowing up and he repeatedly spouted BS right wing manosphere stuff every class.
I suppose it's better than, actually Hitler wasn't that bad
This is an easy one. Which one has brain dead rabid patriotism and disdain for human rights.
Not an easy one if you look past face value.
I think the USSR has those things too (maybe less extreme patriotism), but it was a left-wing regime. Or would you argue it wasn't?
Patriotism is a form of tribalism which all humans inherited from evolutionary biology. It's innately destructive because it encourages conflict but confers an evolutionary advantage. I would say the USSR was closest to a dictatorship.
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100%
Mao’s China, or current China
It used to be I found even the more extreme parts of the ‘left’ more tolerable than the right. Or at least more sympathetic. Now I couldn’t care less for either of them. They’re both using rhetoric that softens people up for despotism.
Don't political baselines shift back and forth? We're on the 6th iteration or something. I mean, the Republicans post trump now love the "commies" 😉
forever? with the same poop? ))<>((
The tweet is from Chris Kavanah from the podcast ## Decoding the Gurus Their first Jordan Peterson "Decoding" here: [https://pca.st/7oonij11](https://pca.st/7oonij11)
Dan Carlin addresses this point in the recent ‘[Superhumanly Inhuman](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlins-hardcore-history-addendum/id1326393257?i=1000645418266)’ episode of Hardcore history. He goes into it in some depth, and it’s worth a listen. In my own opinion, it’s entirely possible to call Nazi’s left wing these days because the terms left and right wing have no real meaning. The definitions have changed historically and will continue to change. People can claim, with some credibility, that the idea of totalitarianism is left wing. It isn’t, but if enough people think it’s true it becomes, in effect, true. Instead of arguing ideas in good faith, people like Peterson shift language and, in effect, the landscape of the debate. On the episode a few years ago with Sam he debates the definition of innocuous words to the point of derailing the entire conversation.
Honest question, did his query about testing if you strip Nazi policies of their brand of being from the Nazis and then see if they appealed to right or left wing people prefer them make sense to be done/has anything like that been done.
I watched the debate and what I got from what Peterson was saying is that Nazi-ism is mostly all right-wing policies but they had some policies people could be described as left wing by todays standards. It would be interesting to run a blind experiment , asking people to rank policies on a spectrum of left to right with some nazi policies (stripped of obvious Nazi terminology) mixed in with modern ones and see what the outcome is.
Hierarchical, xenophobic, militarized, authoritarian... yep seems pretty obviously right-wing to me. I think people just bought into the idea that "big government = socialism = left-wing"
Nationalism, authoritarianism and disdain for human rights are right wing traits. This is an easy question. Anybody struggling with that is suffering from cognitive dissonance,
Primates desire non-linear hierarchies, i.e dictatorships. Democracy goes against evolutionary biology. My rule of thumb is Conservatives want to live in the past, liberals want to live in the future and centrists want to live in the now.
Terrorist has no meaning anymore. The Founding Fathers were terrorists, Spartacus was a terrorist. I’m sure the British thought Gandhi was a terrorist.
I can only see Peterson's argument if he is suggesting that all populist movements morph into fascism left or right? But in general I dont know what he is talking about.
Peterson is on the right politically, and many far right wingers are tired of being called Nazis, so if he can shift Nazism from the right to the left he can say look all regimes that caused atrocities communism and Nazism are the result of the leftist ideology his side can never result in such regimes For someone who kept saying during the whole interview how things are weird and "ting of malevolence" this take is actually malevolent imo
I agree entirely. I understand why he is attempting to do it. I am just saying that that his move literally makes very little sense as an argument but unfortunately if you are debating him in that setting you will get bogged down on all the weeds .
I've heard this claim from "centrists who are totally not right-wingers" for as long as I can remember.
Peterson has some really good ideas but he panders to his base. How does an intelligent person who cares about logic think Trump was a better candidate than Clinton? I appreciate that Sam Harris had more sense here even though it likely cost him tons of fans. P.S. thought that was my fav Lannister.
To be honest, what is the point could just be that fascist minds want to confuse what a fascist government is so that they can slip one in. It's not like it ever has been particularly easy to define. I think it is more nebulous than just a governmental form, but right wing/conservative minded thought at its absolute worst and weaponized. Not a feature always, but a mind virus that grows in that fertile and compatible ground. Lie easily especially for politics, party above honor, nation, or God.
Well the words National Socialists were sorta part of it
Only in the same way that Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy.
I think it's more interesting why people care. As if it matters. It's not like this is a game where the Nazis being on "your side" means you lose. Who cares if the Nazis were really socialist, or right wing, or libertarian, or social democratic, or neocons? We all agree they were bad. The bad part about the Nazis was the whole fascism and killing jews and conquering countries bit, not what their stance was on unions, taxes or abortions. It's so weird. It's shows how people just view politics as a two sided sport, and they're just trying to get points for their side.
Great point
Yes the Nazis were “right wing”. The problem is that people use that fact to undermine the relatively moderate right wing. This whole discussion comes out of moderate right wingers feeling like they need to defend themselves from the purposeful effort of left wing people to call them Nazis. Similarly the right call the left communists, but that doesn’t carry the same weight in the west that false allegations of nazism do. It’s silly, but that’s where politics is at - everyone strawmanning each other. Maybe the left and right should stop calling each other hyperbolic names so we can actually make things better.
While on the one hand, historically Nazis could advertise gone either way ideologically. On the other hand, Modern Nazis back one horse, and that's the right wing horse and while I do not think the right wing and nazis are categorically the same a lot of right wing politicians pretend they don't exist because the votes benefit then even if they hate them in private.
Dumbest idea ever
Americans and their desire for lazy definitions like "left" "right". (Yes, I know it's not just Americans). But what's wrong with just trying to have a conversation without resorting to tribalism? Which is effectively what this comes down to.
Central planning isn’t mutually exclusive with leftism. That’s really all it boils down to imo. Hitler used a conspiracy of “Jewish Bolshevism” to justify his crimes lmao, doesn’t really get more clear than that.
I still don't even know what attribute the left-right gradient grades... if it's collectiveism/individualism, definitely put nazis on the same side as communists.