Why the Right Thinks the Nazis Were Left-Wing

I can’t help but find it hilarious that the US Republican party is trying to revive the Red Scare. Not just your standard “Obamacrats are coming for your 401k” stuff either, but authentic 1950s gray flannel “reds under the bed” War of the Worlds hysteria. Before this year I can’t remember the last time I heard a legitimate and non-crackpot politician say the word “communism” with genuine malice. You might as well start warning people about polio (although I don’t doubt RFK Jr is working to bring that back too.)

 The biggest reason for this, of course, is that there’s a surge of democratic socialists winning elections and primaries, and the GOP wants people to panic about this ahead of the midterms. In the clunkiest possible style, they’re trying to equate democratic socialism with “communism,” and communism with mile-long outdoor queues for a loaf of bread in a blizzard.

 But the world’s richest man is jumping on this bandwagon by spamming Twitter with a claim he’s made before. It’s one of his fixations: Hitler was a far-left socialist!

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the fastest land speed ever recorded was an adult male conservative who wasn’t within arm’s length of a computer the moment he learned that the word “Nazi” was short for “National Socialist.” Every young reactionary can pinpoint where they were and what they were doing when they discovered this fact and transformed into Paul Revere.

One of the most popular responses to this bit is something like “well I guess the Democratic Republic of Korea is a democracy, then,” that being the official name of what we colloquially know as North Korea, and which obviously and demonstrably is not a democratic republic. I’ve never seen anyone give a counter-response to that, but it nevertheless rolls right off the backs of people who are determined to tell you that Nazism was a far-left movement.

 You don’t need these kinds of counter-examples, though, because it should be enough to point out that every single reputable historian and political philosopher will tell you that the Nazis were either extremely far-right, or else I think there are few who think they were kind of a third different type of thing going off on kind of a Z-axis, but in any case, none of them will say that they were on the left.

 Rejection of credentialed expertise is kind of the right’s whole thing, though, or else there wouldn’t be a game show host in the Oval Office, an environmental lawyer with no medical background running the healthcare system, a news anchor running the military, and a real estate developer trying to negotiate the end of a war.

So besides the obvious sophistry here of trying to connect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez directly to the Third Reich (and you don’t necessarily have to believe the Nazis were leftists in order to use the idea as propaganda) there are people who do sincerely seem to believe that, in the face of all arguments to the contrary, the Nazis were left-wing. Why is this?

 Certainly, actual neo-Nazis would be very surprised to hear that they are leftists. Murderously surprised, probably. The rally they held in Charlottesville in 2017 was, after all, called the “Unite the Right” rally, so titled because it was deliberately styled as an opportunity for different Nazi-adjacent groups to join forces, such as the neo-Confederates and the KKK.

 The Klan, of course, is another group that the same propogandists will insist are radical leftists, usually pointing out that a hundred and fifty years ago emerged from the Democratic Party (who were also very right-wing a hundred and fifty years ago but they will deny this.)

This is another example of the exact same phenomenon, and when it’s sincere, it’s because they are seeing the political spectrum in a fundamentally different way to how the rest of us see it, which is something that has a center and ideologies that are to the left and the right of it. As people get toward the far edges of this spectrum they start to lose the idea that they are on a line with a “right” and a “left,” even though they use those words.

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The far-right don’t see themselves as far-right because they don’t think there is any such thing as “far-right,” that this is in fact a nonsense term. To them, politics is radial: they inhabit a point called “the right,” and everything else in every direction is “the left.”

 To visualize it the way that people really do, it is much easier to stop thinking of “left” and “right” and instead think “north” and “south.”

 If you’re living on the equator then it’s pretty guaranteed that you are going to realize that you are smack in the middle between north and south. Geographically, you are Ecuador. Politically, I’m very sorry to tell you that you are Bill Maher. 

Travel a little way south and you’ll run into Matthew Yglesias. A little way north and you’ll find Tim Miller. It’s easy to see that there are other people much further north and south of both of them.

 But let’s say you head north and just keep heading north. Something changes when you get to the Arctic. You keep moving in the same direction but you stop seeing yourself as moving further north, because you are on a globe and not a plane. You are not moving in a direction that terminates at an edge or a wall. “North” starts to lose all meaning. You actually just see yourself as moving toward the center of the Arctic.

 In the center of the Arctic everyone in every direction from you is to the south of you, but you are still in the center. Moreover, nobody you see as an extremist can possibly be close to where you are, because the center is the furthest possible thing from an extreme. There is only one direction away from you, and the only possible extremity is the extreme south.

 I’ve met people who will quite comfortably call themselves center-right, acknowledging that there are extremists to the right of them, but I have rarely come across anyone who will call themselves “far-right.” They may say “dissident right” or “alt-right,” acknowledging that there are other rightists with whom they have technical disagreements, but they will not label themselves extreme and will not label anyone else on the right extreme, because people on the right, they reckon, by definition cannot be extreme. There is only one extreme, and it is the extreme left.

I should note here that the same inclination exists on the left but it’s slightly different in the sense that, for whatever reason, you will find leftists who will proudly label themselves far-left or radical left. I don’t know what the difference is with leftists being willing to embrace the label of radicalism, but in any case, there is a tendency for far-leftists to see other far-left groups as being actually “on the right.” Ask an anarchist what they think of Marxist-Leninists and they might tell you that if you scratch a tankie a fascist will bleed. Ask an ML what they think of anarchists and they might tell you your CIA badge is glowing. Ask either of them what they think of progressives and they’ll just chuck a Molotov at you.

 Now, as to the actual claim that Nazis can’t be right-wing because “socialism” is in the name: Interestingly, it actually is possible to be a right-wing socialist or even a right-wing communist. It is difficult, and to my knowledge there have never been any major internally-consistent examples, but “left” and “right” and “socialism” have different dimensions that can be played with in interesting ways. There’s something called the Center for Political Innovation that seems to be some kind of Trump and Putin-supporting right-socialist thing that is maybe also a cult. There’s a guy named Jackson Hinkle who created a schism in the Communist Party of the USA and founded a breakaway far-right “MAGA communism” party. Then there’s the National Bolsheviks—the Nazbols—who have a flag that looks like this: 

Politics is very complicated and many have come to the conclusion that it’s absurd that we even attempt to map ideology onto a 2-D compass and that any attempt at doing so is going to be approximate at best and misinformation at worst.

 The question of where the Nazis fell on the political spectrum is not, however, questionable or unknown or up for debate, because, unlike how people on the extremes might picture it or their position on it, “left” and “right” are not based on vibes. They have scholarly definitions, and Hitler and the Nazis were and are very much on the far right. That doesn’t mean everyone on the right are Nazis. The Nazis, though, are all on the right.

 I’m not going to get into the weeds about why, but if you are interested, or if you’re about to accuse me of copping out, the excellent John Ganz has a pair of essays that go into detail about NSDAP politics and economics in terms of socialism and leftism: Part 1 and Part 2.

 Now, however, I have to address something that a lot of you have been psychically screaming at me since the third paragraph:

 “But SPD, isn’t Elon a Nazi??”

Okay, so I wrote at length about that salute that Elon Musk did at the Trump inauguration the week that it happened, and you can read the long-form version of my thoughts on it here. The short of it is that I don’t know what exactly Musk was going for when he did that, but my conclusion is it’s somewhere in the space between “he was trolling” and “remarkably, he was telling the truth” about the throwing his heart out thing or whatever.

 The point is, I study Musk a lot… like a lot, since I’m writing a book that has quite a bit of him in it. I can’t find anything to suggest that he is an ideological Nazi. He doesn’t agree with Hitler. He in fact thinks Hitler was very bad and very wrong.

 In saying that, I am not defending Elon Musk—I’m doing the opposite, because I believe that Musk’s disagreement with Hitler comes largely from the fact that he just doesn’t know much about Hitler. I suspect that if Musk was intellectual enough to understand Hitler’s politics he would find a fair bit more in common than he knows. You know what, I’m not even going to make the case outright that Hitler is significantly worse than Elon Musk because I’m not terribly sure where I stand on that. 

Musk is a type of fascist, as is Nazism, but they are in different subcategories. I am currently reading the book aptly titled Muskism in which the authors make a compelling point that he has established his own kind of fascism with a distinct relationship between the corporation and the state (very roughly, the latter being subservient to the former) that differs from how they did it in the grand old days of World War Two.

What Musk knows about Hitler is that Hitler hated and wanted to exterminate the Jews. Musk is a Zionist whose relationship with antisemitism seems to have a political axis (he thinks Liberal Western Judaism is an existential threat but absolutely loves Netanyahu’s Muslim extermination project.) I think Musk probably sees Hitler’s genocide as both aimed at the wrong people and also that killing via direct extermination rather than passive neglect is vulgar and uncivilized.

 From an objective standpoint, this doesn’t put Musk terribly far from Hitler on the political spectrum. From Musk’s point of view, though, Hitler is an extremist. So he can’t be on the right, because there are no extremists on the right, by definition.

 So Musk is just hanging out in the center of the Arctic with his fellow moderates—Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, Greg Bovino—while super-radical-far-left-ultra-communists like Hitler, Stalin, Bernie Sanders, Hasan Piker, Osama bin Laden, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Barack Obama, Sam Altman, and all of his ex-wives share the exact same political ideology on the opposite side of the planet.

 This is the only comfort I find in the fact that the Arctic is melting. I don’t think any of those assholes can swim.

As I just mentioned, I'm writing a book about not just Musk but right-wing reactionary movements in tech and geek culture in general. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.

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