🔒 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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