National Socialism being 'Right Wing'

Good question.

(disclaimer: this is not a political answer)

As a general background, this text does a pretty good job explaining the terms “left” and “right” in politics, and. Briefly, they originated from the seating of the delegates in the French National Assembly during the Revolution, and gradually evolved so that communism became “left” and capitalism became “right”.

The following is a bit of speculation of mine, but looking at some developments during the first decades of the twentieth century, I can see two reasons why the nazis would have been thought of as “extreme right”. Both are based on the fact that the communists were considered “extreme left” - in a sense that they were “more left” than the socialists or the social-democrats. That the communists were “extreme left” was not based on how the Soviet government ruled the country, but on their implementation of Marxism-Leninism.
The first reason could simply be that during the 1920’s and 1930’s, they were vocal and violent opponents of the communists, which became especially clear in Germany. So if the communists were “extreme  left”, then people would come to think of the nazis as “extreme right”.
The second reason could be that the nazis emphasized a nationalistic outlook, focusing on their own nation and its interests. The communists on the other hand, wanted an international revolution of the working class to happen, so their approach to dividing the people of this world into groups was radically different. Again, this difference may have led people to place the nazis at the “extreme right” part of the political spectrum.

Nazi Germany and the USSR were both totalitarian dictatorships – or single-party police states, to put it another way.  So in that respect they were very similar.  The far-right versus far-left dichotomy actually refers to how each society was structured on paper (and I stress “on paper” as opposed to in reality) from an ideological point of view.  Nazi Germany can be called a right-wing state because it was, by its own admission, vertically structured: the Leader at the top, and everyone else below him – in other words, the concept of structuring a state like an army.  The USSR can be called a left-wing state because it was (in principle) a horizontally-structured classless society.  In actual fact, it had its own powerful Leader at the top (especially in Stalin’s time), so in that respect it was far from being the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that it claimed to be.  The right/left terminology itself comes from the traditional association of the right with the aristocracy and of the left with the masses.

@Zooey72:

So your argument is, is that when you flip a coin because one side is heads, the other side has to be tails?

I see your point, but I have to disagree. The Nazis were far from being capitalist (Hitler raged against capitalism as much as he raged against Communism). The government would pay for cars and vacations as an incentive for the people to work more. Volkswagen “the people’s car” is the best example of that. A heavy handed government is a sign of the left, whether it be good or bad. Who wouldn’t want a paid for car and vacation? I won’t go into detail about the evils communism and national socialism, I am sure everyone here knows them.

I probably should have explained my idea a little better. My point was not that the nazis were ardent capitalists - in fact, I agree with you that the weren’t. My point was simply that because communism was considered “left”, people started to think of their opponents as “right”, regardless of their social-economic politics. But doing so, is probably just lazy thinking.

Suppose, as a thought experiment, that there would have been no prominent communist movement in Germany during the interbellum years, and that instead, the opposition to nazism by the old Prussian aristocracy and other conservative forces would have been much stronger. In that case, those opponents would have been though of as “right”, and it’s entirely possible that people would have considered the nazis “left”.

In the end, the whole left-right distinction is just not enough to define all possibilities in politics.

@Herr:

In the end, the whole left-right distinction is just not enough to define all possibilities in politics.

Particularly in the case of USSR and Nazi Germany, which each in their own way muddled the ideological waters.

In the case of the USSR, I’ve already mentioned that the Communist Revolution – whatever its theoretical foundation might have claimed – basically ended up replacing the authoritarian regime of the Tsars with the totalitarian regime of the CPSU, which was hardly an improvent.  The USSR, far from being a classless workers’ paradise, was a nation in which the party elite was privileged and the workers and peasants were pretty much as poor and ill-treated as they’d been under Nicolas II and his predecessors.

As for the Nazi Party, its very name – “National Socialist German Worker’s Party” – illustrates that Hitler wanted it to sound as if it was all things to all people.  Its original core values (at the time when Hitler took it over) of authoritarianism, militarism and hardline nationalism were traditionally associated with the right, which in Germany’s case can be very roughly equated with the Prussian aristocracy, the officer class and the wealthy.  Hitler’s innovation (if you want to call it that) was to retain the Party’s traditionally rightist values, but to turn them into a radical mass movement that would appeal to the middle and lower classes.  Mass radicalism is traditionally seen as a left-wing phenomenon (the social elites being too small in number to qualify as a “mass”), and in 1920s Germany it was being practiced by the various Communist movements which (like the Nazi Party) was capitalizing on post-war chaos there.  Hitler, in essence, broowed their methodology and created a mass radicalism of the right that ended up beating the mass radicals of the left on their own ground.

As long as SOMEBODY does not start bringing up the Holocaust and how the Allied blockade and Soviet Russia were worse than how the Germans treated prisoners and Jews and other revisionist ideas about simple facts, i don’t see this being a political thread. But if you begin to see really long winded soapbox posts about nothing, run for the hills.

The national socialists considered themselves right-wing.  While their agenda was populist, radical, revolutionary, it’s also anti-left and explicitly opposed to the (left-wing) socialists and communists.  Fascists adopted marching and sloganeering tactics from the left but their message was aimed at persuading right-wingers, monarchists, religious believers, etc, who weren’t interested in communism or socialism.

When you look at the electoral history of the period, as they rose the Nazis took the most votes from the Nationalists and National Liberals (eg, conservative, protestant, capitalist funded) as well as the Center (Catholic).  People who formerly supported these right-leaning parties converted to national socialism.

The Nazis eventually formed a coalition with Nationalist and Center politicians.  As far as I’m aware, the Nazis didn’t form working relationships with “left” parties like the SPD, KPD etc.

They were “right-wing” within their own context–perhaps many aspects of the 30s would be considered “left-wing” by the MSM today.

The 30s were a period of bureaucratic collectivism worldwide–all Western governments of the period shared some common features, from right-wing to left-wing to any-wing.  Nazi Germany was particularly barbaric but Stalin set the stage for it.

‘Left/right’ designations more accurately refer to cultural attitudes than economic philosophy.  Attitudes towards religion, morality, tradition, authority etc.  The Nazis did not present themselves as “secular” the way a leftist party would.

In that case, we seem to be in disagreement about what primarily defines “right” and “left” in politics. In my opinion, it’s primarily about socio-economics: the choice a society can make to either allow unrestricted capitalism, or impose checks and balances aimed at a more egalitarian situation. Of course, the more checks and balances you have, the more government you’ll need. So “big government” tends to be a symptom of left-wing policy, but I don’t see it as a defining factor.
As to the rulers of earlier centuries…. they were simply the people who held the power. The existence of an aristocracy is in itself neither right-wing nor left-wing, but throughout history, the ruling class has more often associated itself with the rich and powerful than with the working poor and their interests. So I tend to place them on the right side of the political arena.

@Zooey72:

Heavy handed government whether it be a king, president, czar, or whatever title you want to give it is a sign of the leftist politics.

Monarchies are by definition right-wing. It doesn’t matter if they are heavy-handed or laissez-faire.

CWO Marc makes the most accurate analogy: left/right is roughly equivalent to egalitarian/stratified.

The closest humanity has come to a far-left society in practice have been hunter-gatherers.

One might argue that left-wing policies are created in response to unrestricted capitalism. The Great Depression was not really limited to the US. Germany was facing very difficult economic times and my understanding is that part of the reason Hitler was able to gin up hatred at the Jewish folks was they were involved or perceived to be involved with much of the banking foreclosures German citizens were experiencing.
My understanding is the National Socialists were in many ways “industry friendly.”

In any sense that they might have been nationalizing industry like we might take as “communist” it was so the “right” (pun intended) private citizen might make a lot of money. I have to join the chorus that “right” and “left” aren’t particularly useful when talking about all of this.

@Zooey72:

@Zhukov44:

The national socialists considered themselves right-wing.�  While their agenda was populist, radical, revolutionary, it’s also anti-left and explicitly opposed to the (left-wing) socialists and communists.�  Fascists adopted marching and sloganeering tactics from the left but their message was aimed at persuading right-wingers, monarchists, religious believers, etc, who weren’t interested in communism or socialism.

When you look at the electoral history of the period, as they rose the Nazis took the most votes from the Nationalists and National Liberals (eg, conservative, protestant, capitalist funded) as well as the Center (Catholic).�  People who formerly supported these right-leaning parties converted to national socialism.

The Nazis eventually formed a coalition with Nationalist and Center politicians.�  As far as I’m aware, the Nazis didn’t form working relationships with “left” parties like the SPD, KPD etc.

They were “right-wing” within their own context–perhaps many aspects of the 30s would be considered “left-wing” by the MSM today.

The 30s were a period of bureaucratic collectivism worldwide–all Western governments of the period shared some common features, from right-wing to left-wing to any-wing.�  Nazi Germany was particularly barbaric but Stalin set the stage for it.

‘Left/right’ designations more accurately refer to cultural attitudes than economic philosophy.�  Attitudes towards religion, morality, tradition, authority etc.�  The Nazis did not present themselves as “secular” the way a leftist party would.

I am going to go back to my comparison of both being gangs.  The Crips and Bloods may hate each other, but they are pretty much the same.  Hatred of Communism may have led to a lot of Germans to follow the Nazis, but I still maintain that there was little difference (if any) between Communism and National Socialism.  A lot of the arguments I am reading are more about semantics of “How people viewed it”.  The real question is “what was it really?”

I am sure that every Death’s Head SS officer viewed himself as some kind of saint while he committed unspeakable atrocities.  Just because that was his point of view, that doesn’t make it so, much less give justification for what he did.

There is some justification for that generalization, given that the communists and nazis borrowed alot from each other and both sides (being basically militarist and authoritarian) tended to put the orders/authority of leaders above principle.  Both sides considered themselves at war and at war principle is sacrificed to strategy.  However, this tends to go on alot in history–for example while the United States and the Soviet Union were in competition with each other they borrowed alot from each other (as authentic competitors are wont to do…).

Anyway, there were real ideological differences between the communists and national socialists on the issues of family, race, constitutional right, nation, Versailles, Jews, economic organization, labor organization, and many others.  While it doesn’t help us to take left/right designations overly literally, it also doesn’t really help us to gloss over these real, and not merely apparant, differences.

@Zooey72:

Other than Goering who was a WW1 war hero, the Nazis were a bunch of rabble.  Failed artists hobos and chicken farmers hardly constitute Prussian aristocracy.  But going with your thought experiment… you prove my point.  The Nazis were the left, but I disagree that a Prussian king was the right.  Heavy handed government whether it be a king, president, czar, or whatever title you want to give it is a sign of the leftist politics.

King Solomon even though he was blessed by God with wisdom (and was kind) was on the left side of politics, he ruled unilaterally.

The thing is, the press organs of the time were already “left” or “right”.  Rightist media (such as the empire of Hugenberg, who was more or less the Murdoch of his generation) supported and allied itself with Hitler.  Left-wing media castigated and hated Hitler.  Eg you can understand the ‘left’ and ‘right’ camps of this period when you understand the division of German society into 2 camps–those who supported the new Weimar government (or those, like Communists, who wanted a socialist revolution) and those who opposed it (or those, like Nazis, who wanted to overthrow liberalism utterly).  Weimar Germany (like 1930s Spain) was a deeply polarized society.

The kind of authoritarian/anti-authoritarian or big government/small government dichotomies favored among American libertarians had little relevance to German politics in the 30s.  The closest thing to a classical liberal party in 1930s Germany would be the Democrat party that supported the Weimar constitution and allied itself to the Social Democrats.  Mises himself had a right-wing orientation and was sympathetic to the fascists but he also had no place in the politics of the time, given that he opposed the cultural and economic interventionism practiced by his right-wing Catholic allies.  In general, classical liberals were just as unwelcome in Nazi circles as in Communist circles.

John Gill: “Most efficient state…Earth ever knew”

Spock: “Quite true, Captain.  A tiny country…beaten…bankrupt…defeated…rose in a few years to stand one step away from global domination!”

—Star Trek TOS “Patterns of Force”

I really don’t think I could argue the point.

I’m not sure that the left and the right can be defined simply in terms of whether they are in favour of big government or opposed to it.  It could be argued that there are actually four possibilities: big-government societies of the left, small-government societies of the left, big-government societies of the right and small-government societies of the right.

Societies of the left are theoretically equalitarian: according to their doctrine, the ideal state of affairs is one in which everyone is on the same level, with nobody in a position of privilege over anyone else.  Societies of the right are theoretically elitist: according to their doctrine, the ideal state of affairs is one in which everyone occupies a place within a vertically stratified society that corresponds to their personal degree of merit (or lack thereof) or luck (or lack thereof).  Big-government societies tend to be what exist in the real world, particularly in large nation-states.  Small-government societies tend to exist mostly on paper, in the writings of political and economic theorists; where they exist in the real world, it tends to be only in social entities that are much smaller than nation-states.

A small-government and genuinely equalitarian society of the left would be a “commune” in the true sense of the word (as opposed to what the USSR was, namely a big-government society of the left).  A small-government society of the right would correctly be described as a libertarian one, not necessarily as a conservative one.  Libertarians and conservatives (using those terms for purposes of convenience; there may be better ones available) may both be fine with the concept of a vertically-stratified society, but they differ on the role that government should play in society.  In the libertarian view, government should not interfere with individuals; ideally, in fact, there should be little or no government at all.  Conservatives, by contrast, are open to the existence of bigger governments that the libertarian view permits; in this respect, conservative views overlap to some extent with those of the centre and the left.  Where these views differ is on the subject of what government should be used for – an example being the tendency of the left to be seen as pro-labour (and of actively working in support of that agenda when it’s in power) and of the right to be seen as pro-business (and of actively working in support of that agenda when it’s in power).  A libertarian would probably argue that government shouldn’t be pro-anything – certainly not pro-labour, but not even pro-business.