Jack Burroughs demonstrates his complete ignorance of virtually every single left-wing ideology, party, and movement in human history in seeking to argue that the Nazis Are Too White Right-Wing Christian Conservative Republicans.
Read the Munich Manifesto. The fact that you’ve swallowed the ahistorical revisionism doesn’t change history. The Mensheviks fought the Bolsheviks too, the SPD fought the KPD too, that didn’t make any of them parties of the Right.”
I have read it, Vox. The issue here is not my ignorance of history, but rather that you insist on approaching this question as an extremely narrow definitional argument, almost as if you can, through linguistic sorcery, magically define the Nazis out of the history of the Right. You don’t usually argue that way, but for some reason you do it with this question.
Yes, there are some Left wing elements in the National Socialist platform. I have never denied that. My point is that National Socialism is blatantly anti-egalitarian in spirit and racially supremacist at its foundation, and for that reason cannot be called primarily Left wing. It was a sui generis experiment in political hybridization that was unmistakably Right wing in spirit, while making certain concessions to the collectivist Zeitgeist as a means of preempting the Communist threat.
The Nazi’s ideological commitment to anti-egalitarian racial biology, along with their astonishingly vivid and imposing rallies and heroic iconography radiate Right wing energy like a fever dream. That is why people with Far Right tendencies are often drawn to Nazism, and that is why people with Left wing tendencies are universally repulsed by it.
The call for equal rights for Germans in the Munich manifesto was, in effect, a call for an organic meritocracy, with free and flexible social mobility, such that the most gifted people from the lower classes could rise, and the pseudo-elites at the top could be purged. It was also a declaration of social and political holism: every person, of every class, had value to the whole of the State.
But It was not in any sense a Left wing claim that everyone is basically alike, but for differences in economics and social circumstances.
My argument in this case is no different than my argument in every other one. Jack simply doesn’t know what he is talking about because he is a historical and ideological ignoramus. By his bizarre definition of the ideological Left, even the Leninists and Stalinists and Jacobins and Zapatistas and Nasserites and Khmer Rouge and Maoists were all right-wing. All of these major leftist movements were extremely conscious of the difference between their countrymen and everyone else on the planet. It will be interesting to hear how Jack tries to explain how Stalin and Bukharin’s “socialism in one country”, which became formal Soviet policy as early as 1925, and Nasser’s socialist Pan-Arabism, are somehow of the ideological Right.
Jack has no case whatsoever because he doesn’t understand what it means to be of the political Left. The absolute egalitarianism of globalism is a recent and extreme form of Leftism, it is very far from defining the historical limits of Leftism. It is well to the Left of both Trotsky and Stalin; even Trotsky’s “World Revolution” ideology openly acknowledged that everyone is not “basically alike but for differences in economics and social circumstances.”
And neither nationalism nor ethnocentrism is intrinsically of the Right either. As I pointed out in my debate with Greg Johnson, the national socialist parties that historically preceded and followed the German variant in China, Vietnam, and Egypt were also all of the Left. Jack’s equation of the Left with absolute global egalitarianism is not merely wrong, it is completely ahistorical. And when Jack talks about “an extremely narrow definitional argument”, he is observably projecting his own approach.
