Were the Nazis on the political left or right?

[jim_s]

I'm genuinely asking this. I have some knowledge of military history, but I don't know anything about political history. I have a far too simplistic concept of what qualifies as the left or right: more government = left, less government = right. By those standards ... I still don't know where the Nazis fit. Both sides obviously want to claim they belong to the other. I suspect that both sides have their evils, and we shouldn't judge a political philosophy by its abuse.

I'm raising this now because I just read a post which makes an interesting point, one which I'm not in a position to dispute, but am suspicious about. Basically, the claim was that one of the standard anti-Semitic slurs is that Jews are money-grubbers, people who get involved in banking, finances, and other industries surrounding money. In this light, the Jews are therefore conceived as the personification of capitalism, and so anti-Semitism is essentially anti-capitalism. This would put the Nazis' views on the Jews squarely on the left. But that just seems too easy to me. So I'll just put it to my betters: were the Nazis left or right, and is anti-Semitism left or right? Do you find the anti-Semitism = anti-capitalism claim suspect, and if so, why?

Here's the blogpost I got it from:
davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2010/03/but-left-equals-virtue-.html

[acornuser]

They are typically taken as the extreme right form, but I can see why this seem be a bit simplistic. They did call themselves the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. However, they courted and integrated a large number of German corporations into their movement.

Let's give another example. I have a hard time seeing Otto von Bismarck as a euro-Social Democrat, yet he instituted pensions and other social reforms decades before the Liberal Reforms in the UK.

[noons]

Well, Jim. First we should address the origin of the question. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you heard some rhetoric along the lines of this:

"The Nazis were left wing/right wing and therefore today's center right/center left party members are NAZIS! OMFG!!!11!!1" Of course no one ever says it that way but that's almost always what they imply.

Basically, it is very difficult to take our current political spectrum and make it line up nicely with the competing ideologies of the 1930's, and remain intellectually honest. The NSDAP appealed to both the political right and left. At the time, all of the popular parties advocated some sort of government intervention in the economy, and even the socialists used anti-communist "red menace" rhetoric.

[perplexedseeker]

That's an excellent point noons made. In my opinion, what's truly extraordinary about the Nazis is what an odd grab-bag of fragments from different political traditions their ideology was. You have eugenic pseudoscience, marxist-style nationalisation of industries, exaltation of the warrior cult, extreme nationalism, anti-semitism... there's barely anything coherent about it at all. What's terrifying is that it was popular in spite of this.

[himself]

They were regarded at the time as being of the right, yet the only organized opposition they encountered came from the traditional right. Fascist parties that followed Mussolini and National Socialist parties on the Germanophile model were sometimes in conflict, and Hitler himself sometimes supported fascists over national socialists in conquered or allied countries.

The way I understand it, national socialists differ from international socialists in their eschatology. In orthodox socialism, the class struggle is resolved when the workers and peasants, under the leadership of the Vanguard of the Proletariat shake off their false consciousness and overthrow the aristocracy and bourgeoisie to establish the workers' paradise and be born again as the New Soviet Man.

National socialism, otoh, is the reformed version. The class struggle is resolved when a Leader emerges who will embody the Nation in his own personality and inspire all the classes to unite for the good of the Nation. Unrestrained capitalism will be brought to heel and directed by the Leader to work for the good of the Nation. Likewise, too, Labor and other classes. The real conflict is between rich nations [the haves] and poor nations [the have nots]. It was quite the coming thing in the 1920s and 1930s, especially among the Youth, who were bored with bourgeois respectability and wanted Change from their Victorian or Biedermaier parents.

John Lukacs has some interesting chapters on this in his work The Last European War.

Perhaps one may speak of the right and left wings of socialism, as the US conservatives or UK Tories are the right wing of liberalism.

[perplexedseeker]

That's an interesting idea. I had never thought of it that way.