The Nazis Were Left Wing and the Soviets Were Right Wing
The "Left-Right" Spectrum Obfuscates the Real Issues
Read the title again if you didn’t think it was provocative.
Were the Nazis and the Communists Left or Right Wing?
The first half of this question1 is a perennial one to which everyone thinks they have a simple answer: the Nazis were the opposite of whatever I am. The second half, however, is one that everyone thinks is so obvious that it isn’t even a question. To the first, if you’re a conservative, the National Socialist German Workers Party is the epitome and end statement of left-wing socialism, and modern left-wingers are headed in that same direction.2 If you’re a liberal, leftist, or anything of that stripe, Nazis are the epitome of the right-wing ideology, and Donald Trump is well on his way to being the next Hitler. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, is nearly universally agreed to be a left-wing socialist/communist state. Whether it was a functioning left-wing state may provoke some real disagreement based on your present-day politics, as many leftists would eagerly claim that “that wasn’t real socialism” or something. But no one really disagrees that Stalin and the Soviets were leftists of some kind.
I used to hold these commonplace views. Because I was once a typical Ronald Reagan or Mike Pence-esque conservative, I once upon a time therefore understood Nazis as left wing socialists. It’s right there in the name, I thought. What more is there to say? And of course the Soviets… No need to even say it. They’re the farthest left of all leftists. Besides Pol Pot, maybe…
But then I read, listened to some things, and read some more, and my position flipped. The Nazis were crazy radicals yes, but crazy far-right radicals in their nationalism, corporatism, etc. Of course, the “Republicans are Nazis” or “Trump is Hitler” slur is baseless, but we conservatives sure do need to police our rightward flank, or so I thought. Dan Carlin’s “Superhumanly Inhman” episode offers the best exposition of this popular, Nazis are right-wing radicals, perspective, and the one that is most commonly held.
Hitler’s longstanding opposition towards and eventual invasion of the Soviet Union is the best proof of this perspective. For Hitler, the Bolsheviks, in his mind, only one head of a multi-headed Leftist-Liberal-Judeo-Bolshevism monster, was the enemy. And, so, naturally, if Hitler hates the left, he must be the opposite. The fact that nationalists, monarchists, and corporations supported Hitler’s rise to power and business benefitted from his rule, with further inklings that the German deep state, that is, the army and intelligence supporters may have also played a part in his rise would seem to demonstrate that Hitler was far from a radical left-wing revolutionary as you could be.
Nazi-Soviet Convergence
But with further study, this simple picture becomes even more complicated, as I came to realize a few months ago when reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times. As I noted in more detail in my review of Johnson’s 20th-century history, there were lots of overlaps between the seemingly opposed ideological movements of the early 20th century.
Lenin/Stalin and Hitler (and Mussolini) did not work out their respective ideological programs against a static backdrop but instead reacted to and fed off of the examples set by each other. Mussolini’s fascism, Paul Johnson argues, is but a variant or heresy of Marxist socialism, one making practical concessions to the world as it is, proposing to exploit and control capitalism by the state, but not to overthrow it completely.
Communism in the U.S.S.R, similarly, makes a few practical concessions for the sake of some smidgen of realism, and forgoes its impossible idealistic dreams of communist utopia for the sake of the harsh realities of industrialization and ends up looking—absent different names for the details of the ruling ideology, and different job titles for all the government staff, not too dissimilar from Mussolini’s project. Hitler’s Nazism, modeled after Mussolini’s movement, is thus also, even in reacting to socialism and communism, a movement that exists in a Marxist context, heavily influenced by and heavily influencing Italian fascism and the U.S.S.R. Rather than diametrically opposed movements by nature, fascism, Nazism, and communism, were mimetically related tango partners to each other in behavior, tactics, appeals, and relationship to the outside world.
Regardless of the differences in external ideological branding, Italy, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and to some extent Japan, had become very much alike2 internally by the mid-1930s as state-administered and controlled command economies run by terror and economically modeled after the pattern set by Imperial German economy under the effective control of Ludendorff and Hindenburg in World War I.3
Also, their physical marketing and propaganda did look the same. Look at this again:
The most important point of convergence for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (as well as Mussolini’s Italy) was structural, they all wound up as state-planned and directed centralized economies and states. Yes, branding and marketing, the propagandistic appeals, the chosen state enemies, etc., differed a little, especially during the early revolutionary periods of each regime. Yes, you can distinguish between “Class Marxism” and “Race Marxism. ”Yes, technically, in Nazi Germany businesses were partners of the government, rewarded when they supported government objectives with monopolies, contracts, cheap slave labor, etc., whilst in the Soviet Union all enterprises were state-owned and directed. However, the basic outcome was the same: big government and big business fully centralized and cooperating towards radical social engineering goals whilst killing millions along the way.
Does it really matter if it is the state that controls the businesses or the businesses that control the state if they’re all run by the same oligarchs anyway?
How do we divide “left” from “right” anyway?
But this brings up a wider categorization problem. How should we define left as distinct from right when seemingly opposed movements share much in common? Do you define movements or parties by their “de facto” inner essence? Or by their external marketing? Do you define a revolutionary movement by its initial message? Or by their later propaganda once they have consolidated power? Or again by a later stage “de facto” reality?
Traditionally, left and right have been defined in reference to the French Revolution’s differing ideological factions. The right began as a way of referring to the beliefs of those who sat on the right side of the revolutionary National Assembly and who, more associated with hierarchy, tradition, and monarchy, were less excited about continuing the revolution and the Lockean “blank slate” and Rousseauian “noble savage” views of human nature that formed its philosophical basis. The left, by contrast, were the Girondins, Jacobins, and more extreme radicals who wished to push the revolution further. There is a certain objectivity to our continuing to use a variation on this model today, placing those who believe in a corrupted world that can be salvaged to a degree by a stronger role for faith, family, and order on the right and those who believe instead that these traditional hierarchies are oppressive and need to be replaced by an engineered, infinitely perfectible society on the right.
But this model, objective as it may seem, and as much as it worked in 19th century Europe between monarchists (right) and republicans (left), doesn’t work that well anymore. For one, compared to any society before the French Revolution, we’re all liberals who don’t want much authority that we don’t influence influencing us. For another, those on the right don’t really agree about what older tradition we want preserved. Is it the US Constitution? Or Traditional Catholicism and monarchy? Or some vague Judeo-Christian abstraction of “values”? Or patriarchy, regardless of whether it’s the Tate brothers’ Islamic and human trafficking filled version or some memory of the good version we did use to have? On the left, meanwhile, is the future utopia San Francisco applied to the entire country? Or Egyptian Islamic fundamentalism (ironic)? Is the utopia that centers their view of progress a world where everyone gains a spot on the “LGBTQ” rainbow acronym? Or one where everyone is a minority?
We’re in a multipolar world when it comes to ideological fountainheads. There is no longer merely one axis of differentiation, such as more pro-monarchy or more pro-republic, but many. In response, Balaji Sriniivasan proposes an alternative and more subjective “tactics” way of defining left and right in is his book The Network State, where right is defined as those who control or support the rule of the current most powerful institutions regardless of what they are while left is whatever coalition assembles against these, either to destroy them out right or to propose alternatives. In this view, Trump, even though he is in power and in (some) ways more metaphysically right-wing than his opponents,4 is the left of today’s political divide while the Federal employees, the CIA, the FBI, the major universities, etc. are the right today. For Balaji, the tactics a group uses, supporting power or attempting to take down or replace power, divide groups in a way that matters more than their metaphysical beliefs about said power. This model, too, has its weaknesses, but the key point Balaji makes in setting forth this new model is that any movement will be a fusion of left and right characteristics and will also switch its tactics over time. Early Christians were left wing in response to the pagan Roman empire and used left tactics to bring it down, but later came into power and used “right” tactics, defending Christendom against threats.
I don’t find either model perfect, which perhaps is the point, as reality is more complicated than a one-dimensional model. It is a reductive distraction to try to reduce political analysis to fit terminology, as yes, you may have gerrymandered the definition of left and right to make X movement be right wing, but you haven’t proved anything other than your ability to define left and right. Often, these oversimplifications hide the true complexity and evolution over time of a political ideology.
I don’t believe there are truly objective and universally applicable standards for the words left and right as these are mere abstractions. But let’s still have a little fun with these definitions, shall we?
Hitler Was Left Wing, Stalin Was Right Wing
Lenin and the Bolshevik Communists used left-wing, that is, disruptive and attacking power tactics to take over the Tsarist Russian Empire. To be precise, they were taking down Kerensky’s semi-socialist Republic, another left-wing liberal regime, but well, clear enough. They were advancing a leftist ideology of destroying tradition to advance “the future”. Clearly left.
Similarly, Hitler and his S.A. brownshirts used mob intimidation (and backroom dealing) tactics, as did the Bolsheviks, to threaten an existing left-wing regime. They were nationalist, yes, but they also wanted to destroy the existing commercial and social order and replace it with something more fair and equitable to those they cared about and considered human.
But after they were fully entrenched in power, Hitler and Stalin used their power to entrench it further. Lenin, until his death, preached for an international revolution of workers everywhere, but his successor Stalin’s “socialism in one country” pushed nationalism suppression of minorities5 and strong militarism as much as did Hitler’s similar shoring up of his own power base in Germany. Hitler portrayed World War II, at least on the Eastern front, as a new Crusade against the atheistic Bolsheviks more than a few times. And yes, it may have been an act, but it was a calculated act to build up support for Operation Barbarossa. Similarly, Stalin stopped trying as aggressively to suppress Russian nationalism and the Orthodox church and leaned on the Russian tradition and the Church to bolster support for the “Great Patriotic War.”
Defending homeland, tradition, and “Christendom” to some degree, even if these all were merely rhetorical fluff, at least sound like right wing appeals.
To me, especially with the structural similarity of how Nazi and Soviet economies were run, and even more so during the war, classifying them as left or right is meaningless. Is it left-wing to be a Russian nationalist conscript fighting Germans with the same oligarchical and oppressive (literally enserfing or enslaving) economic structure that you’re under? Is it right wing to have a pagan leadership performing occult rituals in the woods as the Nazis had?
To be clear, we can call the tactics of order, fear, hierarchy, and strong, all-powerful institutions used by both regimes after they each came into power right wing. But we have to call, simultaneously, their departure from past traditions and the violent tactics they each used to get into power left wing. I prefer calling them both outlaws or gangsters toward the international world order of the time, brief allies as they were in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in a conspiracy of crime as wolf-like states aiming to destroy the international precdents of “law” to replace it with one of force that they could benefit from.6
But to give a single answer to split the balance, I will end with the claim that Stalin and the Soviet Union were to the right of Hitler’s Germany as Paul Johnson notes in Modern Times that at the end of his life near the end of the war, Hitler bemoaned not being more revolutionary and socialist with the social engineering the Nazis had performed in Germany, evidencing both the tensions and cross purposes remained within Germany and the Nazi movement. But Johnson doesn’t fully answer that question, leaving it by saying that Hitler was an eccentric socialist.
Hitler, perhaps, coming from a poor background as he did, and being an artist as he was, was also always a left-winger who wanted a utopian society with wealth redistribution, loose public morality, etc. Hitler leading a vanguard out-of-power party was by nature more anti-establishment as he himself performed the revolution that was the Nazi takeover. He had to ally with elements of the current order, the existing business oligarchs of his day, to gain power, and, bemoaning this fact, always wanted a further revolution to reach some future utopian Germania inspired by the mythic past. Stalin, by contrast, was always a gangster, always comfortable with power, and just wanted to rise to the top of a pre-existing power structure (as he did, rising through the Bolshevik ranks after the revolutions had already happened).
This view is again a stretch, as the movements look too similar to really contrast well in themselves, but again left-wing during their attempts to gain power, but right-wing once entrenched in power although Hitler was perhaps a little more to the left than Stalin, especially during World War II.7
What matters much more again is that you judge a movement based on the morality of what it is and what it calls for, not by its position on some scale you can gerrymander or define in different ways.
We could stop talking about whether the movements of 80 years ago were “left” or right and just say they were both objectively bad by what they did, not because of whether they were left or right. Similarly, today, I judge (or at least try to) ideologies and ideas by their merits and not whether they are left or right. Idiosyncratically, I’m by some measure a “far-right leftist” who’s both somewhat libertarian and somewhat collectivist all simultaneously. The agendas of individuals matter more to me than their labels. I’m against Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate for what they promote just about as much as I’m against Bernie Sanders and AOC. Every movement, by any definition of left or right, will be a fusion of the two—and neither. This applies particularly to Trump and MAGA. It’s not of itself a left or right wing movement. It’s a movement that promotes a mix of things that should all be judged on their own, and for now, mostly positive merits.
Purposely being provocative isn’t always wrong, as long as you’re not just going for click count alone and have no content—or if you are running for political office. I could have phrased this far more provocatively, so I’ll claim innocence on the first and have no plans for political office, so I’ll claim like all of us semi-Pharisees to stand justified in making some claims that could bother, well, actually, everyone.
As Jonah Goldberg claims in Liberal Fascism.
The Girardian principle that enemies become more like each other when they are in conflict gives intriguing lessons for today, as yes, there are certain things that the U.S. picked up from Nazism/Fascism (and from Communism) in how it fought the Cold War and the War on Terror…
A leftist named Michael Judge whom I'll only half-recommend as he is rather vulgar, does make some good points in his podcast on fascism here and the rest of his Death is Just Around the Corner show, even if I also think he’s missing half the picture in calling the last 80 years “far right”: https://www.patreon.com/posts/74-free-reissue-61146006
He and they, that is, all of us, are all classical liberals to at least some degree.
The Holodomor was almost as bad as the Holocaust if you’re looking at straight body count and ethnic targeting.
Also, for some reason, they don’t want you mentioning the Holdomor…
Unfortunately, force does rule most of the time, and today’s pretensions that international law rules is a dangerous farce. However, back when Christendom meant something, law meant at least for something between Christian rulers
I may revise this somewhat with a conspiracy theory to be discussed at some point in the future that Hitler was a puppet, an agent of German intelligence who just happened to get out of control. We do know that he was working for the Army as a spy when he visited the first NSDAP party meeting…