Were Nazis lefties?

[caketastydelish]

I don't agree about that but we don't even have to go there.

The Confederates were fighting to preserve a form of systematic oppression that was specifically and directly on racial lines. Ayn Rand and "Austrian economics" are not.

 

[Cutlass]

I don't agree about that but we don't even have to go there.

The Confederates were fighting to preserve a form of systematic oppression that was specifically and directly on racial lines. Ayn Rand and "Austrian economics" are not.

The Confederates were fighting to preserve a system of class privilege. This is what Austrian economics is all about.

 

[Lexicus]

Ayn Rand and "Austrian economics" are not.

"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you."

-Ludwig von Mises, letter to Ayn Rand gushing about Atlas Shrugged

 

[caketastydelish]

You both are still missing my point.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't think so, I just don't think you actually know very much about Austrian economics or Ayn Rand's politics.

 

[Cutlass]

You both are still missing my point.

So far as I can tell, you're point is simply wrong.

 

[caketastydelish]

As far as I can tell, your grammar is the real problem.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Confederates were explicitly racial in nature. They wanted white people as an ethnic group to have exclusive power over black people as an ethnic group. Not that white people and black people could both potentially be either slaves or free. Ayn Rand and Austrian Economics didn't have that racial element to them, ergo, they are not the same.

 

[Cutlass]

As far as I can tell, your grammar is the real problem.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Confederates were explicitly racial in nature. They wanted white people as an ethnic group to have exclusive power over black people as an ethnic group. Not that white people and black people could both potentially be either slaves or free. Ayn Rand and Austrian Economics didn't have that racial element to them, ergo, they are not the same.

Which just tells me that you don't understand the situation. The Confederates were the lords and masters of all they surveyed. It wasn't about the racism. It was about the preferential social, political, and economic, status. The racism was a means, not the end. The end was in no real way different from Austrian economics ends.

 

[caketastydelish]

That's really easy for a white man to say instead of a black man.

 

[Hygro]

Which just tells me that you don't understand the situation. The Confederates were the lords and masters of all they surveyed. It wasn't about the racism. It was about the preferential social, political, and economic, status. The racism was a means, not the end. The end was in no real way different from Austrian economics ends.

I disagree because the racial component seemed deeply backed into their morals. Sure, both Rand and the Conderates believed in inherent differences among people and extolled the virtue of the strong within that ladder, but the categorical differences in their chauvinism (risk takers/entrepreneurs vs household masters/inheritors) are great.

Furthermore I disagree because the ends of Austrian economics was to provide an a-historical scientific economics, which it did given the limitations of a species affecting itself by studying itself with the tools and perspectives given by the historical moment (i.e., you can't create an a-historical social science but you can make some clean-enough models).

 

[Lexicus]

but the categorical differences in their chauvinism (risk takers/entrepreneurs vs household masters/inheritors) are great.

This is a false distinction that you have projected onto the past. The Confederate patriarchs saw themselves as risk takers and entrepreneurs.

 

[Hamilton321]

From what I know about fascism during the years between world war I and Mussolini's rise to power actually internally debated where in the political spectrum they would identify. They eventually decided to move to the far right and to align themselves with conservatives for a few reasons, for one thing the left during the post war years had largely abandoned nationalism which was a central tenet of Mussolini's philosophy, for another thing the socialists/communists were also recognized by the Fascists as a powerful threat whereas the traditional right served more as a pliant tool of the fascists.

Another interesting thing is that before world war I Mussolini was actually a writer for a socialist newspaper in Italy. World War I drastically changed Mussolini's outlook on the world and made him view nationalism/imperialism as a means for nations such as Italy who lacked any colonies which had a hospitable climate to take land from overextended colonial empires such as the UK and France and also to conquer the weaker nations of Africa and the Balkans. The Fascists viewed imperialism as a solution to overpopulation as people from the homeland could be resettled to a new region which was much less populated.

Also the term Fascism comes from the fasces which is a ancient Etruscan/Roman symbol of power and national unity. the fasces was a bundle of sticks tied around an axe and was carried by all lictors in ancient Rome.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm on page ~100 of the Volker Ullrich's Hitler biography and two things are standing out to me relevant to this topic:

1) Hitler was always fundamentally far-right. He adopted socialist language and some policy as a purely opportunistic move to attract working-class people to what was at the time called the German Worker's Party, but whose social base came from the lower middle classes; it was popular among writers and other artists, university students, and so on. The fundamentals of Hitler's political program, from the very beginning, were the dissolution of class divisions in favor of a national community with no room in it for Jews. Ullrich claims that Hitler's fanatic anti-Semitism began not during his Vienna years (though it is likely there that he was first exposed to intellectual anti-Semitism), but rather during the revolution and counterrevolution in Munich immediately after the Great War. His great bogeyman of "Jewish Bolshevism" also came from the far-right millieu in Bavaria.

2) In this thread, I actually understated the extent to which the existing conservatives in Germany helped Hitler at every step of his political career.

 

[Yeekim]

dissolution of class divisions

Far right or far from right?

 

[Socrates99]

Far right or far from right?

well in his next sentence he does mention a new stratification based on religion and ethnicity. Hitler hated aristocracy but he definitely had no problem classifying people. Something the modern right frequently dog whistles today.

 

[Lexicus]

Far right or far from right?

Far right.

 

[Yeekim]

If you go far enough to the right, you end up returning from the left.
Makes sense, Earth is circular after all.

 

[HoloDoc]

The Nazis definitely had similarities with socialism, hence the choice of name. They began as a worker's party, with a racist element. Hitler gained control of the party and moved it away from its working class base it urban areas and was clever enough to ratchet up the racism and target rural voters. The urban wing of the party, led by the Strassers, was far more similar to the Bolsheviks than Mussolini's Fascists (Gregor actively copied Communist organisational techniques), but Hitler outmanoeuvred them for control of the party, and its eventual ideology reflected his own. The Nazis eventually dropped almost all their initial left-wing policies in favour of traditional rightist beliefs. The sole exception was its revolutionary nature, which it shared with Fascism.

 

[Lexicus]

If you go far enough to the right, you end up returning from the left.

New developments in horseshoe theory

They began as a worker's party, with a racist element.

That was the name of the party, but according to the biography of Hitler that I am reading the party started out with most of its (few thousand) members drawn from the lower middle class. These were mostly people who mainly were from professional or tradesman families, or impoverished university students. The most common thread was great difficulty adjusting to civilian life after the experiences of the first world war. Indeed, one of the reasons that Hitler's superiors in the Reichswehr had Hitler visit the DAP in the first place was because the far right had rather limited appeal among the working classes (which they saw as a problem to be fixed by effective "messaging").

 

[HoloDoc]

Tradesmen certainly qualify as workers in the traditional sense, especially in a socialist sense. My understanding of the initial Nazi membership is that it was comprised of petty bourgeois who were essentially pushed into the working class by the economic dislocation after the war. I'm much better with the latter Nazis than their early years.