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Is Fascism Right Wing?

Is fascism left or right wing?

  • Left

    Votes: 18 20.2%
  • Right

    Votes: 46 51.7%
  • Neither

    Votes: 16 18.0%
  • Description sucks

    Votes: 9 10.1%

  • Total voters
    89
In school, I was taught that fascism was not in fact right wing, but compared to American Government, it was very much left wing. Our history class taught that the Nazi party of Germany had a meeting with the Communist Party of Germany to discuss a number of things starting on what slogans would be and what category they would say they were. Fascists were very much left wing, but they looked like right wing extremists compared to the communists, so they decided to call the communists left wing and call the fascists right wing to avoid confusion.
Fascism is left wing because you cannot own a business or large home if you don't toe the line that the ruling party draws.. If you don't toe the line, they take your business and give it to someone who will. It is far right of either communism or socialism in that it allows private property at all. In socialism the government owns all the business and makes sure that everyone is paid equally, and in communism the gov't owns everything and makes sure that everyone has everything they need.
So fascism is far right of communism but still pretty far left of American conservatism. It's somewhere in the middle.

you solved all the problems ..
 
<--(American) right wing-------------- (American) left wing--(european) socialism--fascism-communism-->

Anyone who thinks fascism is right wing (american right), is not worth wasting any of your life talking to. There is a tiny handful of issues that might fall between the fascist realm and american right. Usually minor social issues with little bearing on the overall government. There is a gigantic mountain of issues the left and fascists are lock step in.
 
Extreme right wing and extreme left wing are pretty much the same thing... Extreme
 
Only in America would the question even be asked.

And to a lesser extent, deserves to be discussed in Britain as well. Those are the only places where "conservatism" means "conserving" the Liberal English Enlightenment's bequeathal to us (free trade, free men). On much of the Continent, conservatism has meant "conserving" traditional vestiges of authoritarian power, or maintaining a non-L/liberal foreign policy. It is better to say that fascism is anti-Liberalism in the traditional (dare I say, 'conservative') meaning of the word, rather than the cover term for 'progressivism' that it has become today.
 
I concur.

President Woodward Wilson was a progressive and an extreme racist to the max.

Probably our most racist president. Screened "Birth of a Nation" at the White House, as I recall. Most progressives of the time were - it was science, after all.

Was Theodore Roosevelt, also a progressive a racist ? By the true definition not the PC definition, yes. Teddy Roosevelt was a American nationalist. But he despised those those using hyphenating - Americans. But he did looked upon non Europeans as being inferior.

Not to mention the "children" people of Asia for whom he assumed the beneficence of white mastery.
 
In school, I was taught that fascism was not in fact right wing, but compared to American Government, it was very much left wing. Our history class taught that the Nazi party of Germany had a meeting with the Communist Party of Germany to discuss a number of things starting on what slogans would be and what category they would say they were. Fascists were very much left wing, but they looked like right wing extremists compared to the communists, so they decided to call the communists left wing and call the fascists right wing to avoid confusion.
Fascism is left wing because you cannot own a business or large home if you don't toe the line that the ruling party draws.. If you don't toe the line, they take your business and give it to someone who will. It is far right of either communism or socialism in that it allows private property at all. In socialism the government owns all the business and makes sure that everyone is paid equally, and in communism the gov't owns everything and makes sure that everyone has everything they need.
So fascism is far right of communism but still pretty far left of American conservatism. It's somewhere in the middle.

If you apply a one-dimensional scale of "left vs. right" that exclusively considers the role of free market vs. government, then fascism was left-wing. But this one-dimensional spectrum is a horrible over-simplification and totally unsuited to explain many political phenomena.

In Germany, the (monarchist-authoritarian) conservative right was traditionally statist. Advocates of free markets were considered centrist.

Nazism (if you consider it an example for fascism) was obviously right-wing. It took all the ideological elements the conservative right supported (militarism, authoritarian top-down government, anti-modernism, anti-enlightenment, imperialism, nationalism, racism, biologism) and the left fought against, and put them on steroids. All these named ideological stances had Nazism in common with authoritarian conservatism. The left, on the other side, was anti-militaristic/pacifist, supported a bottom-up style of government, was anti-imperialistic, internationalist, and, depending if we're talking about moderate or radical left, at least based on philosophies in the tradition of enlightenment (even if that was Marx, taking the enlightenment pathos of egalitarianism to the extreme).
 
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Low information types tend to confuse Fascism with Mercantilism and Militarism.

Fascism is a loosely defined political philosophy, bu it is definitely a Collectivist, and therefore Left Wing.

Just because it is collectivist and therefore Left Wing is a stretch.

Yes Fascism is a collectivist, as is Socialism and Communism. But Fascism is all about the conflicts between races and nationalities, whereas Socialism is the conflict between classes.

Furthermore, while both want state-controlled industry, it is for far different means. Socialists want to prevent the oppression of the Proletariat. Fascism state control serves to ensure the State becomes self-sufficient, not needing the assistance of foreigners.

And the nail on the coffin is that Fascists are nationalist, imperialistic, and militarists, all things criticized in most Left Wing spheres, especially communism and socialism.

Fascism is fairly defined. Like every political theory, it varies, but these key concepts must exist for Fascism to permeate.
 
The American right's denial of their heritage seems to congeal around Jonas Goldberg's 1990's revisionist polemic.
 
The American right's denial of their heritage seems to congeal around Jonas Goldberg's 1990's revisionist polemic.

It's especially weird that so many righties fail to see that things like Patriot Act, extralegal detentions, starting wars on a wave of nationalism and militarism and public spending on a big military are not exactly "small government" ... yet they keep on claiming that "small government" defines the right.
 
Clarence Darrow
Beyond getting into your silly guilt by association attack of progressives (in a thread on fascism, but I suppose when you can't turn fascism into liberalism, the next best thing to do is to turn progressives into fascists) argument, I just have to point out that even your beloved Jonah Goldberg understood that Clarence Darrow was anti-eugenics, very clearly shown in Darrow's "The Eugenics Cult".

PS...if all of this exercise is a form of "see, you guys were just as bad" argument, not only is it a conceding that fascism was right wing, it is also acknowledging that under the facade of being "libertarian-right", you are nothing more than a conservative with extreme free-market views......or worse.
 
It's especially weird that so many righties fail to see that things like Patriot Act, extralegal detentions, starting wars on a wave of nationalism and militarism and public spending on a big military are not exactly "small government" ... yet they keep on claiming that "small government" defines the right.

Because NEOCONS are not "the american right"; they are con artist democrats wearing thousand dollar suits.
 
Because NEOCONS are not "the american right"; they are con artist democrats wearing thousand dollar suits.

Okay. Maybe you should tell that the many people who are apparently mistaken by assuming that the Republican Party is "right wing".
 
Okay. Maybe you should tell that the many people who are apparently mistaken by assuming that the Republican Party is "right wing".

The republican party has neocons in it. what of it? Isn't Europe filled with coalition governments?

It's more a case of my enemy's enemy is my friend than of ideological solidarity.
 
Beyond getting into your silly guilt by association attack of progressives (in a thread on fascism, but I suppose when you can't turn fascism into liberalism, the next best thing to do is to turn progressives into fascists) argument, I just have to point out that even your beloved Jonah Goldberg understood that Clarence Darrow was anti-eugenics, very clearly shown in Darrow's "The Eugenics Cult".

PS...if all of this exercise is a form of "see, you guys were just as bad" argument, not only is it a conceding that fascism was right wing, it is also acknowledging that under the facade of being "libertarian-right", you are nothing more than a conservative with extreme free-market views......or worse.

Because of Darrow's involvement in the Scopes Trial it is hard not to see him as a supporter of eugenics at least at that point because the effect of his argument in court was to support the validity of eugenics as science. What has been airbrushed out of the picture is the fact that in that day Darwin's theory was relevant to the public in large part as the rationale for eugenics and as a scientific justification for white supremacy. It is impossible that Darrow was not aware of this.

The whole thing was started by a group with the ACLU that included leaders of the eugenics movement. They convinced Scopes to plead guilty to a violation of the Butler act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution.

Darrow practically jumped at the chance to defend Scopes. If he had any qualms about eugenics and what it would mean to defend Scope's teaching, which was mainly about eugenics, he didn't show it at that point. The point Darrow wanted to make was apparently that there is important science that can't be taught without teaching about evolution.

The first witness Darrow wanted to call for the defense was the President of the American Eugenics Society, but the judge would not allow it and also disallowed 6 other experts on evolution.

Civic Biology, the book in question at the trial, was mainly a book about eugenics, written by none other than the head of the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Lab himself, and Darwin's theory was merely background.

Civic Biology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Instead of arguing for Scopes' right to free speech, as the ACLU wanted to do, Darrow tried to uphold the validity of the science in the science class over against the imposition of religious ideas.

Shortly after the Scopes trial Darrow came out strongly in opposition to eugenics. One can only suppose that he had a change of heart, or perhaps having rubbed elbows with eugenics experts he was repelled. It's also possible that he took William Jennings Bryan's humanitarian arguments against the implications of evolution, i.e., Social Darwinism, to heart. (People tend to forget that Bryan was as big a progressive as Darrow albeit coming to it from a different direction.)

One could suppose that Darrow's real aim was only to oppose imposition of religious belief in the classroom (and for that he ignored the issue of eugenics) if not for his apparent efforts to inject eugenics into the trial and his efforts to uphold Scope's teachings as science.

From a Race of Masters to a Master Race: 1948 To 1848 - A. E. Samaan - Google Books
 
Because of Darrow's involvement in the Scopes Trial it is hard not to see him as a supporter of eugenics at least at that point because the effect of his argument in court was to support the validity of eugenics as science.
This is going beyond Goldbergism and into the realm of Beck pseudoscience/conspiracy/history nonsense. Why would I care what interpretations Samaan has when later he links an obscure American utopian novelist to the NAZI party's love of nationalistic spectacle and pomp? The idea that since Darrow was defending a teacher, and that teacher used a book, which contained pop eugenic theory (which by the 30's in the US was fairly well rejected) was therefore proof that Darrow was at heart a eugenicist....is convoluted at best. The idea of the superiority of one race over another far predates the fad being picked up by early 1900's progressives, it certainly did not originate with them.

There just isn't much left to say to you, if you are going to buy into this shlock historical perspective where TR, FDR and progressives were the blood brothers of Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Heydrich....well, you go with that. There is not much anyone can do to help a view this far detached from reality.
 
Fascism is the Right wing orgasm of Corporations running the gov't and is pretty much what we have in the USA right now. Big Energy, Banking, Big Pharma and Chemical corporations rule the roost. US Gov't trying to promote GMO seeds for Monsanto. "Too big to fail" bailouts for banksters. Wars to get control of Energy resources. Healthcare bills passed to take care of Big Pharma. We need to discuss starting wars for good business profits.

Um, no Facism isn't about corporations running the government. More like the other way around. The only difference between Facism and Communism, is that Facism wants privately owned corporations to be controlled by the government and Communism wants corporations to be owned and operated by the government.

Both are Left wing, big government systems.
 
Um, no Facism isn't about corporations running the government. More like the other way around. The only difference between Facism and Communism, is that Facism wants privately owned corporations to be controlled by the government and Communism wants corporations to be owned and operated by the government.

Both are Left wing, big government systems.

You'd have to provide links to prove that.
 
Its more so a horseshoe. The far right and the far left are a lot closer to each other then they are to the respective moderates on either side.
I see most moderates/centrists as fence sitters with their backs to the Right.
 
Just because it is collectivist and therefore Left Wing is a stretch. Yes Fascism is a collectivist, as is Socialism and Communism. But Fascism is all about the conflicts between races and nationalities, whereas Socialism is the conflict between classes. Furthermore, while both want state-controlled industry, it is for far different means. Socialists want to prevent the oppression of the Proletariat. Fascism state control serves to ensure the State becomes self-sufficient, not needing the assistance of foreigners. And the nail on the coffin is that Fascists are nationalist, imperialistic, and militarists, all things criticized in most Left Wing spheres, especially communism and socialism. Fascism is fairly defined. Like every political theory, it varies, but these key concepts must exist for Fascism to permeate.
You make good points, but we must remember that Modern Leftists are well known for criticizing, with great fervor, traits that their opponents do not possess, and which they are often guilty. (The Soviet Union's government endlessly criticized imperialism while seizing territory and people, for example.) But the one major example of a Fascist government which was a close ally of the German National Socialists, another Leftist entity.
 
<--(American) right wing-------------- (American) left wing--(european) socialism--fascism-communism-->

Anyone who thinks fascism is right wing (american right), is not worth wasting any of your life talking to. There is a tiny handful of issues that might fall between the fascist realm and american right. Usually minor social issues with little bearing on the overall government. There is a gigantic mountain of issues the left and fascists are lock step in.


The modern American political spectrum does not define left vs right. Left vs right was a term which originated in the 19th century to describe the difference between conservative monarchists who were right wing and liberals who were left wing. That is reductionist, but really the entire idea of left vs right is reductionist in and of itself so whatever.

In that set up, the right was the side of big government, support for the status quo, and support for hierarchy. The left was the side for reducing government, opposing the status quo, and opposing ingrained hierarchical structures. This was the way it was conceived for a long time, and this continued to be the way it was conceived in much of the world until WWI, when most of the monarchies of Europe fell. It was in the aftermath of this period that fascism arose. It was a set of beliefs which supported big government, hierarchy, and many other things that were staples of conservative and right wing movements (like nativism, militarism, etc). Their ideological aims were antithetical to everything Marxists believed in. They cared little about class based struggle, equality, etc. They cared about the promotion of the nation and the national citizen. At their core that it what they were, a nationalist movement. An extreme form of nationalism. They often supported a contradictory set of polices to promote this goal. They supported capitalism, but with heavy state intervention (something capitalist/liberal countries do in times of war as well, but Nazis thought treating an economy like constant war times was a good idea). In the end they didn't have strong ideological convictions when it came to economic polices, and instead supported a piecemeal economic policy that placed practicality and expediency in the ascendance. They created a coalition government with a conservative/right wing party when they won their one and only election. The first concentration camps were set up to imprison leftists, not anyone else.

However having said all that, Nazis don't fit in neatly on a modern American left v right spectrum. That is because old left v right spectrums had liberalism on one side and other ideologies in opposition. First monarchism, which placed liberalism on the left. However after the end of monarchism as a major force in the "West' you saw the rise of a new spectrum, which put liberalism to the right of communism. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred, and you no longer had ideological opposition to liberalism. Instead you had debates within the liberal spectrum. So now the left vs right spectrum is essentially between classical liberals on the right and social liberals on the left (again reductionist, but as I said, you can't do this left v right **** without being reductionist). Since Nazism was an entirely illiberal ideology, it DOES NOT fit on an American left v right scale. Nazism had qualities and goals that it shared with the modern American left AND the modern American right. It is why you can have maniacs like Glen Beck tell you the left is Nazi, and then point to similarities, and the left do the same and point to similarities. When in reality neither side are Nazis.

PS. Statism is an idiotic barometer and measure for a left v right spectrum. All major modern political movements, without exception, have seen the state as the primary social mover. Belief in the positive power of the state is something shared by liberals (both the classical and social kinds), communist, and fascists. Only Anarchists and libertarians disagree, and they have never had enough popular support to actually do anything of consequence.
 
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You make good points, but we must remember that Modern Leftists are well known for criticizing, with great fervor, traits that their opponents do not possess, and which they are often guilty. (The Soviet Union's government endlessly criticized imperialism while seizing territory and people, for example.) But the one major example of a Fascist government which was a close ally of the German National Socialists, another Leftist entity.

While the Soviet Union is indeed guilty of such, they are not Modern Leftists, nor are they comparable to the American Left. Secondly, on the American scale the Nazi's would be centrists, and on the German scale they are firmly right-wing.

Above all, Liberals (Throughout history, from classical to modern Social Democrats) have never really been fascist, at least not in a way that you can clearly define them as such.
 
The American right's denial of their heritage seems to congeal around Jonas Goldberg's 1990's revisionist polemic.

:lamo our heritage?

:) No, it's the progressives in this country that don't study their heritage (uncomfortable, you know). Conservatives in this country (the US) have no ideological connection to Fascism, as Progressivism does.

Our Heritage is Madison and Locke, not Marx and Ratzel.
 
Our Heritage is Madison and Locke, not Marx and Ratzel.

...and Father Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh, and Fritz Kuhn. Are you going to airbrush out all the uncomfortable names?
 
It's especially weird that so many righties fail to see that things like Patriot Act, extralegal detentions, starting wars on a wave of nationalism and militarism and public spending on a big military are not exactly "small government" ... yet they keep on claiming that "small government" defines the right.

Not all right wingers are pro-war. We also believe that the gov't has the right to engage in war in response to a threat to national security. Big and small gov't refers to how much gov't or what part of gov't we interact with regularly. We don't interact with the military regularly, so most people don't consider that a big govt overreach because the govt has not only the right but the duty to do it. Please note that without direct proof of danger, the war doesn't fit the criteria, so it could be argued that Korea and Vietnam were indeed gov't overreaches.

And most of us consider the Patriot act an unconstitutional overreach. I don't think an American conservative alive would argue that it is right wing.
 
...and Father Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh, and Fritz Kuhn. Are you going to airbrush out all the uncomfortable names?

:lamo let's talk about them, then :)

Early in his career Coughlin was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his early New Deal proposals, before later becoming a harsh critic of Roosevelt as too friendly to bankers.[3] In 1934 he announced a new political organization called the National Union for Social Justice. He wrote a platform calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights of labor...

Gosh. Nationalization of major industries and railroads, big on protecting labor, broke off with FDR because FDR was too friendly to bankers. Yeah :roll: that sounds really like the intellectual heritage of American conservatives.

So. What did this individual who was so big on Labor Unions and the Nationalization of big enterprises think about fascists?

...After hinting at attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program to issue antisemitic commentary, and later to support at least some of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.[5] The broadcasts have been called "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[6] His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, with his slogan being Social Justice, first with, and later against, the New Deal....

Huh. So it turns out that your first cited individual actually makes the argument that fascism was something that appealed to the American left.


Really, in the sense that we use the terms today (and again, this is where "Liberalism" gets' turned on its' head), there wasn't much of a "conservative" movement in America in the 1930's an 1940's. It was the Progressive Era, and progressive assumptions were largely dominant.
 
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