To be sure, but you should note that Trump’s “far right” followers are union laborers from Biden’s back yard.
The idea that the opposite of “left” must be “right” is incorrect. It’s like thinking that the opposite of binging is purging. The reality is that, that’s one form of opposite and another opposite is to eat properly.
The Communists and the Fascists were both leftist groups and, yet, still opposites.
Pro-business is one form of being a Republican but, to the modern follower, so is being anti-Democratic Party and that wildly opens up the potential for followers.
The word you’re looking for is “extremist,“totalitarian” or “authoritarian”
Leftist just means you want a progressive tax system. Zuck, Bezos, and Elmo would like you to believe that is somehow the same, but you should see a therapist about your Stockholm syndrome.
The idea that corporations and billionaires should pay taxes really is not the same as invading Poland. (A thing both fascists and communists tend to do a lot)
The linear left-to-right thing in American political discourse is basically a by-product of Dem vs Rep dominance, anyway. I realized very quickly after relocating to Europe, with its multi-party landscape, how deeply my thinking had been perverted by an unhelpful and inaccurate sense of politics as being reducible to that simplistic binary. Virtually every attempt to cram a given party or movement into the box of “left” or “right” is a childish consequence of that distorted perception, this one included.
Funny enough, the first time I ever heard of the right/left dichotomy was in the context of French politics. I was taking French in junior high and wanted to learn more about France, so I started watching the French evening news on cable with English subtitles, and it was right around the time when Chirac called the snap parliamentary elections that the left-wing coalition lead by Jospin won.
And equally funny, the guy here who started opening my eyes to my narrow American perspective, in particular the assumption I brought with me that political views can be understood on a linear continuum, was a French guy.
Edit to add: The distinction, I think, is that whereas Americans tend to see camps ranged along a string stretched between “extreme right” and “extreme left,” the French see their politics like a big cloud, with multiple dimensions of belief and potential alliance. The concept did originate as a simple binary — during the Revolution, were you a royalist or did you want to tear down the throne? and you sat yourself in the Assembly accordingly — but even then they understood gradations in ideology and objective.
TikTok was created to undermine our country. If the US government bans it, it will be for nothing. So, get that Useful Idiot to buy it, and it can keep going.
You’re free to make an argument that authoritarianism is right-wing.
Authoritarianism is a different word from fascism and communism. But certainly Stalin was an authoritarian and certainly he was left-wing if we’re very confident that communism is left wing. The two belief systems don’t seem to be incompatible. The Fascists were socialists that became a de facto union for the workers of the nation. It seems difficult to get from there to “right wing”. Maybe you could argue that they abandoned fascism for authoritarianism and so migrated from left to right but, so far as I can tell, there’s no real reason to say that authoritarianism is “right” by looking at these two socialist groups, except by noting that they hated and fought each other. But they also both hated and fought the capitalist, non-authoritarian, rule-of-law societies that were lead by groups of representatives for the people so you could just as well call that “right wing” so far as it goes from looking at who the enemy of the left was at that time.
But I could envision that some capitalist republic might start to use authoritarian means to enforce the decisions of the legal system. Personally, I’d say that authoritarianism is a means of getting what you want done. Anyone of any particular dint - capitalist, theologer, socialist, etc. - could use it to achieve their ends.
There are other things like the belief in business and human innovation, or the belief that the common man should be held supreme , etc. that you might put on some political scale and maybe those many sense for a left-right world view. I’m not sure that the willingness to break rules to accomplish those is a left-right thing - that’s been done by everyone from Mao to Pinochet and they’re nowhere near, politically.
Calling the Fascists right wing was just the decision of some left wing professor, back in the day. Personally, I’m not seeing how it maps to reality. I think he just assumed that there’s only one way for two groups (like the Communists and the Fascists) to hate each other, and that’s because they’re politically opposite. We know that they were not. They were both socialist groups with an eye towards raising the standing of the common man.
Fighting against long-used common nomenclature because of some historical incident is not productive. You’re sounding like a prescriptivist intolerant of actual usage.
Again, you’re free to make the argument. Maybe that guy had some reasonable point and I just haven’t encountered it yet. But if the libertarians are right wing, that’s a long long way to authoritarianism.
Your persistent claim that Nazis are somehow in any way, shape or means “left wing” is really strange since the Nazis were backed by rich industrial tycoons, not the unions.
They were very much at odds with any traditional “socialist” movements.
(As you could confirm by visiting for instance Dachau, which has a large exhibition of 20/30’s German political posters)
The “socialist” in their name was only there because it sounded good. It was not representative of any ideology or policy.
The claim that Nazis are “left” is often made by far right groups to deflect claims that they are pretty much the same as Nazis. It is not a claim that can survive even the most superficial scrutiny and you would do well to distance yourself from people making such claims.
This^^ is what I would have said, except that you said it better than I would have.
Either you’ve misread this or I have. I understood it to mean that you should have said “The Communists and Fascists were both extremist/totalitarian/authoritarian groups” instead of “leftist”. Which would have been accurate. There are authoritarians of all ilks.
You think the Fascists were a “socialist group with an eye towards raising the standing of the common man”? And that’s what, in your mind, maps to reality? Because it really, really doesn’t.
In the early days they did make vague noises about it. Any pretense they were serious about it went out the window once they got real power, though.
And yet here we are nearly a century later and some of the rubes are still fooled. Then again, that part of human nature hasn’t really changed, given what some “common” folk here in the US believe about what a bunch of billionaires will do for them.
Yeah, from 1935 onwards the Nazis weren’t remotely “socialist” in any way. There’s a reason that communists and socialists were listed first in Niemoller’s “First they came” poem.
