Is Nazism left-wing?

[minionofmidas]

could Hitler have been a leading Tory politician in the UK in the 1930s? I very much doubt that.

No - it was a far too exclusive club, the offspring of incestuous backwoods Lower Austrians would have been quite inacceptable. But he could have been if England had lost the war. Easily. Even as is, most of the leading Tories were rather taken by his government's record.
His politics are not the reason why he couldn't have been, his class is.

[minionofmidas]

I know you think you did a gotcha here,

Not really.

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Good.

[minionofmidas]

For example, the Nazis supported a wide variety of cradle-to-grave programs.  

That just means that they were more Conservative than Liberal (original terms alert). I mean, so did Bismarck.

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That's just another way of saying "it's all the Jews' fault".

And I wouldn't quite equate "national interests" and "community interests". Seems to me that's not nearly the same thing. People are part of many communities, but nations are defined in silly binaries (into which most people never quite fit. They are an artificial construct.)

The nazis were not (until they came to power) an establishment conservative party, of course. They were more a discontented conservative grassroots rebellion.

[minionofmidas]

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Yeah, that's true. Though most published stuff on electoral patterns in the Weimar Republic is seriously flawed, based on dubious statistical models that fail to understand that towns and cities are internally diverse!

The thing to remember here is, of course, that not all workers voted for Socialist parties before 1918 or between 1918 and 1933 either.

[minionofmidas]

Now, Mirriam Webster, which,unlike Wikipedia, is an authoritative source, defines Left as:
"a radical as distinguished from a conservative position"

Uh... what? Clarence Thomas is a leftist now?

[minionofmidas]

...which is, to a fairly minor extent, true.

It's not as if any of the Europeans on this thread needed to rely on their school teaching here, btw.

[minionofmidas]

A Georgian nationalist with a chip on his shoulder. Who for a time was deeply involved in Bolshevik activities before they came to power, without apparently ever having a deep grasp on their "ideology" (not that you can hold that against him, frankly, Leninist ideology being what it was.) And who, when in office, pretty much killed all the Communists in Russia. But still was admired by Communists all over the western world - until they had to flee into exile in his fief and got shot.
Of course there's yet another angle... The word Communist wasn't rescued from obscurity until after the Russian Revolution, remember? In a sense asking whether Stalin was a Communist is like asking whether Jesus was a Christian (and the answer to that one would be no, emphatically so.)