.It doesn't matter if it's too abstract "for your liking" because the political spectrum is an abstract concept that requires the context of time to be considered useful.
You're confusing examining the issues of the day through a contextual prism with placing the ideology they espoused on a modern political spectrum.
Certainly looking at things through the America-derived concept of "small/big government" is not useful in the remotest as all governments became tremendously powerful under the context of total war.
This is simply a justification for larger, more socialistic government than an actual defence of your idea. Just because a government has impetus to grow larger, often at the expense of previously-espoused ideas, does not mean that they cannot be placed on the political spectrum.
Fundamentally, you have to look at the motivations of policies rather than get worked up on the details of what the policy is. The left wing motivation at the time would have been, to an extent,unabashedly Marxist: the redistribution of capital and power to the workers. The Nazis motivations, however, entirely nationalistic and derived from a very right-wing nationalist tradition, which is why the conservative establishment of Germany was entirely complicit with their regime.
You want to ignore important details because reasons? I don't give a hoot in hell about their
motivation. The Nazis were also motivated by a belief that they were doing good by exterminating the Jews. The Commandant of Aushwitz, Hoess, thought that what he was doing was entirely normal and righteous and said so in Nuremberg. Yet that doesn't change the fact that it was immoral. TL;DR motivation means nothing; actions matter.
How you can maintain National Socialism as an ideology of the right (or at least, the economic right) baffles me to no end.
The fact that pretty much everyone at the time considered it to be so might give an inkling, perhaps? Why were the DNVP (i.e. the old school Prussian national-conservatives) and the right-wing of the Zentrum so utterly relaxed at going into government in the Nazis? The same people who had gone to extreme lengths only months earlier to remove the SPD-led Prussian state government because 'yuck, dirty reds'?This is an argument from ad populum. Just because everyone at the time thought a particular way, doesn't mean that that's what they objectively were or believed. The DNVP and its leaders were marginalised to the point of irrelevance in the new regime. The fact that they were willing to work together illustrates that, yes, they shared some goals, but were opposite in others. You're attempting to operate on the assumption that Human beings are perfectly consistent creatures; we're not.
Dude, Hitler nationalised private industry and oversaw a precipitous expansion of central government. If that's not left-wing then I don't know what is.
Just like noted socialist Louis XIV!
Of course Louis XIV was not a socialist in the
traditional sense of the word in the same way a government is technically not a monopoly either. However, when retroactively applying the term, it's pretty obvious he believed in an authoritarian state with a large government which are INDICATORS of socialism. The political spectrum is a sliding scale, you can be socialist is some areas and be capitalist in others; socialism has more characteristics than simply the public ownership of the means of production.
So a government may nationalise important industry, prevent the private sector from functioning effectively and foster unions and simply because they don't own the means of production, they aren't socialist?
Have to say that I'm amused at the idea that the Nazis oversee a 'precipitous expansion of central government' - you have to be pretty ignorant of German history to believe that. Not that the expansion of the state is an inherently left-wing thing, of course.
Here's what Hitler said in Mein Kampf (page 287):
'Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors ... But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms'So what does that make Hitler? A centrist? By your logic because he attacked a
both sides, he couldn't possibly be a partisan creature. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Hitler was a socialist, far from it. But, I
am saying that he showed socialistic tendencies by nationalising industry, giving out unemployment benefits and undertaking massive public works schemes like the Autobahn. These alone don't make a government socialist. They
do push it further along the
left of the economic spectrum.
Again, all of this is in such monstrously poor taste. The entire German labour movement and socialist tradition was outlawed and brutally persecuted by the Nazi state. Arguing that their (literal and not metaphorical) murderers, jailers and torturers were on the same side as them in order to score cheap political points is grotesque.
Don't start with me mate, we're literally discussing Nazis here. If you're going to get offended by what should be a very simple suggestion then close your browser.
