Trego's Mountain Ear

I saw this example of the political bell curve on a Canadian blog:

I can’t say that it’s correct – but it does a fair job of showing how the political rhetoric plays out. The comment linked to a Brit article at https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-great-far-right-myth/ .

The article includes these two paragraphs “In an article published in 2021 by the Mises Institute, How and Why Fascism and Nazism Became the ‘Right’, Allen Gindler, a scholar born in the Soviet Union, explains the semantic upheaval. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was not right-wing, real or imagined. In fact, the NSDAP had carried out a large-scale socialist reform consistent with its collectivist platform, virtually identical to the programmes of most socialist parties in Europe of similar inclination.

Only three months after taking power, the Nazis banned communism and social democracy while crushing the trade unions. Like Mussolini and the Bolsheviks before him, Hitler eliminated opposition to consolidate the dictatorship of his party, which Stalin identified as possessing two defining features: nationalism and racism. The implications of this labelling, Gindler notes, were decisive. ‘Ordinary people lost sight of the socio-economic totalitarianism shared by fascism, Nazism and communism. All that the lay observer saw in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was their chauvinistic bent; all that stood out in the Soviet Union was its proclaimed brotherhood of peoples.’

The argument is simple enough – national socialism (Hitler and the Nazis) had a lot more in common with international socialism (Stalin and the Soviets). Calling one group right and the other left confounds the thinking – they’re neighbors, and not only a long way from the folks in the middle of the bell curve, they’re not opposites.

The article covers the United Kingdom and Europe – it isn’t our normal Democrat/Republican split. For that reason, it’s worth reading.