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Horseshoe theory suggests that there actually were some significant similarities between the Communist and Nazi methods and tactics, and there were, though of course you could argue all day about how much was deliberate or temporary vs inevitable due to their opposing radical positions. And, you know, although they didn't outright nationalize industries they did adopt a sort of command economy... although war quickly messed up the politics from its "natural" internal course, and it's not like the regime lasted so long outside of war, so I really don't see it as a fair trial of his point. (Also, it's not like there were lots of fair elections either in that narrow pre-war period we can look at)
That's because it's not horseshoe stuff. Fascism (at least in Germany and Italy - Japan and Spain are a different beast) was clearly a mutant offspring of socialism. They are perhaps best modeled in Civ terms as far-leftists who refused the option of a Diplomatic Victory, and were willing to tweak their civic loadout for more efficient warmongering in pursuit of a Domination Victory.
Strictly speaking, any evolutionary / branching system can look like a horshoe if you zoom close enough to see the modeled divergence.
< is just the more angular form of C, and family branches can easily share traits (and re-merge, Hapsburg-style).
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Yeah. I've always understood horseshoe theory as an invention of necessity for socialists/communists to sanitize themselves of the obvious similarities they shared with the Nazis. In many ways, the Fascist is just a socialist who has realized they can do 99% of what they want to do without the burden of having to actually run the means of production (and get the blame when they inevitably fail at doing so) by just imposing regulations and mandates. Its not your fault the steel industry failed because it had to compete with foreign steel that didn't have to be made using gold dust, it was your stupid capitalists who failed the gold dust mandate.
What leftist movement has been obsessed with concepts like purifying the racial makeup of the country?
Nazis are called right wing because they share the same preoccupations as right wing politics all over the place.
Just as if someone today is obsessed with making the US or their European country a white ethnostate, it’s not hard to guess that that person winds up being right wing in many other ways as well.
The Nazis were a clear right wing movement that simply adopted a new level of extremism after observing the communists.
This is central to the identity of Nazis for people on the left, but they had a menagerie of policies that frequently overlapped with the left.
Yeah the part where they invaded everyone to conduct industrial scale ethnic cleansing campaigns does kind of overshadow their views on tax policy.
Perhaps if your intent is to remain ignorant of how the Nazi's formed a winning coalition, but if you are interested in such things the genocide is more of an afterthought. Its obviously the most important thing when talking about their impact on world history, but when discussing domestic politics and drawing comparisons between the politics of various regimes it is very unimportant.
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All Progressive movements have been trying to do this for at least the last 30 years.
Of course, to them "purifying" means "needs less white" rather than (or perhaps as a reaction to) "needs more white", and have mirrored justifications for this ('stolen land', 'be charitable', 'black lives matter', etc.)
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A big chunk of the horseshoe theory, in my mind, is just ‘crazy people have certain similarities but their politics isn’t one’.
See, I think the politics are typically very similar when it is invoked. People quibbling over whether to nationalize the banks or the banks and the hospitals.
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Fascism in Italy emerged directly out of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism so can be seen more wholly (even as it later got capitalist/bourgeois support) as descended from the radical left.
Fascism in Germany emerged alongside the immediately-postwar right-wing anti-communist freikorps militias in the chaotic revolutionary atmosphere of Germany in 1918-1922, ideologically out of lower-middle class nationalist groups who weren't particularly leftist economically or socially and so can't really be described as socialist. The word 'socialist' was added to the German Workers' Party name to appeal to urban proletarians who might otherwise be drawn to the far left. After the mid-1920s the NSDAP was never particularly socialist, taxes rose during the war as they did everywhere, but were kept at moderate levels through the 30s, friendly corporations weren't seized, capital markets remained broadly operational, including the major stock exchanges. There were currency and import/export controls to some extent, but those had been implemented everywhere after 1919 and certainly after 1929.
Of course, you might argue that there were and are plenty of committed Chinese and Vietnamese Marxists who eventually embraced market capitalism and private wealth, but the circumstances are slightly different. In those cases and in the official Dengist state literature Marx and Engels' own argument about the teleology of capitalism and that it's a necessary stage of progress that societies have to go through is regularly cited and rephrased. Nazi Germany had no such explanation or argument really.
If you define leftism as forced economic redistribution, there’s a good case to be made for the nazis. It fits in the pattern of liquidating a minority’s assets for the benefit of the majority. In other places, leftists liquidated aristocrats or kulaks, hitler picked the jews.
Some medieval kings, once they were deeply in debt to jews, suddenly discovered that they were enemies of christ after all, and in fact, they should leave his kingdom; not their assets though, these could, and should, stay, he insisted. Philipp IV famously liquidated the Knights Templar with this simple trick.
The german working class lived large under the nazis, largely from stolen money, first from jews, then from conquered euro countries. Many of their welfare laws are still on the books. The reason why this isn’t commented on more is that everyone else at the time was also turning hard left. With FDR’s new deal, and Leon Blum’s government in france, both laying the groundwork for their countries respective welfare states.
This is an unhelpfully broad definition. This would include things like the Inclosure Acts, which redistributed common land to private landowners, or Sulla's proscriptions, which redistributed assets from Sulla's enemies to his allies. I could go on, but seizing the assets of people you don't like and giving them to people you do is a pervasive element of political conflict. Identifying that as the distinguishing feature of leftism is confusing, not illuminating.
The left as forced economic redistribution of resources, to the poor. I thought that was implied. Sulla lining handing his enemies’ estates to his allies doesn’t qualify. Sulla abolishing the grain dole does make him right-wing. Enclosure , that’s just privatization. Although it might be characterized as dispossession of the riff-raff, which would be right-wing.
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