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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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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.

What leftist movement has been obsessed with concepts like purifying the racial makeup of the country?

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.

What leftist movement has been obsessed with concepts like purifying the racial makeup of the country?

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.)

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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