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And to be honest I've always found using left and right when viewed from an American perspective to not work either. In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
But even that is just a toy model. If Alice is pro-choice and anti-gun, those are in opposite quadrants. If Bob is the exact opposite, do we say that they're both in the middle, even though they disagree on everything?
> In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
The thing about the US is that the federal government is a kleptocracy, so both parties never actually do the things they say they're going to do.
If you judge the Democrats by what they say, they're pretty far to the left. But then they don't do that.
If you judge the Republicans by what they say, they're pretty far to the right. But then they don't do that.
People who want to claim that the country is far to the right then point to what the Democrats actually do and what the Republicans say they want to do. But, for example, the US has government spending as a percentage of GDP in line with the Netherlands or Australia and not dramatically less than the UK or Germany. If you take all the law books full of regulations in the US and put them on a scale, not many countries could match them. If you go back to the political compass, it's maybe more authoritarian than some of Western Europe -- certainly more people are in prison -- but left vs. right? By what objective measure?
It's the difference between building useful infrastructure and giving a huge handout to a billionaire who is already one of the richest people on the planet.
The US generally leans authoritarian, and bullying at all levels is endemic. That includes the nominal "left", although the far right in the US tends to be far worse. Because while the US left is irrational about a few things, the US far right is hopelessly irrational about almost everything - and armed with it.
No, its not. I mean, except in the sense that Nazi’s are generally considered part of modern history and thus any description of them could be described as a “modern conceit”.
> When FDR was President the Democrats were the party of the Klan. Does that mean the New Deal is a right-wing program, or that the KKK is a left-wing organization?
No. It means that US parties of the time leading up to the New Deal were more strongly regional than consistently ideological (the Democratic Party had very different Northern and Southern constituencies and ideologies even before the New Deal coalition), and that the New Deal itself was the trigger for the largest, longest partisan realignment (or one of the two, though the other one was arguably only possible because the New Deal realignment was still shaking out) in US history, which only finally settled down after the secondary Civil Rights realignment to a fairly stable divisions – with a clear ideological left/right configuration – in the 1990s.
> Or maybe politics can’t be divided perfectly along a one dimensional axis
It can’t, but that doesn’t mean that any of the well-known axes of politicis don’t have things, including modern and historical political parties, that clearly fit on one side. The Nazis being one that fits clearly on the right (also, the authoritarian.)
NSDAP had an economically left, socially right opposition originally (the Strasserists), but those who hadn't been expelled already were arrested or murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
Meanwhile Hitler was repeatedly praised by right wing commentators and papers and seen as an enemy by the left.
To spread the fiction that the Nazis we're not seen as right wing at the time is offensive, and simply not supported by the facts.
There seems to be an ahistorical reading popular with especially Americans today that because the NSDAP called itself a "worker party" and had some left-sounding campaign promises (though mostly in the 1920s) it was a "left-wing party".
Germany had been a monarchy until the end of the first world war. "Right wing" in Weimar Germany meant "monarchist", not "free market". The monarchy was overthrown by a left-wing coalition that rapidly split into the more centrist SPD (anti-monarchists who just wanted a free republic but not challenge the social hierarchy itself) and the various socialist tendencies (anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxists, Bolsheviks, etc). The SPD also famously allowed the (monarchist and right-wing) Freikorps to kill one of the most influential socialist groups. That's all before the NSDAP was even a thing.
The NSDAP started out as a fairly uninteresting nationalist workers' party. It went through several iterations and multiple names that increasingly brought a focus on nationalism and a hyperfixation on an imagined betrayal by the leftists causing the defeat in the Great War that ultimately became part of the Jewish conspiracy theory and the idea of Cultural Bolshevism (which you may know as "Cultural Marxism"). To the NSDAP the clear enemy were the communists, the Bolshevists, but in general "the left" including the SPD. They continued using leftist rhetoric in some of their material for a while because it worked but much like Tucker Carlson ranting about coastal elites and big corporations their answer wasn't to dismantle capitalism or tax the rich.
In the end, the NSDAP heavily vilified the communist DKP and the left-wing SPD as well as the "international Jewish bankers" (who in their mind unlike the "good, German bankers" were a nomadic people in a profession they turned parasitic by extracting the wealth from the German people and bringing it outside the nation - so to them it wasn't capitalism itself that was the problem or even banking). The right-wing conservatives liked this and even pardoned Hitler after his failed coup because they thought they could use the NSDAP to crack down on the still growing socialist movements and prevent a second communist revolution like in Russia. The Enabling Act was signed by the Christian conservative "center party". The plan worked, though not quite as intended. They did however crack down on unions and many of the first people sent to the camps were socialists and queers. They also nearly invented the idea of "public-private partnerships" although they wouldn't have called them that.
Party politics change over time and thinking that "the left" must always have been what the Democrats do and "the right" what the GOP does is not only extremely centric to American history but also ignores that even today the US political spectrum has more than two parties (not to mention the vast differences between local chapters) and none of the parties can or could ever be neatly summed up as "left" or "right".
EDIT: Before someone feels like they have to point this out: yes, the SA in particular (the security volunteers of the Nazis who went on to become their paramilitary street gang) had some people with actually somewhat leftist ideas in them and some members of the NSDAP were openly gay. Upon rising to power however the NSDAP purged (i.e. murdered) most of these people. But even the "leftist" ideas tended to be hypernationalist and be tainted by their social views (e.g. eugenics, anti-Semitism, Aryanism and homophobia). This is in part why most leftists today reject any "red-brown alliance" out of principle.
EDIT2: Since some people are prone to misunderstand points made in lengthy replies: I'm not saying Tucker Carlson or the GOP would have agreed with the NSDAP. I'm saying neither Tucker Carlson, the GOP nor the NSDAP are or were left-wing and that leftist populist rhetoric can be found in right-wing politics to this day so judging the NSDAP by a small subset of its rhetoric is historically illiterate.
They sent trade unionists and Esperantists to concentration camps, because they were also deemed to be leftists.
>because they were also deemed to be leftists
No, not because of that, but they where a threat to the NSDAP. They feared a strong democracy the most and had to take a stand against the 2nd strongest party the SPD. It was like in the USSR not about left or right, but about having 100% power in one party/person.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/05/right-need...
This is absurd. Not only the nazi mindset fits squarely into all the far-right / ultranationalist ideas, but the nazi party even made an alliance with the fascist party in Italy.
Amazing.
The Nazis had help from the left at their inception, but murdered them later to gain approval from finance and law enforcement grous to consolidate power. Look up the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazis that accomplished everything we're decidedly right-wing, despite recent attempts to reverse that impression.
The primary thing that happened in the 60s was that the Democrats stopped opposing the Civil Rights Act. The Republicans didn't start opposing it then, they voted for it, and it passed. It was the process of racism losing the support of both parties when it used to have one.
Strom Thurmond was a racist, butthurt that the Democrats finally betrayed him. His constituents kept reelecting him and the US only has one other party.
The problem with the narrative that the parties switched places is that most of their policies didn't change. When Strom Thurmond switched parties, Democrats didn't go from supporting the New Deal to opposing it. They didn't switch from pro-life to pro-choice or vice versa. Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Which implies that racism and left vs. right are independent.
To the extent there was a switch, it was between the pre-New Deal alignment and the alignment after the end of the double (New Deal and Civil Rights) realignments, Thurmond was from a constituency that was with the Democrats before either realignment and that left with the Civil Rights realignment.
> Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Their politics on racial issues aren’t the same as before the Civil Rights realignment, and their policies on economic issues and the role of the federal government outside of race aren’t the same as before the New Deal realignment; those two realignments overlapped, as the New Deal realignment hadn’t finished shaking out when the Civil Rights realignment (which itself took almost exactly 30 years to settle out after the usually-cited 1964 kickoff) started. Note that the rumblings of the Civil Rights realignment, while usually timed to 1964, were evident earlier, but no one else was welcoming the disaffected Democrats until after 1964, and the tension was very much with the new people and ideas being brought in due to the New Deal realignment.
Residential zoning in the US came out of racism. Restrict multi-family zoning to keep black people out of white neighborhoods. Then use that to create separate school districts for rich suburban white kids and poor urban black kids and maintain de facto segregation after de jure segregation was made unconstitutional.
Predominantly Democrats control the high population density areas where these policies are relevant and it's still ongoing.
Today Democrats promote the construction of abortion clinics and subsidizing the procedure. Before they promoted the construction of abortion clinics for the explicitly stated purpose of encouraging black women to get abortions. It's a changed in the stated justification but it's not actually a policy change.
I think at this point a lot of modern Democrats don't even realize what the intended purpose of these policies was, because they don't like to talk about that for obvious reasons, but they're still the party's policies.
Republicans didn't have kkk members sitting in congress in the 21st century. Democrats did.
We can say they changed their ways til the cows come home but the democrats never extend such mercy to other politicians (for example, franken was expelled for much less than byrd)
Absolutely correct, if you have a right/left clock Hitler stays at 11:59 and Stalin at 00:01, they are the same. National SOCIALIST Party...hello?
Just in modern times being National means right-wing. But with that logic the CCP must be pretty right-wing.
Stalin is so "left" that he's touches shoulder with extreme "right". Stalin and Hitler where so extreme that you cannot talk about right or left (hence the 2 minute difference)
Seams pretty much accepted too me.
>Horseshoe theory is not something taken seriously among academics.
Show me proof for that.
My "proof" is the fact that every academic I know in history, sociology, and political science laughs whenever the topic is brought up. This is across institutions.
Gosh..you must be einstein of sociology ;)
In the 1930’s the Democrats were the party of segregationists (clearly not a left wing position), but also the party of FDR expansion of social programs (clearly a left wing position).
In Europe a significant proportion of the right are Christian democrats of various flavours who consider some degree of state welfare to be moral duty, and/or other non-free market conservatives, to the point where the US style right are considered extremists many places.