General Politics Thread

It is ONE aspect they did. Robbing their citizens (literally!) off all their wealth it he opposite of left -wing politics. Nor do I think that state control is necessarily a left approach, it is a dictatorship approach.

All forms of economic intervention for better or worse necessitate varying degrees state control and anti-market measures, whether that’s authoritarian or not depends on whether it’s being done with a democratic mandate within the confines of established institutions or by a dictator’s decree. Long term, total state control over an economy had yet to occur outside the context of an authoritarian system, but it isn’t impossible in principle, just seemingly rather impractical. Saying state control of any kind is bad because the Nazis (and most other dictatorial systems) is the same class of fallacy as Hitler Ate Sugar.

That the Nazis were strongly anti-market (a traditionally left wing positon) while pro-private ownership (a position shared between the center-left, center, and right) and maintained and in some cases expanded existing social safety net (something expected of the center left to center-right) is a good illustration of my point; left vs right isn’t even a very good measure for economic policies, much less other areas of politics.

edited 18th Jun '18 12:41:44 PM by CaptainCapsase

You take one thing that Nazi Germany did and call it "left-leaning" while ignoring just about everything else that puts it to the far right.

What you're trying to argue here is not only factually incorrect, as other posters have tried to explain here, it's also helping to reinforce the insidious "Nazis were left wing" crap that right wingers use to distance themselves from Nazi Germany.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:03:56 PM by M84

For one, that is not what I said. You are building a strawman argument. And two, the main point here is that the Nazis were not in any shape or form leftist. One has to understand WHY they implemented the degree of control they did. It was NOT to create an equal society, it was in order to finance their war efforts and "make Germany great again". One should also NEVER confuse their various organisations - the Hitler Youth aso - as in any way benign. It was a recruiting tool for their party, and later on a good excuse to force young people into so called "voluntary service" (you could also call it slave labour for the state under the guise of "helping in the war effort")

edited 18th Jun '18 1:04:46 PM by Swanpride

Seriously, it's like saying Bismarck was a leftist for implementing our first social health insurance system.

Exactly. This is not just about WHAT a government does, but why it does it. Bismarck deserves a lot of respect for his ability as a politician which is largely responsible for Germany never having a revolution the was France had, but one should NEVER forget that the social changes he made he didn't made because he himself believed in them, but in order to shut the social democrats up.

And in Hitler's case it was a method to remove wealth from one large group in Germany - Jews - and then move it in the hands of his followers, while also giving the general population just enough that they had no reason to revolt.

One had to give it to Hitler, though, he was clever about it. Ie he funnelled a lot of money into his own pocket but not by outright stealing it, but by using tax payer money to buy his own book which was then given out as a gift to millions of people, while he got part of the revenue being the author of it.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:17:30 PM by Swanpride

Those commentaries make me believe that even non-openly-evil Right Wingers are against Good intentions in general.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:19:35 PM by KazuyaProta

It just means Bismark didn't have good intentions.

Already fixed. My point still stands.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:30:53 PM by M84

That line was talking about Bismark and his social wellfare programs and how were less because "hey, we're gonna help people" and more "fuck commies, so I'm gonna be better than them to show it. I am so awesome"

Yeah. Is just that it always become the conclusion. I'm as bored as you of having the same Villain All the time too.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:33:56 PM by KazuyaProta

Let's not go into the "Are right wingers irredeemably evil" talk again.

Considering the last time people were unhappy the French Revolution happened, Bismarck's decision was actually fairly pragmatic.

Conservatives - actual conservatives, not that reactionary mess that is the Republican Party - aren't completely opposed to reform. They're just usually more cautious about them, in my experience.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:38:27 PM by DrunkenNordmann

My constant eternal "Right Wingers are always evil" is less because I genuinely believe it and more because it looks like it. By the way. I live in a country where our Left ranges from Standard Social Democrats that sometimes apologize literal terrorists to those terrorists themselves, so the Right Wing , no matter how corrupt, sounds like...morally acceptable.

But seeing thought history. It seems that Right Wingers tend to be universally bad with some Pragmatic Villainy (copy something from the Left and apply it so they can't claim having it anymore) moments.

Is...weird. Is boring knowing that Right Wingers will always be the bad guys unless there literal Dirty Commies involved.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:50:30 PM by KazuyaProta

This is more history than general politics, but it is kind of relevant here: One of the reasons why Germans actually liked the notion of a "strong leader" in 1933 was partly because their government was a mess (in: No chancellor was in power for a whole year) but it was also because they actually made pretty good experiences with strong leaders. Friedrich der Große ruled with an iron hand, but he ALSO happened to believe in Enlightenment … and in educated soldiers. So he gave Germany public schooling for every and freedom of religion. Bismarck was just as much an absolutist, but he not only united the German states, he also introduced a basic well-fare system. And yes, he did it mostly because he believed in "Zuckerbrot und Peitsche" (sweet bread and flogging) to keep the population under control, but it still benefitted the common people greatly. On the other hand Wilhelm the second, the guy who lead Germany into WWI, was largely considered a very weak leader.

One should never forget that there are actually dictatorships out there which are able to sustain itself because they refrain from squeezing the population and instead give them a baseline of wealth which makes them just satisfied enough to not rebel. Singapore is an example and John Oliver just explained how China does it.

But no matter what, one should never forget what those dictatorships actually are and what the consequences of them are.

Well, the only problem with that statement is that it doesn’t actually look like that. But as M84 said, no need to rehash this for the hundredth time.

On the topic of left-wing Nazis, one of my problems with the position is that the argument never seems to be made in good faith. It’s always just a weak attempt at both sideism, or a attempt to smear the US left in the vein of Jonah Goldberg.

The worst thing of the idea that "Nazis were Left" is that is fake. Regardless of political alignment of who said it.

I mean, if a Leftist said " Stalin was Right Wing because he wasn't Progressive". I would safely say that said Leftist is as misguised as the Right Winger claiming that Nazis were Leftists.

edited 18th Jun '18 2:36:50 PM by KazuyaProta

@Swanpride: When I talk about benign state control of the economy, I'm referencing, to use a contemporary example, the economic policies of the Roosevelt administration during the great depression, and other examples of Keynesian policies.

As for your other point, I fail to see how the motivation for state control matters; being staunchly anti-market, is one of the most distinctive left wing economic positions, and deficit spending for the purposes of economic stimulus (as opposed to austerity measures in the face of an economic crisis) is very much in center-left/left territory (the fact that fascists did not have an exit plan for their stimulus packages was of course one of the main reasons their economic systems were unsustainable).

I also never claimed the Nazis were in any way leftist, even in economic terms, I said center-left/left leaning in terms of their economic policies, though I will concede it's probably more accurate to say they defied the usual conventions of the left-right economic dichotomy, which makes a certain degree of sense given fascism billed itself as a "third way" far before the rise (and subsequent fall) of neoliberalism in the late 20th and early 21st century, another example of an ideology that defied many of the conventions of the left right dichotomy.

edited 18th Jun '18 8:25:40 PM by CaptainCapsase

Just for the record, economics are too complicated that you can consider one philosophy clearly right-wing or left-wing. For example: Germany follows the concept of a social economy, and the party which introduced the concept was the CDU, which is a centre right party with conservative leaning...and when they did it, their views were way more right-leaning then they are nowadays. But they had a clever minister for economics who figured out that everyone wins if the workers are well off (because if they are well off, they are also able to consume more).

Regarding Roosevelt: The Democrats and the Republicans actually switched sides on the political spectrum, originally the Republicans were the human-rights and free the slaves party and the Democrats were the ones pushing for racist politics, and then suddenly those two parties switched position. This was a gradual process, though, which makes it really difficult to pin politicians back then down just based on party affiliation.

There are economic ideas which are nowadays more associated with the right (deregulation) and others which are associated with the left (control through nationalisation, strict rules aso), but in reality they aren't inherent to either leaning. And in the end, it is just a question of balance, anyway.

Otto von Bismarck was a great believer in authoritarianism, hierarchy, and traditionalism, yet he was also a pragmatist.
He chose welfare policies because, based on the knowledge available at the time, he rightly assumed it was in the interest of Germany and the German people.
For the same reason, he also preferred some measure of parliamentary democracy, not that far from the more liberal regimes of the day; and for that same reason the IInd Reich was less likely to send troops to fire at strikers like the IIIrd French Republic or the contemporary US Republic were wont to do.

For the same reason again, he chose to refuse any involvement in the thorny Balkan conflicts, and to avoid a colonial empire like the plague. Wilhelm II, always a good sport, overturned Bismarck on that with the consequences known to all.

Which goes to show that sometimes though not that often, even a Jerkass with a Heart of Stone can end up with the right moves, but better not expect too much of it.
The IInd Reich had to have an exceptional individual like the Iron chancellor to rely on and those are hard to come by, a more easily available mediocre moron such as WillyII drove that Reich to the throes of painful war and defeat.
Meanwhile liberal democracies, while not immune to the damages of moronic mediocrity, seem to weather that bane better than whatever flavour of authoritarianism tickles your fancy.

edited 19th Jun '18 4:31:20 AM by AlityrosThePhilosopher

The actual Socialist/Communist Nazis wanted to work with the Soviet Union, and most of those Strasserites got purged in the Night of the Long Knives, which seems like pretty good evidence to me that they weren't lefties.

Personally I would say that economic neoliberalism is more similar to libertarianism than anything else, deregulate everything including the social stuff.

It’s common in the present-day USofA to assign “Right-Wing” and “Left-Wing” character to policies and political organisations solely on the criterion of state intervention in the economy.
Based on that criterion alone should Ike and Nixon be made icons of the Murican Left and worshipped in ways that decency won’t allow me to utter here.

The notions of “Right-Wing” and “Left-Wing” are evolving with the rest of the political realm and must account for the context of their time and place.

At the time of the IIIrd Reich, the moderate Left was democratic and reformist, accepting of market economy and private ownership of entreprises with a degree of state intervention to offset some excesses; the Far-Left was totalitarian and revolutionary, rejecting any market economy and taking over the means of production on principle.
The Nazis were neither the one nor the other.
[Edit: Though Nazis may have had some commonalities with both of the above, here and there. As we know, the Führer was also known to ride a drop-top Benz.]

edited 19th Jun '18 4:32:36 AM by AlityrosThePhilosopher

My whole point was that left vs right is not a particularly good framework for defining political ideology, many influential ideologies defy some or all of the conventions of said framework, ie neoliberals having distinctly left to center left positions on social issues and being strongly internationalist, fascists being both anti-market and pro-private property, and so on. It's not even a good framework for defining economic philosophy given the complexity of economies in action, as mentioned by @Swanpride.

edited 19th Jun '18 6:07:13 AM by CaptainCapsase

This all started because you claimed Nazi Germany was economically left leaning. Despite all the contradicting evidence.

As I said earlier, I concede it wasn't really a particularly good way to phrase things; they (fascists) did not map well to either the right nor left in their approach to economic policy.

They ran an economy with a focus rearming themselves for war, they were as right wing as you can get,this is one the basic things you learn in high school history class,Hitler wanted to rebuild Germany for war and revenge for the treaty of versailles

edited 19th Jun '18 6:20:46 AM by Ultimatum

The Nazis did not exert government control over corporations, they made corporations part of the government. Those are not the same thing, and any attempt at portraying fascism as "leftist" should immediately discredit the person saying it.