This started as my weekly politics rant for The Rising Orb, but between the current throttling of Substack on Twitter and the sheer length of this, I decided to post it over here instead.
The internet’s first ever interesting Twitter fight
(Keep it in your pants, we are clearing a low bar here.)
On the 11th March, 2023, the English author and columnist Peter Hitchens released his regular weekly column for The Mail on Sunday (the weekend edition of The Daily Mail). His column for that week was headlined “End this crude smear against conservatives – Hitler’s Nazis were in fact Left-wing racists.” Two days later, the moderately popular Twitter politics personality and YouTuber SocialismDoneLeft (SDL)—who is just some guy named Aidan so far as I know—responded to this column with an image macro implying exactly the opposite perspective. Namely, that the Nazis were not socialist.
The phrase “a clash of titans” implies the epic grandeur of Greek myth. Neither of these two match that image. This collision was more akin to two slightly tall high schoolers pushing each other on the campus quadrangle. Nonetheless, between this Tweet and a handful of follow-ups from both parties, there was something of a Twitter clash between the famously responsive Hitchens and a fairly wide range of online socialists. The central question was taken straight from the thesis put forward in the headline to Hitchens’ column: Were the Nazis left-wing?
To cut the question short, no they were not. If there is any meaning in the idea of a political binary, given the historical context of what the Nazis stood for and how they operated in German politics, they clearly represented the right-wing of the spectrum. However, this clarity, and the received wisdom it represents, obscures more than it illuminates. This collision was not interesting because each side was equally wrong; the position Peter Hitchens argues for in his column is fundamentally misleading. However, SDL’s responses completely lacked any understanding of the history and context behind Hitchen’s position that the Nazis were left-wing socialists. SDL’s arguments confronted a well-entrenched voice in European politics. But they did so from a fundamentally American frame of reference, and therefore each voice seemed to be speaking an entirely different language from the other.
The result was a series of Tweets where, in terms of rhetoric, it seemed as though Hitchens understood the subject well enough that he was being wrong on purpose, and SDL seemed to be wading through the surface of the argument so unartfully that they could only be correct by mere coincidence. It was a Twitter exchange about a very detailed subject—one that cuts to the heart of many contemporary political ideologies—where the matter of truth seemed entirely uncorrelated from the participants’ knowledge or awareness. It was an ugly collision between the thoroughly flattened politics of the United States with the ideological and obtuse politics of king and country European conservativism. To paraphrase Seinfeld, it was loathsome, offensive, brutish. Yet I can’t look away.
It was exactly that discontinuity that made the exchange something of a brain worm. It was a narrative that lacked closure. There was no detective who could arrive at the end to close the case. Since that closure never came, it became necessary to do it myself. Not just because of some need to bring an end to this debate, but also because the subject is actually interesting—in ways that are slowly being flattened by the Americanisation of the mass politics of the internet into a proxy for simple Republican vs Democrat identity affiliation.
The column itself, briefly
It is often the case that the content of a newspaper story is merely an irrelevant tool in service of a hyperbolic and eye-catching headline. While the headline here is certainly effectively clickbait, we can at least say that the title of the column more or less reflects its actual contents. It is an argument that the Nazis were in fact left-wing. With Hitchens saying: “Actually, it is amazing how little so many people know about these things. Although modern school history seems to cover nothing apart from the wives of Henry VIII and Hitler, nobody seems to know one crucial fact. The Nazis were very Left-wing.”
Hitchens’ argument is a conservative rendition of the ever-popular horseshoe theory of politics. Which is to say that the far-left loops around to meet with the far-right at some nebulously defined point. Although in Hitchens’ formulation, what is commonly understood as “far right” politics is in fact just a misunderstanding of the far left. If one were to advocate for the horseshoe theory, discussion of Nazism is fertile ground for such speculation. As any reader of the various biographies of both men would know, there was no living man that Adolf Hitler admired more than the ruthless Joseph Stalin, and Stalin for his part was so obsessively trusting of Hitler that he did not believe the original reports of Operation Barbarossa. The horseshoe theory was in point of fact originally formulated in the Germany of the 1930s to describe the Strasserite faction of the Nazi party.
While there are many nuanced variations on the horseshoe theory, Hitchens’ approach is a rather crude and commonplace one. It also has an unmistakable and unsurprising conservative bend. The right-wing, in this mode, is fairly easy to understand. It is those that go out to bat for their God, their king, and their country. It is a right flank of Whig ideology that goes back to the days of Edmund Burke. That which is good comes from a British tradition of liberty, Christianity, and constitutional monarchy, and those that seek to undermine this tradition are radicals and troublemakers—and therefore inherently left-wing. As Hitchens explains of the Nazis:
They hated Christianity and deliberately set children against their parents. They imposed penal taxes on the middle class and attracted Communists to their ranks. They wrecked Germany’s schools, insisting (sound familiar?) that they taught mad dogmas instead of proper knowledge.
From Hitchens perspective, what the Nazis and the communists shared in common was a vision that they wished to impose on society. They are both ideologies that aspired towards fundamental change through the power of government, and to Hitchens, such ideas, regardless of their specific content, are nothing more than the delusions of the children that need to get off his lawn. From this perspective, conservativism is all about those long-standing cultural institutions that make up a society. Those that attack institutions are upstarts of the same mould as one another:
And those of you who have noticed the stripping of patriotism and Christianity from the Scouts and Guides, Cubs and Brownies over the past 20 years might note that this attack on old values through schools and children follows a carefully devised pattern in both the Third Reich and Stalin’s police state.
The general contours of this argument will be familiar to Americans, who have been exposed to something like this version of the horseshoe theory since the early days of Glenn Beck. While Peter Hitchens does not engage in the kind of deceptive practices that were common on Beck’s programme, the essential argument is mutually intelligible. Nazis, communists, so-call pragmatic eugenicists from the US, and other such groups are combined into a uniform category for those who wish to change society using the government, known as the left-wing. They are opposed by those in the right-wing who allegedly just want to preserve society’s natural rights.
Notably, Hitchens’ definitions do not mention much in the way of conventional measures for the left-wing of the political spectrum, such as economic nationalisation or tax increases and the like. This seemed to baffle SDL’s attempts to argue against the column, as in this exchange:
This is precisely because Hitchens’ definition of the right-wing of politics is more spiritual than a matter of policy. As he defines it:
However, if we return to the fundamentals and attempt to define the basic terms of political theory from the ground up, we will see that the Hitchens viewpoint is hardly surprising. We do not want to be like SDL, and express bafflement and indignation every time anything escapes from the narrow confines of conventional American discourse.
What the hell is a left-wing anyway?
The terms left-wing and right-wing are easy to take for granted in the context of modern politics, but their definitions are more opaque than many would like to accept. It is a dichotomy built in a dialectical tautology. The left-wing is defined by not being the right-wing, which is in turned is defined as the opposite of the left-wing. It is a categorisation system that does not have any tangible substance to it, but it nonetheless works well enough for daily use because, by definition, every single idea and its opposition can be sorted into one of the two boxes. As a result, the simple act of describing something as either left-wing or right-wing is easy enough in any given historical moment, but understanding the system itself will take something of a general model of political thought systems.
The terms left-wing and right-wing themselves have a cute folk origin that has the rare benefit of being entirely true. During the French Revolution, those who supported the Ancien Régime (the monarchy) sat on the right-hand side of the National Assembly, and those who supported regime change sat on the left-hand side. Throughout the various coups and counter-coups of the subsequent decades, the general practice continued. Those who supported change sat on the left-hand side, and those who either wanted to conserve the status quo or return to an earlier status quo ante sat on the right-hand side. The language of this convention quickly spread throughout various European cultures and their respective commentaries on the happenings in France. Before anyone could notice, those who fought against the establishment became known as the left-wing of politics, and the establishment became known as the right-wing.
While every system has its antecedents and originating concepts from earlier in history, it is also important to remember the extent to which the French Revolution was the crucible from which the entire system of modern politics emerged. It is fair to say that modern politics was born in the National Assembly of France. In one exchange I had back in university: someone who refused to use the terms left-wing and right-wing once told me that he felt that it was impossible to provide a definition for each that could meaningfully sort every political actor. I expressed scepticism, and he asked for mine, to which I sarcastically retorted that left-wingers are those who would have supported the French Revolution and right-wingers are those who would not have. The point being that the issues may be entirely contingent on one’s particular historical moment, but the language we use all originates in the polarisation around that one specific issue from 1789. In some sense, things have become more complex since then, but in a crucial sense it is all about that same simple question—yay or nay to revolution.
The full depth of this history is explained in Yuval Levin’s excellent The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Levin’s account explores the intellectual history of the 18th century, and how the issues that were crystalised into the framework of the left and right wings had developed in the century since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had itself produced the beginnings of representative democracy in the British parliament. This account is an important component for understanding the functioning of democratic politics, and how the concepts of the left-wing and right-wing emerged in coincidence with the first major democracies of America and France at the close of the 19th century. However, it is too specific to hint at the general reason why such systems of political thought emerged in the first place.
Factions and power: The eternal rules of politics
When Marshall McLuhan famously said that the medium is the message, he had the flow of information in media theory in mind. However, the general principle of the abstract particles of social life being determined by their underlying material systems is fundamental to Marxist thought generally. And it is an absolutely essential framework when attempting to understand how politics has changed from the pre-democratic age.
It may at times seem as though contemporary political factions have their roots in natural tendencies in human thought. But this conclusion is misleading. For all of the ideological reasons that one can imagine for abortion opponents to also support cutting taxes—say, references to the American founding rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—there is a far simpler reason that has nothing to do with ideology: Neither policy preference can marshal the forces needed to pass laws in a democratic system with their own base of support. Everything about modern politics is determined by the magical power of the majority of 50% in a democratic system. Even with the most passionate issues, those mobilised to fight for one side or the other tend to make up less than 50% of the people and are therefore outnumbered by those who oppose them out of principle or, more importantly, disinterestedness. Therefore, if they wanted any guarantee of being able to pursue their agenda, those factional minorities that represent individual issues would need to ally themselves with the different factional minorities that represent those disinterested parties. Put more frankly, every abstract ideological connection in politics obscures a straightforwardly transactional relationship between different interest groups based on the structure of democratic politics.
This hypothesis may just seem like unfounded cynicism, but its factual basis will become shockingly clear when we summarise the history of parties and factions in politics. The phrase ‘court politics’ should be reasonably familiar to most people. Court politics refers to the dynamics of the interior factions of the various monarchies and empires that have existed throughout history. Most people would have a helpful, if crude, frame of reference for the idea from watching Game of Thrones. In Game of Thrones, power does not rely on a mandate from the people, and it does not operate with reference to attaining 50% of the power in a democratic institution. Instead, absolute power is associated with the so-called ‘Iron Throne’ of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. However, even when we say absolute power, such medieval systems do not operate on the principles of totalitarianism and single-person rule that characterise modern dictatorship. Instead, the monarch derives their power from their control over subsidiary institutions. These institutions can be separated into two broad categories. Firstly, there is the military might to maintain a particular regime, and secondly there is the economic might that is necessary to sustain this military-based rule.
In Game of Thrones, these institutions are easy to visualise because they are embodied by distinct and easily legible clans within the universe. Originally, the universe of Game of Thrones was based around the rule of House Targaryen, who monopolised the military might of dragons to capture Westeros through force. By doing so, they created a regime that maintained itself via the agriculture-based food-wealth of House Tyrell and the mining-based wealth of House Lannister, in particular. However, once House Targaryen lost their dragons and associated military might, they were successfully challenged and replaced by the military might of House Baratheon and House Stark.
Even if using pop culture is a bit whimsical, we can still isolate the two key practices of so-called court politics from the above descriptions. Firstly, there is the large-scale politics based around the use of force to control economic and military power. As we have discussed previously, the state, regardless of its form, is defined by its relationship to the monopolisation of violence and power. We could define this macro-politics by its universality. Once the rule of violence becomes challenged, anarchistic power politics, where might determines right, becomes the dominant mode of politics. Secondly, there is the smaller-scale politics based around the social means of control over those who wield the rights of the state associated with this violence. In modern democratic states, this social control takes the shape of formal institutions such as parliaments and legislatures. But in the world of court politics, the world of social power is based around the informal structure of social networks. Max Weber referred to this informal kind of micro-politics as patrimonialism. In essence, in patrimonial systems, familial clans—as well as their retainers and friends—hold the social rights to particular political powers. In such cases, political ascendency is a game based around gaining social influence over these clans, via methods such as rituals, religion, marriage, and other similar relational means.
While any system, no matter how modern, may return to some degree of patrimonialism as a symptom of corruption and institutional rot, we should nonetheless focus on the differences between informal patrimonialism and the political dynamics of modern formal systems such as democracy. In these informal systems of power, the idea of systematic political thought and political ideologies, as we understand them today, are utterly incoherent. One cannot imagine a faction based around the ideological pursuit of conservatism or progressivism in this system, and there is little evidence for any existing in the historical record. Instead, the clans, factions, and guilds that made up the patrimonial system would attempt to influence those with social control over particular political institutions in order to institute policies for their own self-interest. For example, those clans close to the central government might advocate for higher taxes and a stronger bureaucracy in order to increase their own political power, and those clans operating on the periphery would support the contrary position of decentralised taxation in order to empower themselves. The target of their advocacy was, of course, not the people at large, but those in control of specific institutions, such as tax collectors or agents of the reigning monarch.
The most important feature of this system, for our purposes, is the lack of importance placed on the now magical number of 50%. If the king or a sufficient group of powerful families supported a particular policy, it could be carried out through sheer force. While coalitions between various different factions were still necessary in order to enact particular policies, the composition and size of these coalitions were ever shifting and dependent on the distribution of power in a particular patrimonial configuration. There was no need to establish long-standing control over 50% of any formal institution such as a legislature in this system. In addition, there were likely to be as many coalitions as there were issues, as the organs of social power were distributed across various clans and factions, that would need to be won over for each particular issue.
The net result of this system is that politics on the micro-level was defined by the relational struggles of clans and factions rather than ideologies. For political ideologies to dominate these smaller-scale social politics, two key conditions need to be fulfilled: Firstly, there needs to be a reason why these factions need to build a coalition that is justified for reasons beyond simple self-interest. Secondly, these coalitions need to be durable and long-lasting enough to be self-perpetuating, rather than a simple alliance of convenience. The two most historically salient factors related to these conditions were the presence of centralised political institutions and the ascendency of the class system.
When a state centralises power into a single political institution, or a small group of political institutions, the decentralised features of patrimonial power cease to function as described. If there is a key decision making body, capturing that body becomes determinative for the political power of any given faction. As a result, factions can no longer be disinterested in the power of other seemingly unrelated factions. If the taxation of metal imports and the control of agricultural land are both decided by the same political institutions, a merchant guild and a faction of agricultural landowners will suddenly find themselves in direct competition for the same institutional power. This was precisely what happened in Europe after the Middle Ages. During the 17th century and onwards, power became increasingly centralised in absolute monarchs and, in some cases, the political institutions of the central government—such as the British parliament. This era is called the Age of Absolutism by historians and continued until the emergence of modern politics during the French Revolution.
Once this happened, the centralised government could no longer operate as a simple intermediary for the various decentralised power bases of local factions. Instead, the factions in control of the central government could determine policy for the whole state. It was precisely during this period that the first political parties emerged. Namely, the Tories and Whigs of British parliament. During the 17th century, as control of the British parliament became instrumental for all political factions in Britain, coalitions of these factions with mutually compatible interests combined in order to obtain parliamentary power. While British parliament was far from democratic, obtaining 50% of the votes in this institution was still the essential means of governing, and no faction based on patrimonial interests could hope to capture it on their own. Therefore, those factions who were aligned on the biggest issues of the day agreed to vote as a bloc on one another’s local interests; those who were interested in continuing to allow Catholics in the British monarchy during the Exclusion Crisis became known as Tories, and those who supported solely Protestant rule became known as Whigs.
To be clear, while British parliament was an early and easy to understand example of these antecedents of modern politics, similar dynamics were at play all across the centralised monarchies of Europe. Such coalitions of smaller factions, unified by a need to influence the institutions of the king, arose in the aristocratic classes of France, Austria, Prussia, and other similar states. However, they never formed political parties in the modern sense precisely because of the lesser importance of formal political institutions such as the French Estates General and the Austrian Imperial Diet as compared to the British parliament. However, even without such parliamentary institutions playing a large role in political decision making, factions still needed to build coalitions to influence the absolute monarchs who wielded centralised power over the state. To this end, the class system became an important organising principle. Those with aligned class interests, such as the contrast between established nobility versus the younger money of merchants and plutocrats, could each coalesce their factions and build opposed political bodies. Either way, we should return to the British example for clarity’s sake.
As the Exclusion Crisis gave birth to two large coalitions of factions that became the basis for modern political parties, they already took on the shape of what would later become known as the left-wing and right-wing during the French Revolution. The Tories, who sought to preserve the established succession laws of the English monarchy, represented the right-wing of the Exclusion issue, and the Whigs who wished to enact Exclusion represented the left-wing. However, this initial configuration gives an important lesson about the essentially false nature of political ideology. While the Whigs represented the left-wing—radical—end of the issue of Exclusion, they did so in favour of the reactionary interests of the rural Protestant majority. By contrast, the Tories were defending the issue of tradition in order to protect a religious minority in the Catholics. In other words, the factions that took on the role of left-wing and right-wing arose out of the particular interests associated with the issue of the status quo versus change with regard to Exclusion. As a result, the cultural values that we associate with left-wing and right-wing—that is, traditionalism and progressivism—were not clearly embodied in this conflict. Those values came later, as a tool to justify the Tory and Whig coalitions, as they became long-standing features of the British parliament. Ideology emerged second, after the need to build a coalition that could govern 50% of the British parliament—and one could even say that it was the institution of the 50% vote that created the conceptual framework of these ideologies.
In the century after the Exclusion crisis, after a period of turmoil associated with the aftermath of Glorious Revolution, the Whigs came to dominate British parliament. Those older class interests that had been represented by the Tories were reduced to outsiders in most political matters. However, by the time of the French Revolution, once the succession struggles related to the Exclusion crisis had been settled, the Tories and Whigs each institutionalised themselves as formal political parties in British parliament. While those older party struggles were strongly associated with factional interests, and the concerns of monarchical succession, the development of democracy in America and France refocused the debate on considerably different issues. The Tories obtained a new lease on life as the opponents of those more radical Whigs who looked on favourably towards the anti-aristocratic activities in France. It is at this point in the story that Yuval Levin begun his exploration of the formation of left-wing and right-wing politics, that is as ideological frameworks that were developed to unify those that supported or opposed the revolution, which became known as liberalism and conservativism respectively.
What’s in the name “national socialism?”
In general, we could summarise the previous section to say that the left-wing and right-wing of politics are the factional coalitions that emerge out of the class interests of highly centralised, and especially democratic, states. The ideologies that we traditionally associate with these two wings are more like the glue that keep such coalitions together, rather than any kind of essentially defining characteristics of these coalitions. Therefore, we could cut this whole debate short by referencing the clear historical record that the established right-wing class interests of Germany aligned themselves with the Nazis in order to oppose the Communist Party of Germany. By definition, when we look at data points such as the 1932 federal election in Germany, with the left-wing of the spectrum dominated by the third of the vote received by the Social Democrats and the Communists, it becomes clear that the Nazis captured the contrary right-wing with their own roughly 40% vote share.
However, this shortcut only gets us to the answer—it does not actually explain much of anything. How is it that a party with socialist in the name captured the right-wing of German politics? And why were their policies so contrary to the kind of king and country conservatism of someone like Peter Hitchens? We are still a long way off from being able to establish a proper historical understanding of what the Nazis were and where they came from—and being able to explain why people view them as left-wing, beyond an extremely simplistic act of unthinking imbecility such as assuming that everyone who does so is just more stupid than we are.
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which we’ll shorten to NSDAP from now on) was the reformulation of the earlier German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). In both forms of the name, there is an intentional and unavoidable repetition of both nationalism and socialism as key themes. However, we should not be tricked by reading these names too literally. Beyond SDL’s simple meme rendition of the necessary retort, the Nazis always and everywhere used their names as a propaganda tool. As explained by Hannah Arendt:
The same ingenious application of slogans, coined by others and tried out before, was apparent in the Nazis’ treatment of other relevant issues. When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of “German” and “Worker” connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all. Combinations of supposedly antagonistic political doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried, and successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in such a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and the nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior sinister motives—for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these things at once?
This is to say that the meaning of both the phrases national socialist and German workers’ was not something that could be found in their literal words as they relate to the left-wing and right-wing of politics, but exactly in the dialectical content of proudly displaying a contradictory identity. Doing so trivialised the attempt to label the Nazis as political, because the populist foundations of Nazism were intended to be read as apolitical—or even anti-political.
However, it is exactly in this populist origin that people try to equate the Nazis to the left-wing of politics. The argument goes that the Nazis sought to erase the political content of their identity exactly because their brand of politics—populism and fascism—does not base itself on left-wing or right-wing issues, but on a pure will to power outside of the political spectrum. In other words, populism is used as a means of return for the horseshoe theory. A similar extension of this argument compares the totalitarian police states of Nazism and Stalinism. It was, ironically, advanced by Christopher Hitchens, the Marxist brother of Peter Hitchens, like so:
The generally accepted verdict on 20th-century ideology—that its “totalitarian” character eclipses any of the ostensible differences between its “left” and “right” versions—is one that few wish to dispute. Indeed, the very term totalitarian was most probably coined by the dissident Marxist Victor Serge, to denote a uniquely modern form of absolutism that essentially sought to abolish the private life and the individual conscience. As with concepts, so with consequences: David Rousset’s early classic, L’Univers Concentrationnaire, foreshadowed the image of “the camp” as the place where the human surplus of brute Utopianism was disposed of, no matter what the claimed character of the regime.
It is exactly this point we must concede: Whatever their differences, there is something that unified Nazism and Stalinism in their anti-political brutality and totalitarian control. This unification, although not absolute by any means, explains why the trope of seeing Nazism as simply an excess of conservatism is a stupid point that lacks a factual basis. On this particular point, Peter Hitchens’ defence of conservatism is correct. However, we must not let those differences escape from us, as they are wont to do, in a puff of propaganda and ideology. Nazism is not left-wing, and it is not just ‘right-wing socialism’ either. We will only see through this endless string of ideological assumptions once we really capture the history of the Nazis and their anti-political populism.
The history of the Nazi party
As already mentioned, the Nazi party was a direct revival of an earlier political organisation known as the German Workers’ Party—DAP. However, neither organisation was strictly speaking the origin of this twisted semantic mix of ethnic and class concerns. Prior to either party in 1903, the pan-German movement in Adolf Hitler’s native Austria manifested itself in the German Workers’ Party (also named DAP). By the conclusion of the war, this party had renamed itself in precisely the same styling as would later be adopted by the German Nazis, calling themselves the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP; the same name as the later German Nazis, just with the word German placed before national socialist). While the Austrian incarnation of Nazism was strictly senior to the German movement in terms of origin, it soon became comparatively minor as it deliberately subserviated itself below Hitler’s larger movement. But if we forget Nazism’s Austrian origins, we risk miscategorising the movement as simple nationalism gone astray.
Precisely the most important single feature for understanding Nazism is that, in its origins in the Duel Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, it was a movement established to organise against its own nation state. It was one of the many pan-X movements of Austria-Hungary that sought to dissolve the mutli-racial Austro-Hungarian Empire in favour of various ethnostates. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the universal proclamations of brotherhood (fraternité) and the Rights of Man birthed a new ideology to contradict the age-old vision of the state as an agent of the divine rights of kings. According to this new ideology, the state existed to serve the interests and consent of the people at large. This vision of popular sovereignty was eventually articulated as the idea of nationalism. That is, that the state was an agent of the nebulous idea of the nation—which is the people that make up a particular country.
It did not take long for people to notice the inherent circularity of this vision of nationalism. The state existed under the nation. But what defined the nation? The only answer given was that the people were the people as defined by the pre-existing sovereign countries governed by state power. Even if it was articulated that the French state existed to serve the French people, all civic definitions of who made up the French people were at least indirectly defined by this same state. It did not take long for this vague vision of civic nationalism to be challenged. The alternative model was ethnic nationalism, where the state existed to serve the interests of the people as defined by a shared culture, language, tradition, and race. In those nations with largely homogenous racial compositions, ethnic nationalism seemed harmless enough. It could paper over the circularity of civic nationalism and gave legitimacy to the supremacy of the people over the state. However, the essentially racist character of nationalism was nakedly exposed in those states that were composed of multiple different ethnicities. The most prominent example of this was Europe’s most racially diverse empire, the Austro-Hungarian Duel Monarchy.
The existence of Austria-Hungary was an utter affront to ethnic nationalists. It seemed to be a state that ruled over several “peoples” or “nations” who each rejected its legitimacy. As a result, it became a fertile breeding ground for the pan-X movements. In particular, pan-Slavism, of the type that eventually instigated the First World War, and pan-Germanism, which led notably to the Nazi movement and the Second World War. Each movement called for the dissolution of states such as Austria-Hungary that were based on civic legitimacy, and the creation of large ethnostates that comprised the entire population of each race. For pan-Germans, such as the original DAP, Austria had no purpose as a separate nation state. Its German populations should have rightfully been annexed by the state of Germany. To be a pan-German in Austria-Hungary was, by definition, to decide that race was the organising principle of politics, such that loyalty to the state should be utterly rejected in favour of loyalty to one’s race. And we can see how successful this idea of the nation has been in our contemporary politics, where we often instinctually continue to discuss the right to rule over peoples and lands in racial terms.
In this context, it is essential to understand that the DAP formed by Anton Drexler in Germany in 1919 was, exactly in the tradition of its namesake, a party solely dedicated to the politics of pan-German ethnic nationalism. In the context of Germany, where nationalism carried some connotations of the civic nationalism of the conservative military establishment, the right-wing aspects of the party’s name were just as propagandistic as its left-wing rhetoric of class solidarity. Behind them all were naked racial politics. In the name of one’s race, the movement saw all political ideology as merely instrumental. It saw politics as such as merely an attempt to divide the natural solidarity and sovereignty of one’s race—which was above either socialism or nationalism.
However, this is not to say that the labels of the party were a meaningless badge. Whether as the DAP or as the later Nazi party, Hitler’s movement expressed views which were undeniably a mix of both anti-capitalist and anti-socialist—or more specifically, anti-Marxist—rhetoric. The party would on one hand diagnose their opponents as being a cabal of Wall Street capitalists, and then on the other hand catastrophise about the world-ending threat of Soviet Bolshevism. These broad antagonists did serve a convenient propagandistic purpose. The Nazis were just one of many so-called Völkisch movements that attempted to win over working-class voters who might have otherwise considered communist parties. This working-class strain to Nazi ideology was not simply a convenient lie. While Hitler was the most popular figure in the Nazi party even from his early days, the second most prominent faction was a furiously anti-capitalist strain of racists known as the Strasserites. The Strasserites remained an extremely important faction in Nazi politics until they were systematically purged during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934—well over a decade into the existence of the party.
It would nonetheless be a mistake to say that Nazis were partially socialist, or that the Strasserites were socialist Nazis. For both the Strasserites and the Hitlterites, the purpose of anti-capitalist rhetoric was not the promotion of class interests as in the case of the communist parties. Rather, as was common among ethnic nationalists in the interwar period, the Nazis promoted the theory of the Volksgemeinschaft. The Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people) theory argued that the economy should be run for the benefit of the communal interests of the nation—not for international capitalists nor for the international working class. It was a theory that used the rhetoric of collectivisation, but it did so for the purpose of erasing class interests in favour of racial interests.
The same is true of the anti-Marxist sentiments that were most prominent in the Hitlerite faction. The Nazi’s opposition to Marxists and communists was not in defence of German capitalism. Rather, it was in opposition to the international class solidarity promised by Marxists. The Nazi position on any given economic system was not determined by any attachment to its opposed system, as both were merely instruments to the establishment of their vision of the Volksgemeinschaft—which is to say, an anti-internationalist economy established for the benefit for the German race. In the early days of the party, both anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist sentiments were openly parts of the Nazi ideology, but both were instrumental and subservient to the more important Nazi interest in the issue of race.
Nazis and the right-wing
So then, what of the Night of the Long Knives? An obvious response by those who wish to cast Nazism as intellectually capitalist is to note that the Nazis purged the most socialist wing of their party, and not those dedicated to anti-Marxist rhetoric. And this is correctly something to focus on. However, understanding exactly what motivated this purge, and how it differs from ideological pro-capitalism is absolutely essential to grasping the full picture of how the Nazis relate to the left-right political spectrum.
Until now, we have discussed racial politics in a fairly euphemistic manner, without cutting to the heart of Nazi ideology. That needs to change in order to understand their approach to capitalism. We have already established that all Nazi ideology existed as a pretext to justify their racial politics, which had grown out of 19th century pan-Germanism. These pan-X ethnic nationalists viewed the world purely in terms of various racial peoples and their associated nations. As a result, the centralised state, which had evolved to govern variously disunified factions, was seen as something that had be disintegrated to serve the undifferentiated mass of the racial people. For such ideologues, the impersonal state would be replaced by the spiritual and familial nation of the people, who could manage all affairs with one mind and one heart, due to their innate cultural and racial connection.
Under such a vision of the world, there was nothing more intellectually repellent than the existence of the Jews. The Jews of Europe had established a fully integrated community of outsiders within the European nation states: The Jews were ‘free’ to live under a different religion, a different religion, and a different community. In other words, so far as the ethnic nationalists were concerned, even the most racially homogenous societies were intolerably violated by the existence of their Jewish communities. Furthermore, the Jews had been granted a special place in society, and special connections to the state infrastructure of Europe, due to two key facts: Firstly, the international nature of the Jewish diaspora had made Jews highly valued as diplomats and international businessmen, and many Jews had risen to notable prominence in all areas of international relations and bureaucracy as a result. Secondly, the traditional Jewish exemption from Christian prohibitions on usury had gradually developed into a disproportionate role in all areas of finance and economics. Both of these factors had been crystalised in the imaginations of the people of Europe by the stereotyping of the Rothschild family throughout the 19th and early 20th century.
For the pan-X movements, antisemitism was not just another bigotry, as entailed by their general concern with racial politics. It was a full scale conspiracy theory. Fueled by the fictional work The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and events such as the Dreyfus affair, the pan-X movements fully believed that the supremacy of the state over the natural community of the nation was a Jewish plot, maintained by the internationalist forces of capitalism, imperialism, and Marxist communism. The fight for national liberation was one and the same with a fight against the Jews—achieving one was identical to achieving the other. Antisemitism was not incidental or instrumental to the racism of Nazism—it was the whole ideology. Every other belief was subservient to their belief in a pathological and anti-rational anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Insomuch as the Nazis utilised the economics of either capitalism or socialism, it was all premised on purely nationalist relationships with Germans. And it was all instrumental for their stated raison d’être of destroying so-called “international Jewry.” As the left-wing politician Ferdinard Kronawetter correctly remarked, “antisemitism is the socialism of fools.”
In this light, it must be clarified that the Night of the Long Knives was about power, not political ideology. The Strasserites, despite their emphasis on socialism, were motivated by the same antisemitism as the rest of the Nazi party. And their purging did not represent any major change in the official doctrines of the Nazi party, which maintained the same mix of anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist rhetoric laid out in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Rather, the primary motivation for eliminating the Strasserites was their independence from Adolf Hitler. The Strasserites had dominated the party during the mid-1920s, whilst Hitler was serving house arrest for his role in the Munich coup attempt of 1923. After Hitler’s return, they represented one of the only factions that remained independent from Hitler’s sole will. Their ideological differences from Hitler, while present, were incidental to this fact. Therefore, any attempt to secure total power required their purging. However, it must be said that Hitler did have an additional incentive to emphasise anti-Marxist rhetoric during the early 1930s, and in this regard, it could be said that the Night of the Long Knives was a case of killing two birds with one stone.
A key catalyst behind the Nazi’s rise to power was the Great Depression. With the onset of the Great Depression, it was precisely the establishment right-wing of German politics who was abandoned by the voters. For example, during the 1930 federal election, while the social democrats and communists only suffered a modest 2.8% swing, the establishment conservative parties had a catastrophic 11.4% downward shift. While the economically nationalist rhetoric of the Volksgemeinschaft was precisely what differentiated the Nazis from the conservative establishment, and while the Nazis were considerably more popular with working class voters than these establishment conservatives (two points of notable similarity to contemporary populists and Trumpists), they nonetheless required the support of the bourgeois base of the German right-wing in order to hope to continue their electoral success. As the Nazis attempted to court this vote, electoral situation developed into what was widely perceived as a binary competition between the Nazis and the left flank represented by the social democrats and the communists. This distinction was crystalised by the Industrielleneingabe, a 1932 petition of business leaders calling for Hitler and the Nazis to be granted executive authority in order to prevent the rise of the communists. In the simplest terms, the Nazi rise to power from 1930 to 1934 involved a definite shift to the right in order to clearly differentiate themselves from the left-wing opposition parties. For all of the racial politics that motivated the internal ideology of the Nazis, the desire of the middle-class bourgeois to protect their property from the communists was absolutely instrumental to the rise of the Nazis, and the Night of the Long Knives was utilised in order to placate this power base.
As a result, almost independently from their actual ideological convictions, the Nazis came to occupy the right-wing of German politics precisely because of the structure of democratic politics. Threatened by an ascendent communist movement, any opposition movement that was supported by the bourgeois would, by definition, occupy the right-wing of the political structure of German elections. This is why it is so important to not retrofit our understanding of the Nazis with their role in the structure of the political spectrum. The Nazis happily played the role of the right-wing puppets of the bourgeois, but their ideology was more complicated and distinct from a simple extension of right-wing conservativism. The precise point is that ideologies arise due to a complex contingency of historical forces, such as those that gave rise to the Nazi ideology of pan-Germanis antisemitism and militarism. The political spectrum is not an independent force that determines ideologies, but the structure that these ideologies use in contests for power in democratic institutions.
While Peter Hitchens is utterly wrong to call the Nazis left-wing, if your contrary picture of the Nazis is as a simple extension of the inherent or natural ideology of the right-wing taken to the extreme, as though every conservative action brings us closer to a Nazi regime, I would call that position equally if not more ignorant. It is an understanding of Nazism that cannot be reconciled with the basic history of their own ideology. It is a purely psychological response to an inability to understand one’s own political enemies—the arena of paranoid anti-thought.
However, we should not let Hitchens off too softly. While the Nazis were right-wing as a matter of the contingencies of the illusory qualities of the political spectrum, that does not mean they had the equal potential to occupy the left-wing of that same structure. While the Nazis are not a simple extension of the logic of the left-right spectrum, and while the Nazis definitely blended left-wing and right-wing issues in a manner undeniably recognisable in modern populist movements, they were still undeniably a force of reaction that emerged from the underbelly of capitalism. It was a matter of contingency that Nazis came to embody the right-wing of German electoral politics, but they could never be, as Hitchens imagines, the embodiment of left-wing radicalism.
As we begun with, behind the abstract ideologies of politics is always and everywhere the material conditions that determine those politics. The economic relations that are abstracted away into the real of philosophical principles. That Nazism is “right-wing” is the result of the particular structures of democratic politics, and how those shape our idealistical superstructural moulds of “conservatism” and “progressivism.” However, those moulds do not emerge from nowhere, like manna from heaven. Instead, as has been the case since the very first modern political issue of the French Revolution, behind every political delineation are the same class issues that crystalised into that eternal question of being for or against revolution—conservative or Jacobin. However, in times of crises, there is something of a third category: an impulse towards conservation so strong that it is willing to engineer a revolution against the revolution in order to dredge up the past and make it new again. We call this impulse reactionary politics.
In a landmark 1933 essay titled What Is National Socialism?, the Marxist thinker and revolutionary Leon Trotsky convincingly explained how Nazi ideology, despite its single-minded and anti-political motivations, originates as the material conditions of a wide reactionary force that is organic to the capitalist system in the aftermath of the utter destruction of the First World War. I will let Trotsky’s thorough arguments close out of this lengthy post:
The multiplicity of parties, the icy fever of elections, the interminable changes of ministries aggravated the social crisis by creating a kaleidoscope of barren political combinations. In the atmosphere brought to white heat by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie rose up against all the old parties that had bamboozled i.e. The sharp grievances of small proprietors never out of bankruptcy, of their university sons without posts and clients, of their daughters without dowries and suitors, demanded order and an iron hand.
The bonfires which burn the impious literature of Marxism light up brilliantly the class nature of National Socialism. While the Nazis acted as a party and not as a state power, they did not quite find an approach to the working class. On the other side, the big bourgeoisie, even those who supported Hitler with money, did not consider his party theirs. The national “renaissance” leaned wholly upon the middle classes, the most backward part of the nation, the heavy ballast of history. Political art consisted in fusing the petty bourgeoisie into oneness through its common hostility to the proletariat.
The petty bourgeois is hostile to the idea of development, for development goes immutably against him; progress has brought him nothing except irredeemable debts. National Socialism rejects not only Marxism but Darwinism. The Nazis curse materialism because the victories of technology over nature have signified the triumph of large capital over small. The leaders of the movement are liquidating “intellectualism” because they themselves possess second- and third-rate intellects, and above all because their historic role does not permit them to pursue a single thought to its conclusion. The petty bourgeois needs a higher authority, which stands above matter and above history, and which is safeguarded from competition, inflation, crisis, and the auction block. To evolution, materialist thought, and rationalism—of the twentieth, nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries—is counterposed in his mind national idealism as the source of heroic inspiration. Hitler’s nation is the mythological shadow of the petty bourgeoisie itself, a pathetic delirium of a thousand-year Reich.
On the plane of politics, racism is a vapid and bombastic variety of chauvinism in alliance with phrenology. As the ruined nobility sought solace in the gentility of its blood, so the pauperized petty bourgeoisie befuddles itself with fairy tales concerning the special superiorities of its race. Worthy of attention is the fact that the leaders of National Socialism are not native Germans but interlopers from Austria, like Hitler himself, from the former Baltic provinces of the Czar’s empire, like Rosenberg; and from colonial countries, like Hess, who is Hitler’s present alternate for the party leadership. A barbarous din of nationalisms on the frontiers of civilization was required in order to instill into its “leaders” those ideas which later found response in the hearts of the most barbarous classes in Germany.
Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.
