Just to keep matters in balance, let me point out that although it is mostly the Left that hates individualism—remember, socialism means that we, humanity, are all just one organism—the Right’s hostility toward it is no less virulent. Just recall that both Hitler and Stalin hated individualism, in any of its varieties. ~Tibor Machan
Actually, Hitler and Stalin hated personal liberty and they hated individualism. To confuse the two is typical of people who think that individualism is somehow a good thing. Also, Hitler was a radical nationalist who endorsed the supreme importance of labour and encouraged the collaboration of the state and industry in a state capitalist economy. Only in the fever dreams of libertarians does that place him on “the Right” or associate him with conservatives of any stripe. If this is how Mr. Machan begins his tiresome attack, you can just imagine how much worse it gets.
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March 8th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Leonard
It is liberals, not libertarians, to whom Nazis were capitalists. Indeed I would say this is a mainstream view, held almost universally on the left but also held by many on the right.
As for “left” and “right”, they are descriptors for general tendancies containing many different components. Left has traditionally been socialist, humanist, modernist and internationalist. The Right, capitalist, traditionalist, and nationalist. But not all -isms fit neatly into these categories, with Nazism a prime example, being socialist and modernist on one hand, but also racist and nationalist. Depending on which of these elements seems important at the time, various -ism will look leftish or rightish. At the time, socialism was in the air and racism not discredited, so the nationalism seemed the most striking features of Nazism. Hence the idea that is was on the Right. Capitalism is now resurgent, internationalism a joke, and racism has been disowned on both left and right; hence we now look at Nazism and see a different picture.
March 8th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Daniel Larison
I think I failed to make an important point. Leftists, and Marxists in particular, have pointed to the state capitalism of Nazi Germany as proof that Nazism was a “conservative” or even “reactionary” phenomenon. For them any involvement with private enterprise marks a political movement as bourgeois or a bastion of conservatism against the revolution. I reject this connection. I do not reject the idea that Nazis were, in fact, state capitalists following the purge of the last full-blown state socialists among the National Socialists in 1934. I reject the idea that state capitalism, which is the marriage of concentrated power and concentrated wealth for the purposes of greater centralisation, homogenisation and “rationalisation, has anything to do with conservatism or the Right, properly speaking. For Mr. Machan to refer to Hitler to tar the Right with his crimes, as if Hitler were obviously on the Right (when he is not), he has to believe in some sort of connection like this. Neither adherence to nationalism or capitalism is necessarily rightist at all, and I think strong arguments could be made that a thoroughgoing rightist would have to oppose very strongly at least certain forms of both.
On the question of nationalism, conservative nationalism of a kind has existed (Nicholas I in Russia promoted such a thing), but otherwise nationalism is almost always a revolutionary ideology, as it was again in Nazi Germany. The Nazis did not talk about the New Order and the New Man for nothing. Nationalists have only appeared relatively “rightist” to the extent that they were less revolutionary than international socialists–according to the socialists’ definition of what made one revolutionary. From the perspective of the people they were attacking, they were both equally revolutionary and coming at them from the left. I understand how the nationalist/Right connection was made, but I was trying to state why that connection makes no sense. I should have been more clear that it was not “only” in the dreams of libertarians that this association is made, and I should have made clear where this association originally came from.
It was, of course, the Nazis’ conceit that they had squared the circle and combined the best of revolutionary progressive ideology in a national context. Their racism was another element of their progressivism, which was at the time captivated by the en vogue “science” of eugenics.
March 8th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Leonard
Although I will use them, I am unhappy with the terms “left” and “right” exactly because they are vague. You evidently want to separate nationalism and “right”; well, look around the right-blogosphere and punditarat and tell me they’re not nationalists to the nines. You can, of course, argue that they are not the “real” rightists, that their understanding is shallow, or that they are deviant on that one point, while you are keeping it real. And there’s something to that — to me it is clear that you understand the world better than they do. Anyone who talks seriously of “nation building” is a mediocre thinker at best. Still, there has to be a point in any use-based definition, as are right and left, where you just cede the term to the vast majority, in spite of apparent contradictions.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Daniel Larison
Thanks for your reply and your kind words.
Fair enough. I grant that many of the people conventionally aligned on the right are actually nationalists, and for many of them being a nationalist is part of what it means to be “on the right.” Some might deny the label nationalist, because they think it has bad connotations, but would adhere to the ideas all the same. I would indeed argue that this alignment of nationalism on the right is a mistake and I would say that these people have misunderstood a great many things. They have confused patriotism and nationalism, and they have also tended to confuse the government and the country (which is a mistake nationalists frequently make), which leads them to take bizarrely strong positions in favour of whatever the government is doing because they think it is “patriotic.” Besides being hostile to local and regional identities, which is bad enough, nationalism has in it this ugly tendency to be able to express itself only through the denigration or subjugation of other peoples and the domestic nation-building or identity-building of the nationalist is often forged in war against outside enemies. This is also why these nationalists tend to be very supportive of any war, because to their minds it helps “unite” the nation more fully in common purpose, and why patriotic anti-nationalists such as I tend to be extremely skeptical and/or hostile to most every war. This is probably why there is such nostalgia for WWII among these same nationalists, because it was for them the first and last truly and unequivocally “united” war effort (at least in the propagandistic history we are fed) and therefore was “America’s finest hour” as well as being the engine that created modern America.