AHC: Fascism commonly viewed as leftwing

Here is a challange: Make Fascism/National Socialism be commonly perceived as a leftwing political ideology. This thread is not to be used for a debate on whether or not Fascism/national socialism is left or right wing. Fascism/National Socialism are commonly viewed as being rightwing political ideologies today. How can we get these ideologies viewed as left wing ideologies with a PoD no earlier then 1945.
 
if the line of fascist thought stays closer to its original corporatist and syndicalist origins and following through on its rhetoric re: opposition to capitalism and such it could be viewed as a rather unusual strain of authoritarian nationalist leftism. keeping futurism and life-as-aesthetics as a larger part of fascism would probably help here as well. if fascism stays the domain of d'annunzios rather than hitlers and mussolinis, this is actually pretty likely IMO.

however once parties with 'fascist' in the name start doing the things traditionally associated with the right - suppression (rather than co-option) of unions, teaming up with conservative/reactionary parties and the church, etc etc, then it becomes increasingly harder to paint fascism as an ideology of the left.

edit: also the inclusion of racist philosophies and ideas into fascism probably won't help here either, as racism is generally (not always) a trait of reactionary and backwards looking parties and organizations.
 
I can't see any way to do it post-1945. I don't think there's any way to do it at all without reversing the political spectrum completely - have the monarchists sit on the left rather than the right in the French parliament, say.
 
I think there are bars in some parts of the world where, by speaking to the clientele, you'd get the impression that this is already the case IOTL.
 
Pretty well impossible if you actually understand what fascism was and stood for. Otherwise I can only imagine the US Right's characterization of 'Leftist = Fascist (And Marxist-Communist-Islamist :rolleyes:)' becoming mainstream, somehow...
 
oh, I didn't see post-1945 in there. yeah this is a nigh-impossible given that by 1945 there was a fairly large body of work focused on proving exactly the opposite of this AHC.
 
Guys? Its a completely arbitrary and undocumented standard. All it takes is for some widely-respected political theorist to come to the same conclusions as Pournelle and hey, presto! New standard.

Or do you think the adoption of the Metric system was ASB?
 
Guys? Its a completely arbitrary and undocumented standard. All it takes is for some widely-respected political theorist to come to the same conclusions as Pournelle and hey, presto! New standard.

Or do you think the adoption of the Metric system was ASB?

The Metric system wasn't decided by just one man, and had an entire revolutionary philosophy associated with it. Redefining the political spectrum with a POD post-1945 will require a similar group consensus that is associated with a movement to ditch the old regime.
 
I think it would take the majority of political theorists to come to that same conclusion, and I can't really see why they would. For all its flaws it is still the most workable system. The attempts I've seen to redefine it as Pournelle does, seem to end up endorsing it when they try to fit people into that new two-dimensional spectrum (the overwhelming majority ending up in a band from one corner to another).

Switching from imperial to metric was a way to make things simpler. Abandoning the left-right spectrum for a multi-dimensional one, for the sake of dealing with special cases that can't be fitted into the left-right model, makes things much more complicated for the majority of cases.
 
If left-right is not defined in terms of economics but rather in terms of adherence to traditions and such. Then facism and nazism would definitely end up on the left wing of the political spectrum since both were revolutionary ideologies.
 
To help this process along since there seems to be a bit of confusion on the topic I highly recommend everyone at least skim through Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton is the authority on Fascism due to his earlier work, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, which is widely considered ground-breaking when it comes to Vichy France, and made Paxton important enough to be called to testify at the trial of Maurice Papon (who was convicted for crimes against humanity in 1998).
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive vigilance and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

[...]

I believe that the ideas that underline fascist action are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter 2 I called them "mobilizing passions":

  • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
  • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
  • the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
  • dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
  • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
  • the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny;
  • the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;
  • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, wen they are devoted to the group's success;
  • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
 
If left-right is not defined in terms of economics but rather in terms of adherence to traditions and such. Then facism and nazism would definitely end up on the left wing of the political spectrum since both were revolutionary ideologies.

They were counter-revolutionary and (in terms of social theory and political organisation at least) deeply regressive - that, more than anything else, is what put them unambiguously on the far right (and that's why, when they formed alliances, it was with conservatives, monarchists, etc).
 
It's not ASB; but you would have to get people to agree to a definition of "left versus right" as purely measuring governmental power to the exclusion of most other factors.

Therefore you would have a scale like:

Communism > National Socialism > Latin American Leftism > Social Democracy > New Deal Leftism > Moderate > Laissez-Faire/Neo-Liberalism > Libertarianism > Anarcho-Capitalism.
 
But fascism is far left of the current American Right. :D
Pretty well impossible if you actually understand what fascism was and stood for. Otherwise I can only imagine the US Right's characterization of 'Leftist = Fascist (And Marxist-Communist-Islamist :rolleyes:)' becoming mainstream, somehow...
 
It's not ASB; but you would have to get people to agree to a definition of "left versus right" as purely measuring governmental power to the exclusion of most other factors.

Therefore you would have a scale like:

Communism > National Socialism > Latin American Leftism > Social Democracy > New Deal Leftism > Moderate > Laissez-Faire/Neo-Liberalism > Libertarianism > Anarcho-Capitalism.

Would Fascism fit between National Socialism and Latin American Leftism or the latter and Social Democracy? There is a difference between Italy's Fascism and Germany's version of Fascism.
 
It's not ASB; but you would have to get people to agree to a definition of "left versus right" as purely measuring governmental power to the exclusion of most other factors.
Therefore you would have a scale like:
Communism > National Socialism > Latin American Leftism > Social Democracy > New Deal Leftism > Moderate > Laissez-Faire/Neo-Liberalism > Libertarianism > Anarcho-Capitalism.

If it is based on government control of the economy and nothing else, surely Nazism and Fascism would be somewhere around the middle of that spectrum.
 
Yeah, on a the Political Compass scale the Nazis are top-center, not top-right. In terms of free-market support, they're not very far right at all.

So the spectrum needs to be defined more in terms of economic issues. Perhaps an averted Cold War would avoid a lot of right-wing authoritarianism. That would allow the right in the US and Britain to be more isolationist and more free-market oriented.
 
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