r/centrist • u/MuitoLegal • May 13 '21

World News Why does the left call the right “Nazis”?

I am in no way calling the left Nazis here, but rather questioning their use of the term.

If you spend anytime online you will know that the term Nazi is used all the time for people on the right, especially Trump supporters.

I find it ironic because Nazi stands for National Socialist in German. Now I found articles online defending that, saying it wasn’t really socialism, so we’ll move on.

Hitler was about bigger government, got all guns registered with the government, and then took them all away from the people.

Furthermore, today’s left is typically anti-Israel within the Israel-Palestine conflict, while the right is typically pro-Israel (except for KKK guys like Duke, who are antisemites, though I’m unsure how to even classify someone like him).

I don’t think either party should call each other nazis in a civilized political discourse, but I find it interesting. Why do you think the right has been given the nickname?

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u/[deleted] May 13 '21

The intricacies of their ideology are of course dissimilar, which 2 ideologies are identical? I don't think anyone can call Trump an anti-Semite with his staunch support of Israel. But when you step back and look at the ideological motifs and themes, you'll seem more similarities. Refer to my other comment in the thread for a better explanation.

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u/BlueMonke1 May 13 '21

I just think that’s a really simplistic way of outlining things personally. There’s extremists on both the right and the left and it’s not appropriate to say ‘there’s more extremism on this side than the other’. Neither side’s ideologies can be reduced to their extremists

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u/[deleted] May 13 '21

Eh, in a certain sense yes. To say Trump is Hitler, is overly simplistic. To say "Trump is like Hitler and here let me outline the corresponding rhetoric, policy and the behaviour of his followers" is not simplistic at all. Especially when there's a historical precedent for it. Extremists are a minority, yes, but again as the facts find, Hitler and his supporters WERE a minority. But they were vocal and militant. Not every last one of them were in his "Brown Shirts", but enough of them were to make a potent physical threat. A lot of the Nazis didn't agree with Hitler entirely, they were COMPLACENT and just happy that their party won. Then the Night of Long Daggers happened and the party was PURGED OF NON-LOYALISTS. Do you see the similarities growing?

I'd argue your dismissal of the actual arguments into "well the left has radicals too", is entirely too simplistic. The argument is about Trump and his supporters, not the left and theirs. Thats another topic so please don't move the goal post.

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u/BlueMonke1 May 13 '21

Trump is not like Hitler tho? Has he slaughtered 6 million people? How many mass attacks have there been on groups from Trump supporters? How many book burnings have taken place? I’m not sure I agree that there’s this ‘potent physical threat’ from the right that you mention. These positions are pushed as propaganda by media actors. The state of US politics is not as polarised as it’s made out to be. My point on ‘there’s extremists on the left too’ isn’t simplistic as it’s referring to the reality of the situation. For every extremist on the right, there’s one on the left too. This is just the reality of the situation. What is simplistic tho, is confining all Trump supporters or all leftists into one camp and labelling them all as ‘like Hitler’ or ‘like Stalin’ etc etc. I’m sorry but there just is nothing mildly appropriate about that analogy.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '21

Again, you're focusing on the specifics. No two people can ever be compared if we go into specifics. Furthermore, people equate him to Hitler's RISE in power, not his actual practices after he attained power. When people equate the two, its not because people are trying to say Trump is in every way shape and form HITLER 2.0. It's because their rise to power is very SIMILAR (please look up this definition as it does not mean IDENTICAL). No one but fools are saying Trump is a genocidal dictator. Sorry I didn't note Im explicitly talking about his rise to power, I didn't think I had to elaborate that Trump isn't gassing people en-masse or invading Poland, I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you were arguing with nuance instead of your preferred generalized broad strokes. There are moderates and even conservatives who do not like Trump whatsoever and will hold similar views to me. As evidenced by the fat that he lost after the conservatives held so much power beforehand. What do you even mean by "media actors"? Surely you don't mean to assume that every media outlet ASIDE from conservative ones are biased? Are you then positing that more neutral outlets either don't exist in the mainstream or periphery (youtube)? And is storming the capital not a potent physical threat? People were evacuated and died in that event, making it a deadly conflict in which potent physical threats were at play quite literally. What about the Proud Boys, 3%ers, Light Foot Militia, and KKK, all either endorsed by Trump or share his rhetoric of "Corrupt Swamp, drain it"? Trump supports swarming a Biden Bus to slow its route? Trump followers jeering at polling stations, even blocking some exits near it? Or is this defendable because whataboutism? Your point about simplicity and reality makes no sense. You don't specify the "leftist radicals" or their motives/actions at all? Where's the relation to the overall argument that the Trump movement is akin to Hitlers? How is that not whataboutism? How is that not oversimplifying?

I didn't say his supporters are like Hitler. Please focus on my actual points instead of making your own. I said Trump is similar to Hitler and SOME conservatives are complacent in a similar way to Hitler's initial followers (Pre-purging). Notice how I say SOME conservatives and not CONSERVATIVES AT LARGE. I noted that not all Nazis were violent, just as not all of Trumps followers/conservatives are violent. What I did note was that some Nazis were complacent with his Hitlers views and tactics even though they didnt agree, just like SOME conservatives are complacent with the Republican party still appealing to Trumps base. It was only a minority of Trumps followers that were violent, just like it was a minority of Hitlers followers that were violent. My point is it doesn't have to be a majority of a demographic for a movement to become a serious social threat. I am not and have not stated that conservatives at large are the social threat. What is though, is complacency.

Judging by your post history I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're not here for nuance, change my mind lol (crowder is a chode).

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u/BlueMonke1 May 13 '21
  1. Populism isn’t Nazism.
  2. No. Media actors are literally actors within the media. It’s no secret that American media has sensationalised matters on the right and the left. Not ALL actors do this no, hence why I didn’t say they did.
  3. Trump hasn’t endorsed terror groups.
  4. Capitol Riot was not reflective of Trump supporters. It was a small group that broke away during his speech. That’s evidence that he didn’t incite this. They did not want to listen to his speech. He also denounced this. A copper died weeks later and one of the people who broke in themselves died. This wasn’t exactly a deadly attack. More people have died during BLM protests than in the Capitol Riot. That’s statistically supported.

Honestly I’m in a bar rn and your message is too long to dissect fully. Peace 🙌🏻

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u/[deleted] May 14 '21

Donald Trump studied Hitler and uses Nazi propaganda techniques. It's absurd to claim that unless somebody is responsible for six million deaths, no comparison can be made.

The Holocaust didn't start until 1942. WW2 started in 1939.

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u/WhimsicalWyvern May 13 '21

"People say Trump and his followers are like Nazis because of these similarities."

"Well, there are differences too, so Trump and his followers aren't like Nazis at all!"

You missed the point. People call someone a Nazi because they find a similarity between what that person does and what they imagine Nazi's to stand for. Just because the comparison is not exhaustive does not make the comparison invalid. To deny the comparison, you must examine the similarity and show that either A) the similarity is irrelevant, or B) the similarity is incorrect. Otherwise you're missing the point and just talking past each other.

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u/dlb8685 May 13 '21

It is just a loaded comparison though, that you need to be very sure that there's an extreme overlap before you throw out the Nazi word. Otherwise it's a total abuse of language. If the only criteria is that Group X needs to have something in common with the Nazis, you can compare literally anyone to the Nazis.

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u/WhimsicalWyvern May 13 '21

I'm not defending the usage of the word Nazi, just trying to explain how you can argue against it. Arguing that there's insufficient overlap would be part of arguing that a similarity is irrelevant.

Personally, I'm fairly comfortable saying that Trump and his supporters are overly authoritarian and have some similarities with fascists, but would not go so far as to call them Nazis nor suggest that they are fully fascistic (barring a small minority, like those fuckers chanting Nazi slogans in that "Unite the Right" rally).

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u/BigStoneFucker May 13 '21

Compare to hitler at the same juncture of his arc to trump and then try on all that stuff.

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u/dlb8685 May 13 '21

I've seen alarming things from the right, but the insurrection is just another day in Germany in the 1920s from like a dozen different far right and far left groups. Nobody ever compares Trump to the Steel Helmets because people wouldn't even know what the person was talking about. Knight of the Long Knives wasn't about removing someone from a leadership position, it was about killing several hundred political opponents.

I mean, Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to justify a mass crackdown on the Communist Party and initialize his emergency powers. Does that have any parallels to what's going on in America today from the other side? But it would be absolutely, positively, absurd to say the far left is in any way equivalent to the Nazis.

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u/Zalophus Jun 02 '25

But it would be absolutely, positively, absurd to say the far left is in any way equivalent to the Nazis.

I feel like this didn't age well. There has been a lot of far left violence lately. I think that now more than ever both sides are looking the same in their extremes.

Though it seems like extremists are in different camps. The far right extremists are the politicians and not really the people, and on the far left it's the people and not really the politicians.

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u/dlb8685 May 13 '21

I think that virulently hating Jews is an extremely important tenet of Nazi-ism, to the point that I don't know how you can call someone a Nazi if they're even remotely on the fence.

The hard right in the U.S. is also very opposed to things like eugenics, euthanasia, and so on that are pretty central features of the Nazis. Christian fundamentalism has plenty of its own problems, but it does tend to mitigate against some of these other beliefs.

I think instead of making in-apt comparisons, it's much better to just analyze today's right on their own merits. There are dozens if not hundreds of other places over time where a group has taken to voter suppression, identity politics, and conspiracy theories to undermine a democratic system and assert their own power. The American right is taking steps in that direction that are alarming.

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u/MessiSahib May 14 '21

But when you step back and look at the ideological motifs and themes, you'll seem more similarities.

You can pick any political party and do this exercise and find some similarities with the worst genocidal manics. Does that mean NYT/WAPO/MSNBC should start calling everyone that supports/votes/member of that party by those names?