Hayek addressed this well 80ish years ago.
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Some people really want to stick their heads in the sand.......
I observe that the Soviet Communists associated anyone not on board with the Bolshevik mindset as bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, hence “right-wing”. This included the mere Socialists in the governments of eastern Europe, who were purged along with real Nazis during “de-Nazification” phase in 1946/47, so that outright Communist governments could be installed. Communist parties in France and Italy also used the “right-wing” epithet to apply to all their opponents. It seems to me that the American Communists did this also, spreading it through their infestation of Hollywood and the newspapers.
Fascism is not an ideology. It’s an organizational method. Theoretically it can exist on the political right or left. Ultimately, fascism is a strong alliance between government, media and big corporations. The political left in America certainly has achieved that triad by of power. Historically, fascism has been used in left-wing governments. And, I’m still not sure why the NAZI’s were considered a right wing force. I guess they were right of Stalin.
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