I know that there are holocaust deniers… indeed, I know that there are people who’ll deny almost anything that doesn’t fit with their political agenda. However, until recently I had no idea that quite a few people deny that the Nazis were, well, a bit right-wing.
The stupidest holders of this belief tend to argue that Nazis are bad, and being bad means that you’re left-wing… and anyway, they even had “socialist” in their name! The best way to deal with these people is by deporting them to the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.
More sensible people tend to use longer words and say slightly more sensible things, pointing out that early Nazi and social democratic economic policies share significant common traits.
Their main error is in not taking into account that the Nazis were uniquely evil not because of their economic policy, but because of their coercive social policy (this three-word description might be the understatement of the decade). Indeed, these right-libertarians are making the same mistake as their halfwitted co-ideologists: they’re equating “the left” with everything they dislike.
Democratic political parties *actually* tend to fit on a diagonal on the political compass, between economic liberal / social authoritarian and social liberal / economic authoritarian, therefore making these the most sensible definitions of “the left” and “the right”.
On this basis, the Nazis aren’t quite a classic party of the right, but their social authoritarianism is rather more extreme than their economic authoritarianism. Calling them a party of the right is at the very least defensible, and seems to be the more sensible of the two labels to use.
Digressionally, I’ve never quite understood liberal-libertarians who are prepared to support right-wing political parties. Given that being thrown in jail (or otherwise denied non-economic freedoms) is clearly worse than being poor, why would anyone prioritise the economic side of the compass over the social side when choosing a compromise party?
Maybe they’re just venal.