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Yeah, non-conservatives (mainly liberals) really need to get it into their heads that every single conservative either actively wants an authoritarian state that murders "woke" people and minorities, or if they're not outright for it they think that surely the leopards won't eat their face because they're on the right side.
Ultimately even a "moderate" conservative has fewer disagreements with literal neo-Nazis (oh wait, except the Nazis are leftists according to reich-wingers) than they do with anybody left of the fucking Strasserites. Even if a conservative is not calling for the extermination of
{CURRENT_HATED_MINORITY}, they're still more than happy to support parties that either have fascist members or collaborate with fascists.This is on clear display here in Europe; the "moderate" conservatives are lining up to kiss Meloni's ass, and they don't mind at all that FdI (Meloni's party) is a literal offshoot of the original Fascist Party and a huge percentage of their MPs and "lay members" have voiced their love of Mussolini.
The whole "Nazis are leftists" thing really blows my mind but I've seen people saying it unironically.
It's because in their mind Nazi = bad guy.
They cannot see themselves as "bad guys," so the association is immediately dismissed without further consideration. The leftists are the bad guys, so obviously Nazi maps onto those people.
But it's not really about truth, it's about "winning" the argument.
Also National Socialism means they were socialists, much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democratic republic.
It just shows a total lack of understanding of what the NSDAP platform was. Nazi Germany was a corporatist (in the political science sense) and authoritarian capitalist country, and they eg. specifically privatized a lot of functions that had been public before, absolutely loathed the idea of welfare or supporting "unworthy" people in any way, and were quite enthusiastically supported by business interests starting from their early years. Socialism, ie. social ownership of the means of production and strong public services, is about as opposite as can be to what the economics of fascism are, not to mention the social side. Fascists literally murdered sick or infirm people rather than support them, because weakness has to be weeded out of society.
Like this contemporary caricature puts it, the NSDAP – the National Socialist German Workers' Party – presented itself as the "Socialist Workers' Party" when appealing to workers, and as the "National German Party" when appealing to "financially solvent circles".
All of this is just completely beyond many conservatives' capability to internalize – understanding any of that would mean they'd have to think some very uncomfortable thoughts about their own ideology, and the vast majority of them are fundamentally incapable of that sort of self-reflection.
Wait till you find out that the servatives rebrand/redefine all the leftie concepts. For example they have redefined what Critical Race Theory means.
It's not because they are stupid and can't understand the original meaning. It's because the servatives know that the true meaning of the concept they don't like will be popular and widely agreed with, so they deliberately butcher the original meaning on purpose. It's a war tactic.
Put another way, the servatives use words not for what those words mean, but for the effect they want those words to create inside the minds of their listeners.
So if the servative calls Biden a socialist they want Biden's latent fear of socialism to push him right. That Biden is not actually a socialist doesn't matter. What matters is that Biden is a self-professed capitalist who fears socialism, and the effect of being branded "socialist" on Biden's psyche is to create pressure inside his mind to move Biden's policy comfort zone to the right. And once this is aired on TV it doesn't just push Biden alone, but most of the viewers who even remotely see anything of themselves in Biden are also affected.
It doesn't help that Nazi is a truncation of National Socialist. Anybody with a lick of sense would know that they weren't socialists in any way, shape or form, but a lot of people don't have a lick of sense.
If you go far enough right, you buffer overflow around to the left.
If you go far enough left, you buffer underflow around to the right
Authoritarian leftists have a lot more in common with fascists than liberal leftists, that's for sure.
I really think The Reactionary Mind should be required reading by leftists. It really helps to understand why conservatism is actively opposed to individual liberty and how they sell these regressive ideas to a population primed for them: