In point of fact, the whole classification of political tendencies into ‘right wing’ and ‘left wing’ has, since about the mid 1920’s become nothing but a propaganda tool for the left.
‘Right wing’ as a practical matter means opposing internationalist socialism
(whether the formal International led by the Soviet Communist Party, or the UN as ultimate arbiter, let’s make the whole world into Sweden sort of international socialism that one finds among granola munching hemp-wearers near and on American university campuses).
Realizing that that is the functional definition, and any other usage has an element of propaganda in it, there no contradiction between recognizing that on the one hand the Nazis were, as their party name proclaimed, socialists—they instituted a command economy, exerting more state control over the economy than even the most stringent controls ever instituted by the British Labour Party or any Social Democratic or Socialist party in the Nordic countries—and on on the other, because they were nationalists, and thus opposed to internationalist socialism, were ‘right wing’.
It would serve American conservatives well to repudiate the whole notion of ‘right wing’ v. ‘left wing’, by heaping scorn on the actual usage.
Curiously, what now passes for the ‘left’ in America has more in common with the Nazis than with Marxist Communism: there is an obsession with identity politics, racial classification and the like (albeit not issuing forth in mass murder as under the Nazis); an irrational romanticization of nature; no insistance on state *ownership* of the means of production; and (if one looks closely) more reliance on Nietzsche than Marx.
Good suggestion.
When carried to the extreme, almost any political or social movement can be characterized as totalitarian. This is a favorite tool of propagandists, who are adept at stretching things to absurd dimensions. That's how people who oppose affirmative action on principle get thrown into the same bucket of slime with racists and neo-Nazis. It's how conservatives who favor prayer in public school get branded as religious fascists. It's a question of degree, not direction.