American White Supremacist David Duke: Israel Makes the Nazi State Look Very Moderate

The concept of volksgemeinschaft was a German conservative one

Nope. It was a German Romantic concept.

A product of the Enlightenment, not the old order.

They are cousins, yes, but Nazism's wellspring was the conservative-nationalist base.

Again, I disagree. The monarchists and the Centrum were the German conservatives. Some nationalists were conservatives and some were socialists.

Nazism was predicated on two ideas: scientific racism and secular statism.

Scientific racism is a leftist innovation of the Enlightenment as is secular statism.

A true German-speaking conservative in the 1920s/1930s could be of two varieties: a devout Lutheran supporter of the Hohenzollern dynasty and its junker class or a devout Catholic supporter of the Habsburg dynasty (in Austria-Hungary) or of the Centrum (in Germany).

These were precisely the kind of men who populated the Third Reich's army officer corps at the beginning - which is why the SS was created as a counterweight to what Hitler himself described as "reactionaries" in the Wehrmacht.

It was conservatives such as these who plotted against Hitler's life and almost suceeded. Claus von Stauffenberg was an almost perfect example of an actual German conservative, as opposed to a typical Nazi leftist.

The only way it works as you describe is to put true anarchy (with unfettered liberal economy) on the far right with the most absolutist communism on the far left

You're close.

I would describe it as being the most limited government with the highest degree of subsidiarity on the one extreme with the most centralized and most interventionist statism on the other extreme.

In the former case, morality, economic activity, etc. are dictated and formed by voluntary associations like churches and business associations while in the latter all human activity is subject to state dictation.

I would not describe the former state as "anarchy" - most self-described anarchists are collectivists who believe in replacing the existing state with an even more powerful state consisting of rule by labor unions or similar organizations. To me, these "syndicates" are indistinguishable from soviets and therefore from Communism proper.

The former is consistent with both traditional American conservatism which was based on a limited government according to the US Constitution and with traditional European conservatism, which was based on the pre-absolutist, voluntary allegiance to a monarch who was restricted in his authority by tradition and by subsidiarity.

What I'd say is that Communism and Nazism are the left and right extreme versions of Statist and collectivist ideology.

Your description would be more convincing if you had given us a substitute axis for left/right distinctions to replace the liberty/statism axis you've rejected.

Because both Communism and Fascism/Nazism make the state the highest authority, give the state absolute power of the lives and deaths of its subjects and replace traditional systems of morality and interpersonal behavior with a state-implemented, state-promoting ideology, they are both on the far left of the left/right continuum.

I would recommend that you read Jose Donoso Cortes' essay (really a parliamentary speech) entitled "Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism" in which he shows how state interventionism increases as people cease being inner-directed (i.e. doing the right thing because their well-formed Christian conscience inspires them to voluntarily behave in socially productive ways) and become other-directed (only the law and the accompanying punishment inspire them to behave in any certain way - they have no inner compass and are dependent on external force for moral action).

Many things were products of the Enlightenment, not all were left wing developments. When I say VG was a popular idea among conservative elements, it only means that it found traction among traditionalists (however idealized the past) and not the Social Democrats or Communists.

I'd also argue that Nazism borrowed elements from scientific racism and Social Darwinism but there was a strong and mystical neo-pagan element to it. There is a difference between Hitler's racial vision of history and the world and scientific racism. A vast difference. Jews as the parasites and the antithesis to the true civilization of the Aryans was on the order of eschatological religion.

It's not that Nazism didn't have leftist threads, considering that era saw an increased rejection of liberal societies in favor of secular statism, based on some communist utopia or a harmonious, classless "Volk."

Don't mean to waste bandwidth with two posts in a row, but I believe I laid out the case for why we cannot merely have the left/right political axis you

For one, circumstances change and who is 'conservative' when viewing a particular time in history is difficult to discern (not in the sense of status quo but some abstract definition of the term.) Another is that people who subscribe to what I'd consider views antithetical to liberty may still find a home on the right. Certainly religious authoritarians hostile to leftist social and political movements may be rightist but not necessarily standard bearers for liberty.

I just think the axis, though it is helpful, is not sufficient. While Nazism and Communism are two sides of the same coin and can often resemble each other, too much in the Nazism that succeeded (as opposed to Strasser's vision) does not display the same leftist vision of communism or 'social democracy.'

I don't disagree with you as much as you think. I just think that for these categorizations to have meaning, one must also think of the social conditions of the time and where a particular movement finds its strongest base of support.

I'm not hostile to the idea of a liberty/statism axis, I just don't think it fits completely. It would mean that no totalitarian regime could ever be of the right. I just don't find that to be the case. I read far too many, even here at FR, that seem hostile to liberty on a great number of topics. I would not then consider those people 'leftists.'

Pinging you to this discussion of the usual suspects.

Thanks. My computer's just out of the shop (for the second time in a month) and I'm just now logging on. I have a lot of catching up to do.

I wonder now that Mr. Duke has declared Syrian Arabs honorary white people if this will cause the international "anti-racism" mob (including those South African hypocrites the ANC, Mandela, and Tutu) to reevaluate their pro-Arab position?

Don't answer that! That's about as likely as the "white nationalists" reevaluating Mr. Duke because of his support of Middle Eastern "mud people!"

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