The reason people focus on these definitions is because you have authors like Goldberg making absurd statements like "Hitler and Mussolini were leftists because they were anti-individualistic collectivists." The military is by its very nature anti-individualist and collectivist. Does this make all militaries, including our own, inherently "left-wing?"
Fascist movements basically took the collectivism inherent to military organization and expanded it to encompass the entire organization of the state and society. Now, there are good reasons to say that this is not a desirable state of affairs here or anywhere else, but to call their movements "leftist" or "liberal" on these grounds is ridiculous.
It seems to me that the essential point is that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini all approached the entire organization of the state and society in very similar ways. They were all anti-individualistic collectivists.
I don't care how you label the spectrum, but I think, as a group, they all bunch up on the same side.
Fascist movements basically took the collectivism inherent to military organization and expanded it to encompass the entire organization of the state and society. Now, there are good reasons to say that this is not a desirable state of affairs here or anywhere else, but to call their movements "leftist" or "liberal" on these grounds is ridiculous.
You've hit the nail right on the head. The European totalitarian right wing ideal is really ancient Sparta, which was a totalitarian and collectivist hell where babies with birth defects were left to die and children were raised collectively in a sort of military barracks. Ironically, ancient Sparta was also very "left wing" economically, so it does serve as a sort of connecting point for both Communism and Fascism.
There are two other points I would like to make before I forget them. First, the old order of European conservatives like Metternich saw the social Darwinism of individualistic free enterprise (unleashed, ironically, by the French Revolution, which was a project of the bourgeoisie, not of the proletariat) as unfair and cruel to the poor. They argued for a restoration of the old order in part in order to protect the poorest segments of society who would otherwise be left to die on the outskirts of the "struggle for life." This attitude, I believe, is one reason for American Catholic devotion to the Democrat party, which while liberal by American Protestant standards was the closest thing Catholic immigrants could find to "social chrstianity" in America. Unfortunately, as the Democrat party went Left it took American Catholics with them. Later on Father Coughlin attacked capitalism and called for minimum wage legislation and even nationalization of certain industries as well as the curbing of economic individualism. While left wing by American Protestant standards, within European Catholicism this was a right wing position, and Father Coughlin is indeed rejected by the Left and claimed by some on the Catholic right to this day.
The other thing I would like to mention is the right-populist identification of capitalism with Communism (a position very much held by the European right). Recall that whatever its ideological pretensions, every Communist country in history has not abolished the state or put everything in the hands of workers' councils, but rather centralized everything into the hands of an all-powerful state. Right populists have long claimed that Communism is nothing but a front for wealthy capitalists to consolidate resources under their own de facto ownership by centralizing them in the hands of governments which they control from behind the scenes. After all, if a few big businessmen have a government in their pocket, they have nothing to lose if that government expropriates all productive property. True, they will lose nominal ownership of their productive property, but will retain de facto ownership, while at the same time gaining de facto ownership of the productive property of their former competitors. It is no coincidence that the John Birch Society's rogues' gallery is identical to that of the left wing Populists of the late nineteenth century: the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Mellons, and the Carnegies. I have even read speculation that it was David Rockefeller (who vacationed in the Crimea in 1964) who ordered the firing of Khrushchev and his replacement by Brezhnev. The late JBS author Gary Allen also speculated that SMERSH (made famous by Ian Fleming) was the enforcement arm the "international bankers" used to control the Communist movement. I note that there are even Protestant American conservatives who admire people like William Jennings Bryan and Huey P. Long.
I am no fan of the JBS (being a repentant former member) or subscriber to their conspiracy theories, but one must admit that it is certainly theoretically possible for "state socialism" to serve as a front for capitalists. After all, actual "workers' control" has never existed at any time in any Communist country.