Dear CNN:
Nazis were socialists. You know… As in “national Socialist German workers party”.
Socialism is a left-wing ideology. Therefore, Nazis were left-wing socialists… Just like modern day Democrats and progressives and communists.
But you guys know this already…
Hitler threw a few twists in the Nazi product that made it, if not unique, at least distinctive. One was antisemitism. That is abundantly clear in Mein Kampf. That was the heart of Hitlers story. And then there was the, if not exactly racial in a modern sense, devotion to the ethnic community of Germans.
Without those one simply doesnt have real Nazis. There were quite a few movements that aped the Nazi style, but had no real ideological basis in common. Lower class alienated white men arent actual Nazis, no matter if they tattood swastikas on themselves.
One could, maybe, call them fascists, as that is indeed a very broad term. But its very rarely the case that these movements have a developed ideology of the state and corporatist organization of the economy. Fascism is a way more intellectually involved thing for skinheads.