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This might help you shed some light on what is considered left and right. The political map actually has four compass points, left, right, authoritarian, and libertarian.

Fascism is far right and authoritarian, while socialism is far left and authoritarian. What makes them similar is their reliance on the power of the state to enforce their narrow views on the rest of society.

Go here to see where you are on the political spectrum. It's a quick 30 second multiple choice quiz;

http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html

Took it, told me I was a Libertarian, go figure.

LIBERTARIANS support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.

Thanks for the link, but I'm pretty sure I know where I'm at politically: somewhere to the left of Ann Coulter and to the right of Colin Powell.

According to John Toland, writer of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", the truly strange thing about Hitler and the Nazis was their utter lack of a coherent economic agenda, among other things. Stalin drew upon an established idealogy, claiming 'higher sources' like Lenin and Marx, whereas Hitler more or less cobbled together national socialism from, well, his own twisted worldview and grasp of history. In both cases, I guess one could translate both Stalin and Hitler as 'Thugs With Power', and dispense entirely with the whole right, left thing.

Thanks for the quiz, it was fun, I should of guessed that I would score as a libertarian. I really don't like libertarian political candidates though, since I find them unrealistic. Like everybody else, people when left to their own thoughts seldom line up neatly in any category. That was a fun side diversion from the grim discussion of Neo Nazis.

Conservatism in the American sense is far different from its Continental European counterpart. Continental European conservatism sees as its ideal pre-industrial Europe and a stratified society with the hereditary nobility and clergy being the dominant influence in society, as opposed to the business community and the masses of workers and peasants. American conservatism is respectful of tradition, but the American tradition is one of pioneers, immigrants, and entrepreneurs achieving success in new lands, not that of preserving the stratified Old Order. Americans are descended from people who thought a new start was better than "knowing one's place" in Yorkshire, Calabria, Hesse, Limerick, Stavanger, Galicia, and a hundred other such places. The "throne and altar" of American conservatism are the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, including the Bill ot Rights.

American conservatism is, because of the character and history of this nation, individualist and anti-statist. There have been communitarians and authoritarians who have posed as conservatives and considered to be rightist, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Prohibitionists in the early 1900s, many "law 'n' order" advocates and conspiracy theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, and many neo-conservatives and some Christian rightists in the present day. They come closer to the European Right than does truly American conservatism. However, the limited government tradition, whether that of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland in the Democratic Party or that of Coolidge, Robert Taft, Sr., and Goldwater in the GOP, most accurately reflects the foundational principles of this republic.