Tired of the Claim That Fascism Is 'Right Wing'?

Chapter 4.1: Deconstructing foolish political spectrums

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3) (3.4) (3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 (4.1) | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6
PART 3
Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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Part 2
Today’s Spectrums
The Useless, the Bad, and the Ugly

Chapter 4:
Relative Spectrums

The saltwater taffy of political spectrums

4.1
Spectrums based on political rivalry

• The Marxist Continuum

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Head to the Jersey shore or the coast of Maine and you’re sure to find cute little shops that sell sweet, delicious saltwater taffy. It is commonly sold as irregular little lumps wrapped in wax paper, though it also comes in cylindrical lengths.

You could, if you wished, measure something with one of these lengths. If you had some food-grade ink, you could even make graduations on it to measure with greater precision. For a brief time, you have a ruler that smells good and is almost useful.

But it doesn’t last for long. You can stretch the ruler, spreading the graduations and contorting its shape. You can compress it, reducing the space between graduations. In both cases, the graduations will be distorted unevenly, some widening or compressing more than others. 

Indeed, you don’t even need to take any action at all to change its shape, other than leaving it on your dashboard in the hot sun all day. Messy! But not, as it turns out, particularly useful as a ruler.

Political spectrums based on purely relative measures are like saltwater taffy. They can be stretched, contorted, and remolded, and eventually they become stale and useless. None of these are desirable characteristics for a political yardstick. And yet our most commonly used spectrums are constructed around just such relative measures…

Spectrums based on political rivalry

The Marxist Continuum

A spectrum based on a leftist struggle for power

We begin with the widely used spectrum that places communism/socialism to the far left and fascism/Nazism to the far right. (Fig. 4.1)

Fig. 4.1: "The Marxist Continuum"

As we have discussed, and as numerous scholars have demonstrated, this spectrum is utterly unsupportable. Fascism and Nazism were created by Marxists, syndicalists, and left-wing nationalists. In doctrine and application, they were phenomena of the left. With only a few practical and stylistic differences, they were substantially similar to all the other manifestations of the left, and bore very little resemblance to the classical-liberal right…then or now. As a tool of legitimate political analysis, this spectrum is complete garbage, and it ought to be treated as such. It should buried in a landfill of wrong ideas and covered in green grass, so that one day, generations from now, children will play upon it, blissfully unaware that such nonsense ever even existed.

Unfortunately, that day is a long way off: this spectrum continues to be treated as a KnownFact™, even by many on the right. So we have to deal with it.

So what exactly is this “spectrum” measuring?