The Modern Landscape
In The Illusion of Left And Right we discovered that the terms “Left” and “Right” in politics came from the French Revolution. One important takeaway from that is that those who seek to preserve the status quo are on the Right, and those who seek radical change are on the Left.
So how well does this principle of conservation vs. change fit with the modern view of Left and the Right? Not very well. This is a simplistic depiction of how many perceive the political spectrum today:
The first thing you should notice is that the Nazis are shown on the right along with Republicans and Conservatives. Does that make sense?
The goal of the historical German Nazis was to radically change the society of the Weimar Republic. They accomplished that by taking Germany from a democracy to an absolute totalitarian government where one’s only justification for existence was to serve the state and the Führer. The desire for radical change is a trademark of the Left.
Compare that to the Conservatives in the above diagram. Conservatives, among other things, want to conserve the principles of the United States Constitution with limited government power and protection of individual rights. There is a huge divide between the views of the Founders of the United States who created a government with intentionally limited power and the Nazis who created a ruthless, totalitarian regime.
The Communists, indisputably on the Left, also created a totalitarian government just as ruthless and murderous as the Nazis. By those standards we ought to take the Nazis in the diagram above and put them on the Left right next to the Communists (where they truly belong).