FYI, Hitler Was A Conservative

By Leo Gura - March 25, 2024

Jump to timestamp 1 7:45 to hear Jordan Peterson say something truly ridiculous. I did not believe my ears when I heard it:

It is shameful to claim ambiguity about whether Hitler and Nazis were right or left wing. The notion that Hitler was a leftist because his party called themselves “National Socialists” is asinine. Fascism is ultra right-wing nationalism, a conservative philosophy and value-set. Although, paradoxically it is so far-right that it becomes unhinged to the point of undermining and distorting traditional institutions and decorum. Hitler’s biggest enemy besides the Jews was Communists and the Left. Hitler and the Nazis were virulently conservative in the sense that they wanted to return to traditional values, family values, ethic-group values. They hated internationalism, globalism, pluralism, and equality between the races, minorities, and ethic groups. Nazis hated trans. Nazis hated gays. Nazis hated minorities. Nazis hated the weak and the disabled. Nazis wanted women in the kitchens making them sandwiches. The whole Nazi agenda was to radically deconstruct the liberal multi-cultural German democratic state in order to return the German people to their traditional, ethic roots. Blood and soil! Motherland, fatherland! Germans first! Exactly what MAGA salivates for in America. They wanted this so badly that they were willing to overturn any norm, institution, and moral to get it. Extreme conservatism becomes revolutionary. That’s not a mistake. Because it seeks to return so far back into the past.

Jason Stanley defines fascism as ‘a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed Communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation’ and that ‘The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.’

The common thread between Nazis and MAGA is that the neoliberal establishment or deep state is the chief obstacle in their way to creating a religious ethno-state. That’s why most of the MAGA extremists are Bible-thumping Christians. That’s why Trump appoints fundamental Christians to the Supreme Court. That’s why they salivate at a national abortion ban. The American far-right wants to be the American Taliban, with Jesus instead of Muhammad as its idol. That’s the far-right ideal. And it’s shameful that Jordan Peterson doesn’t understand this. But of course he does not understand this because he’s a Bible-thumping Christian himself. He’s more sophisticated, educated, and moderate, but that core bias is there all the same.

Note: I am not calling JP or conservatives in general, Nazis. But I am calling Nazis conservatives. You can be a conservative without being a Nazi, but you cannot be a Nazi without being conservative. This is not a personal attack on anyone. It’s just a statement of political science. This also does not mean that the left is correct in all their positions and worldview.

JP demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of politics. This level of misunderstanding and ahistoricism should be disqualifying for an academic or public intellectual. And yet, JP says this trash with such righteous indignation. This is not “a matter of opinion”. The jury is not still out on this. Mountains of serious scholarship has been done on Nazi and Fascist ideology. Hitler’s views and Fascist views are well-known and well-documented within academia. We don’t need a super-intelligent AI to tell us that Hitler was conservative! Are you fucking kidding me??

The reason JP feels like this is an open question is because his mind cannot deal with the fact that conservative ideology leads to stuff like the Holocaust, Nazism, genocide, book-burning, world war, and dictatorship. The mental gymnastics that the American right-wing will go to to deny that Hitler was a conservative is comical and galling.

It’s a shame that Destiny let JP get away with such trash.

There is a ridiculous trend going around within the American conservative movement to frame Nazis and Hitler as left-wing because “socialism”, and to frame Spiral Dynamics Stage Green not only as authoritarian but totalitarian — along the lines of Stalin and Mao. As if vaccine and mask mandates, gay pride flags, or being kicked off Twitter are totalitarian or Maoist. This is laughable. George Washington imposed a vaccine mandate on the US military. This does not make George Washington a totalitarian Maoist. This is ridiculous logic. This confuses toxic forms of Stage Red and Blue with Stage Green.

The “socialism” in “National Socialism” simply means the prioritization and glorification of a strong ethnic far-right community. When you see MAGA people at a Trump rally all gathered together as a community for their right-wing cause, that’s what the “socialism” in Nazi means. It is national as opposed to international. It’s a community of people built around their ethnic group. When American conservatives want to rebuild a majority white, male-dominated, anti-gay, anti-trans, Christian nation — that’s what the “socialism” in Nazi means! The reason the Nazis hated Communists and Marxists was because in that era Communism held an international ideal. Communists wanted to transcend national boarders and ethnic groups to unite the workers of the world into a single universal majority against the capitalist elites. Communists were globalist in their outlook. Which is what MAGA people hate as well. But none of this computes in the MAGA mind because that would place them in close proximity to Nazism — which they regard as “evil”. The American conservative mind faces a serious inconsistency: on the one hand it wants to claim that objective evil exists — as epitomized by Hitler — yet on the other hand Hitler is the ultimate conclusion of radical conservatism. How do you square those two? Well, you can’t, so you have to resort to the kind of historical distortion and mental gymnastics of Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Fox News, and their ilk.

This is what “national socialism” really looks like:

That’s an American Nazi.

Don’t misunderstand. This “national socialism” does not have to equate to gas-chambers for gays. There can be far less extreme degrees of it. For example, a simple Muslin ban, or less rights for brown people. Or the attempt to steal a democratically-decided election through rioting. Hitler is the worst extreme of this kind of ideology but things rarely get as far as Hitler, simply because we have systems in place to check it. Those systems are the so-called “deep state”. The deep state is what prevents the US from turning into a white Christian theocracy — which about 25% of Americans want. And Jordan Peterson would let this happen on his watch. When JP was asked who he would vote for in the 2024 election, he said Mike Pence — a Christian fundamentalist.

If Jordan Peterson studied Spiral Dynamics, all of this would be clear to him. Which is one of the reasons I talk about Spiral Dynamics so much and why he doesn’t study it.

Here’s the interesting epistemic problem: Even if we built a super-intelligent AI that unequivocally told us that Hitler was a conservative, conservatives would just get outraged, call the AI “woke”, and blame the makers of the AI for being biased and making a broken AI. See, if you’re deeply closedminded and biased — as conservatives are by their nature — then you cannot recognize things as more intelligent than you, because what you consider “intelligent” is defined by you according to whether it validates your biases. If you are a fundamentalist Christian, you need your AI to tell you that Christ is everyone’s lord and savior. But that is exactly what a super-intelligent AI can never say. As another example, I recently read an article about people complaining that ChatGPT is broken because if you ask it whether pedophilia is evil, the AI doesn’t reply with a “Yes”. Is the AI broken? Or are you just closedminded and biased?

In conclusion, ChatGPT is more intelligent than Jordan Peterson. And the reason for that, is that ChatGPT doesn’t share his conservative and Christian biases. Christianity is a restraining-collar on your intelligence.

Hitler is not an interesting question. The really interesting question is: Were Stalin and Mao actually libs?

I recommend that you read and contemplate the biographies of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, Franco, Pol Pot, Castro, Hussein, Putin, etc. I read them all. Studying dictators is a hobby of mine. They have little in common with today’s progressives, annoying though they are.

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