How can conservatives say Hitler was a leftist/socialist?

[Tartarus Sauce]

The type of person that subscribes to this argument generally strikes me as somebody that has adopted an infantile, black-and-white view of politics as a fight between good and evil throughout time, as opposed to the reality that politics are the messy expression of different segments of society publicly clashing over differing value sets. In this instance, our prospective ideologue submits to a rather simple school of thought: all bad things done by every government ever has been because of leftists. I mean, just look at all the stuff Stalin and Mao did, communism killed millions! Confederate slave owners? They were are all Democrats! And of course everybody knows Hitler was a socialist that used big government to control people's lives, just like liberals and college professors want to do now! I mean it's even the name, National Socialism! Checkmate, libtards!

No matter how tortured the logic, they will distort the truths of history until they can fit it into their personally crafted pigeonhole. The actual nuances of historical facts just get in the way of pushing their agenda. As a rule, I loathe these kinds of people, because they almost always come equipped with the same attitude. Dismissive, arrogant pricks who think they've got it all figured out and aren't interested in actually listening to other perspectives, even though they're usually either some of the least informed or most misinformed individuals on the topic. They're simple people with a need for simple narratives and can't handle any complications to their preconceptions.

Insomnian made a good point about how Nazism is a political Rorschach test that people map their fears onto, so it's not like the people purveying this argument are the only ones who make erroneous analyses about the Nazis or political groups they want to compare to Nazis. But what makes this characterization of Nazism so cretinous is the degree to which it misses the mark of what actually made Nazism tick. The promotion of racial hierarchy was the beating, ideological heart of the Nazi Party, everything they did stemmed from an ethnonationalist desire to secure a future for the "Aryan bloodline." That is completely incompatible with socialist ideology at it's core. Yes, the actual implementation of socialism became an absolute trainwreck in its biggest test cases, but the foundations of socialist thought are inherently egalitarian: the workers of the world throwing off the chains of oppression and creating a harmonious global community free of strife where every man is an equal. Nazism, on the other hand, had intense, and intentional, inequality baked into the pie from its beginnings. Nazism declared the future to be that of the fittest of the Aryan race, and everybody else can and will suffer at their expense.

So no, anybody that claims that whatever liberals are doing today constitutes the first steps in the road to Nazism is an ignoramus who has no clue what they are talking about. Nazism is just as incompatible with liberals as it is with socialists. The constituent groups conservatives like to decry for their liberalism would be the first ones purged in a fascistic takeover, as was the case when the Nazis took control of Germany. Ironically enough, the proponents for this misguided characterization of Nazism are themselves often channeling the spirit of Hitler when they label all left-wing ideologies as socialist, because that was pretty much exactly what Hitler did. He made no significant distinction between left-wingers and considered them all to be equally traitorous to the German nation in his eyes, from pro-democracy moderate liberals to hardcore communists. But at least Hitler knew which groups actually were left-wingers, as opposed to the oafs who peddle the dreck that one of the most right-wing ideologies ever constructed is the same thing as one of the most left-wing ones.