Here is a link to our FAQ section on the question of the Nazis being right/left-wing. Here is an answer by the incomparable /u/kieslowskifan on the question of Nazis and socialism, which goes on to explain why the Nazis chose to usurp the label of socialism and here by the equally amazing /u/klesk_vs_xaero.

The key factors to understanding why Fascism, including Germany's Nazis, is a right-wing movement and what is relation to the left-wing was and is, lies in the factors of a.) class conflict, b.) the ideas being seen as underpinning history and therefore society, and subsequently c.) thier vision of utopia.

While even talking about class and class conflict seems to get a very bad reputation in these current times and especially in the US where more than in other Western countries the idea that class is a thing of the past and class conflict is only a rhetoric tool of those commonly regarded as socialist, i.e. everyone to the left of Genghis Khan, in the beginning of the 20th century and after WWI the question of how to resolve the conflicting interests of workers and bourgeoisie within an existing or proposed political framework was akin to the question of climate change today, meaning the defining political question of the day. Thus, proponents of the most prominent ideologies of that time – Liberalism (in the classical capital-L sense of the word), Marxism in both its socialist and bolshevik/communist strands, and after WWI Fascism – were forced to position themselves vis-á-vis the question of class and class conflict.

While Liberals advocated a position of increasing wealth through productivity and capitalist progress, Marxists posited a need to abolish capitalism either through revolution or evolution. Fascists ostensibly – and according to its propaganda – offered a "third way" as they claimed of solving the class conflict, mostly via ways and means best described as corporatist, meaning organizing society "like a body" (always excluding certain people, of course). Within this, one of the reasons why Fascism was a right-wing movement becomes obvious: Unlike the left, which thought to transform material relations of a given society so that the means of production were socialized, Fascism did decidedly not touch upon capitalist economic relations since the bourgeoisie was one of their key allies and supporters. This, among other reasons, is why one of the literally first steps of the Nazi regime was to dismantle the traditional union structure in Germany.

There is a similar strand when it comes to Fascist movements and their views on what drives history: Unlike the advocators of liberal democracy, it is not reason or modernization, which drives forward and unlike communists, it is not material relationships. For the Fascist the engine of history is conflict, whether between nations, peoples or races. History is a constant struggle in which a community of mythical qualities needs to assert itself in order to gain dominance over others. Dominance is the core goal and must be asserted. And only if the right and rightful people dominate will a golden age begin.

The political utopia of the Fascist differs greatly from liberal or communist visions of utopia: Both of the latter are build on a vision of a utopian future that needs to be build and achieved. The Fascist on the other hand looks to the past for its utopia since most fantasies of dominance are historically justified. Whether it is the return to the Roman Empire or the mythical Lebensraum of German kings, all Fascist utopian visions are build upon a return to a hazy, mythological past in which the world was right.

This factory is depended on and at the same time leads to the strong inherently anti-modernist rhetoric of Fascist movements. From tropes such as the city corrupting the purity of rural live or the return to a blood-and-soil type romantic idyll or decrying the devaluation of the core family and the place of women in society as "unnatural" Fascism espouses a rhetoric that uses the past to justify a complete and total criticism of the present and advocates building an alternate modernity in the image of a supposedly "pure" past. This is also what fits well with Hegel and the idea of the Weltgeist, only a rather twisted version.

And here another theme becomes obvious that Fascism shares with a lot of other right-wing ideologies and political creeds: The left and right are differentiated by the question of social power, specifically the idea of emancipation/distribution regarding social power vs. the idea of assertation/maintaining social power. While the distribution of social power to those that currently don't have it and subsequently the dismantling of existing social hierarchies is a left-wing idea, the right wing shares in the broadest sense the wish to assert and maintain these existing social hierarchies. While this is very broad and the view of how open these structures should be will differ among various strands (f.ex. "work hard enough and you too can join the elite that is necessary" vs. "only white people can join the elite" though the difference here is quite blurry sometimes), the general idea is the same. And it is an idea at the basis of Fascism.

There is a couple of things that different Fascism despite its beloonging to the right-wing from other ideologies. As one of the most prominent scholars of Fascism, Robert Paxton writes:

In a way unlike the classical "isms", the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any proposition advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract universal reason. (...) The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader's mystical union with historic destiny of his people. (...) The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one's petty concerns for the group's good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled cultural critic Walter Benjamin was first to point, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.

Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. (...) Fascism radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification.

In the same vein, Paxton goes on to define Fascism as

a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

What is important here is not only that Fascism operates always under the assumption of threat resulting from the inherent view on the way history always functions as a conflict; it's also imperative that Paxton defines it as a form of political behavior rather than a stringent world-view.

In service of the core narrative of threat and conflict, an ill-defined and mythical past to which the goal is to return, and Fascisms use of authoritarian means to these ends, Fascism is the turning of politics into spectacle and an aesthetic experience. It doesn't matter in a sense what kind of program it is espousing at the moment but the imperative lies in an utopia with an open definition in whose service the experience of community against the forces that threaten the community, the way of life, the "chosen race" have rallied. Who these enemies are depend on historical and national context, it is the underlying practice that is so essential to the political behavior of Fascism.

Here, Fascism might differentiate itself from such ideas like Conservativism (also in the classical European sense) but despite all these differences, what places it firmly in the right of the political spectrum and what it shares with other right-wing ideas is the attitude towards social power and the need to assert it vis-á-vis the outsiders.