Why Brazil’s right calls Nazism a left-wing movement

At times, Brazil does seem to be a country straight out of Bizarro World. Earlier this week, a social media clash showed just how difficult things have gotten around here. After the German Embassy in Brasília published a video about Nazism – highlighting its extreme-right politics – Brazilian netizens went berserk. They called out the German diplomats, saying that Nazism was “obviously” left-wing, as Adolf Hitler’s movement was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

In one stroke, these enraged social media trolls associated Nazism to Socialism and, therefore, to the left-leaning Workers’ Party.

Incited by Olavo de Carvalho, an ultra-conservative ideologue who lives in the U.S., the new Brazilian right interprets things at face value when it calls Nazism a left-wing movement due to the word “socialist,” and the fact that state interventionism was a trademark of Nazi Germany.

Many people make that mistake out of sheer lack of information. But there’s a more obscure reason for that association: getting rid of the burden that Adolf Hitler represents, handing it off on the lap of the left wing. By twisting this political concept, they also try to associate the right wing to a purer version of liberalism, at least a purely economic version of liberalism (which we could call “marketism”). Everything related to state intervention is associated with the left, according to this line of thinking.

We can see that effort even in libertarian...