Tearing Down the Nazi Wall

Javier Milei's victory in Argentina has the potential to blast open the so called Overton Window which has for decades limited political discourse by the fact that Nazis were branded as right wing after the Second World War.

This can be illustrated by presenting the following diagram of the typical left-right political axis.

Overton Window in politics

By placing Nazis to the right of conservatives, the political left managed to silence almost all political discussions taking place to the right of conservatives. No-one wants to be associated with Nazis, and if Nazis are right wing, then Libertarians must be extreme right wing, and Ancaps must be ultra extreme right wing. That doesn't sound good.

One way to avoid this problem has been to claim that Libertarians and Ancaps are not on this axis at all. But that only serves to further exclude them. It's much better in my mind to stick with the simple left-right axis, and simply remove the Nazi label.

Left-right axis in politics

To bolster this position, we add a graph of how much state involvement there is in the economy. This keeps the Nazis label from coming back into our chart because the Nazis were big believers in state involvement in the economy. If anyone insists on us putting the label back in, we'll point out that from an economic viewpoint, Nazis properly belong in between Communists and Social Democrats.

Having gotten rid of the Nazi label, we can put various politicians into our chart.

Political positions

Importantly, we don't put Hitler into this chart because that would reintroduce the Nazi label. Instead, we put Putin where most people would've put Hitler. No-one will object to this because most people equate Putin with Hitler, and those who object to the Putin=Hitler label see Putin as someone positioned somewhere between Conservatives and Libertarians.

With the Nazi wall now torn down, and with no mention of Nazis or Hitler, we suddenly have a much wider Overton Window. The centre in politics is no longer Social Democrats. It's located to the right of Conservatives. Libertarians are no longer extreme right wing. They are right leaning. It's the Ancaps that are right wing.

By doing this, we no longer need to talk about extremes in politics. We have wings instead. Communists are left wing. Ancaps are right wing. Everyone else is located left or right of a Conservative-Libertarian centre.