Jordan Peterson Proposes Using AI to Determine Whether Hitler Was ‘Right-Wing’ Because He Can’t Figure It Out Himself
Jordan Peterson proposed using AI to determine if Adolf Hitler’s regime was right-wing, claiming “no one” has been able to determine the political leaning of the Nazi party.
During a recent interview with Steven Bonnell, known as Destiny on YouTube, where he commands a large audience, Peterson claimed it was a “open question” as to what degree Hitler’s policies were right-wing or left-wing. Peterson cited the name of Hitler party, the National Socialist or Nazi party, commonly assumed to be far-right, as evidence the German dictator was not entirely right-wing.
“I also think it’s an open question still, to what degree Hitler’s policies were right wing versus left wing, and no one’s done the analysis properly yet to determine that,” Peterson said. “What do we consider was the National Socialist movement for a reason. And the socialist part of it wasn’t accidental.”
Bonnell pushed back on Peterson by noting Hitler’s regime did not have any of the hallmarks of socialism, despite its name.
Peterson thinks it’s completely unknown if the Nazis were left or right wing. He had a study planned that could have resolved it but the damn woke mob stole his professorship before he could do it. So now it’s a completely open question. pic.twitter.com/xHqehIhpOo
— Chris Kavanagh (@C_Kavanagh) March 22, 2024
Peterson then proposed using AI to determine whether the specifics of Nazi policies aligned more with the right or the left.
One of the things I would have done if I would have been able to hang on to my professorship at the University of Toronto, would have been to extract out a random sample of Nazi policies and strip them of of markers of their origin, and present them to a set of people with conservative or leftist beliefs and see who agreed with them more. And that analysis has never been done, as far as I know. So we actually don’t know. And we could know if the social scientists would do their bloody job, which they don’t. Generally speaking, that’s something we could know, and we could probably use the AI systems we have now, the large language models to determine to what degree left and right beliefs intermingled in the rise of National Socialism.
The argument that the Nazi party was actually left-wing has become trendy on the online right. It has been dismissed by historians. U.S. Army War College professor Ronald J. Granieri wrote in the Washington Post back in 2020 that Nazism was not particularly socialist.
Granieri writes:
The Nazi regime had little to do with socialism, despite it being prominently included in the name of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The NSDAP, from Hitler on down, struggled with the political implications of having socialism in the party name. Some early Nazi leaders, such as Gregor and Otto Strasser, appealed to working-class resentments, hoping to wean German workers away from their attachment to existing socialist and communist parties. The NSDAP’s 1920 party program, the 25 points, included passages denouncing banks, department stores and “interest slavery,” which suggested a quasi-Marxist rejection of free markets. But these were also typical criticisms in the anti-Semitic playbook, which provided a clue that the party’s overriding ideological goal wasn’t a fundamental challenge to private property.
Read his full argument here.
