National Socialists and communists had substantial overlap in the psychologies of its members. Hence Robert Conquest in Reflections of a Ravaged Century, p. 64:

"Hitler himself said that Communists far more easily became Nazis than Social Democrats did.  On another occasion he remarked, "the Reds we had beaten up became our best supporters," a point also noted by others.  A remarkable firsthand example is given by Patrick Leigh Fermor in A Time of Gifts...In a German workmen's bar late one night he made friends with a group of young factory hands just off a late shift.  One of them offered to put him up in a family attic.  There he found what seemed to be a "a shrine of Hitlerism" - flags, photographs, posters, slogans, emblems.  His new friend laughingly said he should have seen it last year - all "Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite."  He and his friends were Communists and used to beat up Nazis in street fights.  Then, "suddenly," he had realized that Hitler was right, and he and his friends were now SA men.  "I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides," he said."

Both movements appealed primarily to attachment-regulated and meaning-regulated constitutions in crisis, offering a redemptive collective identity (the volk, the proletariat) that metabolized individual suffering by relocating it into a heroic collective narrative with designated enemies. The ease of switching from one to the other was that the underlying regulatory demand (give me a collective identity, a meaningful enemy, and a redemptive future) was identical, and both movements were offering psychologically analogous products under radically different symbolic vocabularies. Social Democrats didn't convert as easily because they were offering a more procedural, institutional, less numinous product - parliamentary reform rather than redemptive revolution - which serves a different psychological need and doesn't generate the same switching behavior.

This analysis extends into the present. 2026 Trump supporters - I think of Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse as one - are part of the so-called “right”, yet Trump is basically supporting extreme financial predation, few if any deportations, total Zionist domination, and endless tens of billions of dollars of theft for himself and his allies. These blind hero-worshippers have, psychologically, much in common with 2009 Obama supporters, I think.

The messiness around these labels is why I have mostly dropped them. To me what fundamentally matters is understanding the nature of the crucifixion of opposites and where people hold it, because the crucifixion must be held somewhere: offloaded into a political movement, a charismatic leader, a religious framework, economics, or the "scientific consensus"; denied through antinomian predation; or borne internally as part of the crucifixion of opposites itself.

https://substack.com/@hermesofthethreshold/note/c-281378925

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876809&forum_id=2betting#49957989)