Have you ever considered that maybe it is the US which has an unusual definition of "right-wing"? Any attempt to define "left" and "right" across country borders will encounter difficulties, and no party will ever perfectly fit the mould - not that there even is a well-defined mould. But while some people in the US seem to think that right-wing is synonymous to "small government" and left-wing to "big government", the international definitions, as ill-defined as they are, are a bit more complicated than that. The similarities between the Nazis and the Soviet Union or other communist states have always been obvious, and those liberal college professors of yours have never denied that, but believe it or not, the reasoning why the Nazis are considered far right while the Soviet Union is considered far left is in fact based on political science and not on some "let's try and stick the right wing with the Nazis" conspiracy.

Yes, I quite agree about the attempts to define the other party by its extremes. That's done in politics all over the world, of course, but in a country with only two parties it has a tendency of turning even uglier than elsewhere.