No, it doesn't. The Nazi characteristics of extreme nationalism, conservative stances with regard to things like discipline, the position of women, the family, those are things that are considered right or far-right in America just like everywhere else. And I think it's safe to say that those things were more central to the political philosophy of the Nazis, in their own minds and in those of their detractors, than the relatively left-wing economic policies they were indeed implementing at the same time (in a time, one should point out, when every country, the US included, was implementing rather left-wing economic policies, because the Depression was just that bad). Now on the other hand you had the communists, who, firstly, had actually radical left-wing economic policies, and secondly, had rather left-wing ideas and policies on social issues: they were remarkably un-nationalistic in many ways ("workers of the world, unite!" and all that), were rather feminist for their time, and wanted to radically change the nature of society, which almost per definition is anti-conservative.

And if the far-right European parties nowadays are called far-right despite having relatively left-wing economic policies - often closer to the left than those of the mainstream right-wing parties of those countries - it's because those parties themselves attach far more importance to their conservative and anti-immigration stances, than to the economic ones.

Well, you certainly won't see me argue with that last sentence. It's rarely very productive to bring up the Nazis in a political debate that isn't actually about Nazi Germany, but when Mein Kampf comes up, it's hard to do otherwise.

Other than that, allow me to quote from the Wikipedia article about "Spectrum":

"In most modern usages of spectrum there is a unifying theme between extremes at either end. Some older usages of the word did not have a unifying theme, but they led to modern ones through a sequence of events set out below. Modern usages in mathematics did evolve from a unifying theme, but this may be difficult to recognize."

Whenever graphic depictions of the political spectrum are made, here at least, they clearly show that the extreme left and extreme right are indeed closer together than the mainstream left and mainstream right - it's not a line, but rather something like two thirds of a circle, with the extremes not quite literally touching, but moving closer together again. And that has a lot to do with what you note about the similarities between far left and far right in terms of how they tend to the use of force and oppression to propagate their views, and their inclination towards the totalitarian.

If you prefer the graphic depictions that really use two axes (you could conceivably use more than two, but that gets very difficult to show on paper or on a screen), you'd get something quite different, that perhaps shows better how Stalin and Hitler can be, in some ways, closer to each other than either is to mainstream politicians, while still quite far apart.

Erm. Define "pretty regular basis". If you can get much further than Fortuyn and Van Gogh, I'll be impressed. But no, I didn't mean that the US has much more actual political violence. What I did mean was that the tone of the rhetoric and the loathing between the two sides is worse than in most other countries, and I think worse than than in all of the Western ones. Obviously it's good that that hasn't translated to significant amounts of political violence yet, and presumably won't in the near future either, but that hardly means there isn't a genuine problem.