In 1965, Murray Rothbard described socialism (or at least state socialism) as a “confused, middle-of-the road movement” that “tries to achieve Liberal ends,” such as “freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war,” but does so “by the use of incompatible, Conservative means,” such as “statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc.”
If that’s right, and I think it broadly is, it suggests a somewhat different grid from the usual Nolan Chart:
An incompatibility between means and ends suggests, further, that the two quadrants I’ve marked in grey are unstable. Attempts to implement the program of the traditional left politically end up sliding in practice into the political right (as is evidenced by the general recognition that Kremlin hardliners were appropriately called “conservatives”); that’s why Marxist ideology can be preferable to Nazi ideology, even if there’s not much daylight between Stalin and Hitler. The Marxist vision of universal cooperation and solidarity is more congenial than the Nazi vision of superior races crushing inferior ones; but implementing the former vision through the centralised, authoritarian state tends to yield something looking more like the latter vision.
Similarly, right-libertarian attempts to uphold conservative, authoritarian goals (such as heteropatriarchy, white privilege, closed borders, hierarchical workplaces, the capitalist wage system, etc.) via free-market means are doomed to fail for the same reasons. Hence we see the breakdown of libertarian-conservative “fusionism,” the transformation of right-libertarians into alt-righters, etc. At the end of the day, as William Gillis says, “everything is philosophically unstable besides fascism and anarchism.”