An acquaintance, whose name is unimportant for this story, once talked about this board game. He is a German who works for an Israeli company, and his colleagues invited him one day to a game evening. They game they proposed was "Secret Hitler,” the point of which is to identify Adolf Hitler and kill him before he can become chancellor of Germany. It is, the colleagues assured him, much funnier than it sounds. But the acquaintance declined. He, as a German, playing "Secret Hitler”? It seemed like a bad idea.
Hardly anyone in Germany knows of the game "Secret Hitler,” which shouldn’t come as a surprise. It sounds rather toxic, bad karma. In fact, though, it is a rather interesting game about how mistrust develops. A game that focuses on the art of lying – about the naivete of good and the cunning of evil. About how the world can plunge into chaos. And about how ultimately, the course of history is largely decided by chance.
The game is set in 1932, in the Berlin Reichstag. The players are divided into two groups: fascists against democrats, with the democrats in the majority, which might sound familiar. But the fascists have a decisive advantage: They know who the other fascists are, which is also reflective of historical reality. The democrats, though, are not privy to such knowledge – any of the other players could be a friend or an enemy. The fascists win the game if they are able to pass six laws in the Reichstag or if Hitler is elected as chancellor. For the democrats to win, they have to pass five laws or expose and kill Hitler.
The game starts with everyone acting as though they are democrats. To win, all the democrats have to do is trust each other, but it’s not quite that easy, since the democrats sometimes have to vote for a fascist law for lack of a better alternative, and they thus begin looking like fascists themselves. Which is exactly what the fascists want.
One insight from the game is that there is no strategy for guaranteeing a democratic victory and a fascist defeat. One wrong decision, that might feel right in the moment, can lead to Hitler becoming chancellor. It’s all by chance, just as there was no inevitability about how things turned out in 1933. Another insight: Being a fascist can be fun.
"Secret Hitler” hit the market in 2016, shortly before Donald Trump was elected president in the United States. The game’s authors, a couple of guys from the progressive camp, collected $1.5 million from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for the project. Their goal was to introduce a bit of skepticism about the political process, apparently channeling the zeitgeist of the time: Euro crisis, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, Brexit, the refugee crisis. The public debate at the time focused on the crisis of democracy, the threat from the right and authoritarian tendencies. But fascism? Adolf Hitler?
Accusations of fascism have been part of the extreme-left arsenal since World War II. The West German, far-left terror group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang justified its "armed struggle” by arguing that the postwar German republic was little more than a fascist police state. Accusing someone of being a Nazi was both an insult and a way of demonizing one’s political opponent – a slightly paranoid barb that trivialized German history. Isn’t fascism defined by Germany’s slaughter of 6 million Jews? Who, aside from a handful of nutcases, could seriously be a fascist?
The reversion to fascism is a deep-seated fear of modern democratic societies. Yet while it long seemed rather unlikely and unimaginable, it has now begun to look like a serious threat. Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions in Russia. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India. The election victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Marine Le Pen’s strategy of normalizing right-wing extremism in France. Javier Milei’s victory in Argentina. Viktor Orbán’s autocratic domination of Hungary. The comebacks of the far-right FPÖ party in Austria and of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Germany’s AfD. Nayib Bukele’s autocratic regime in El Salvador, which is largely under the radar despite being astoundingly single-minded, even using the threat of armed violence to push laws through parliament. Then there is the possibility of a second Trump administration, with fears that he could go even farther in a second term than he did during his first. And the attacks on migrant hostels in Britain. The neo-Nazi demonstration in Bautzen. The pandemic. The war in Ukraine. The inflation.
The post-Cold War certainty that democracy is the only viable form of government and would cement its supremacy on the global political stage has begun to crumble – this feeling that the world is on the right track and that the almost 80 years of postwar peace in Western Europe has become the norm.
Now, though, questions about fascism’s possible return have become a serious topic of debate – in the halls of political power, in the media, in the population, at universities, at think tanks and among political scientists and philosophers. Will history repeat itself? Are historical analogies helpful? What went wrong? And might it be that democracy itself helped create a monster of which it is deathly afraid?
IS TRUMP A FASCIST?
In May 2016, Donald Trump emerged as the last Republican standing following the primaries, and the world was still a bit perplexed and rather concerned when the historian Robert Kagan published an article in the Washington Post under the headline "This is how fascism comes to America.”
The piece was one of the first in the U.S. to articulate concerns that Trump is a fascist. It received significant attention around the world and DER SPIEGEL published the article as well. It was an attention-grabbing moment: What if Kagan is right? Indeed, it isn’t inaccurate to say that Kagan reignited the fascism debate with his essay. Interestingly, it was the same Robert Kagan who had spent years as an influential member of the Republican Party and was seen as one of the thought leaders for the neocons during the administration of George W. Bush.
The article has aged well. Its characterization of Trump as a "strongman.” It’s description of his deft use of fear, hatred and anger. "This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes,” Kagan wrote, "but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ’tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party – out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear – falling into line behind him.”
It is an early summer’s day in Chevy Chase, a residential suburb of Washington, D.C. Kagan, whose Jewish ancestors are from Lithuania, was born in Athens in 1958. He is an expert on foreign policy. Kagan supported George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, even if the reasons for going to war in Iraq were ultimately revealed to have been fabricated and both conflicts ended with undignified withdrawals, he continues to defend the idea of American interventionism and the country’s global leadership role.
These days, Kagan works for The Brookings Institution, the liberal think tank. In our era, he says, it has been possible to believe that liberal democracy and its dedication to human rights were unavoidable, almost inevitable. But, he continues, that’s not necessarily true. The rise of liberal democracy was the result of historical events like the Great Depression. And of World War II, which was, Kagan says, fought in the name of freedom and created a completely new, better world.
What Kagan means is that because liberal democracy was never inevitable, it must constantly be defended. It cannot relax, it can never rest on its laurels out of a conviction that the end of history has been reached. There is no natural law that defends democracy from someone like Trump, or from fascism, or from the Christian nationalists who believe in Trump.
Freedom is difficult. It gives people space, but it also leaves them largely to their own devices. It doesn’t offer security and fails to provide many things that people need. It atomizes societies, destroys hierarchies and disempowers established institutions such as religion. Freedom has many enemies.
Kagan’s ninth book has just hit the shelves in the U.S. It is called "Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart Again” and describes Christian, white nationalism in America as a challenge to liberal democracy. Its goal: a country rooted in Christianity in which the Bible is more important than the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For Christian nationalists, Trump is an instrument, the perfect leader for this revolution precisely because he cares little for the values of liberalism and the Constitution. When he told a late July gathering of Evangelical Christians in Florida that if they voted for him, "you won’t have to vote anymore,” it was precisely the kind of thing Kagan warns against.
And it could be even worse this time around. If Trump wins the election, Kagan believes, the old system will be destroyed. It will be, the historian believes, an unimaginable political disruption, as though everything would collapse on the first day. Kagan believes he will use the Department of Justice to take revenge on his enemies and militarize migration policy to round up hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. The system of checks and balances would gradually be eroded. First, the immigrants would lose their rights, followed by opposition activists, who would be arrested and prosecuted.” For me, that’s enough,” says Kagan. "Even if the system looks the same.”
We always thought there was no going back to the dark times, says Kagan. “I don’t think history moves in a direction. It just walks around. The Greeks had a cyclical view of history, not one of progress. The Chinese have a view that nothing changes. The Chinese historically don’t believe in progress. They believe in a single world system.”
His opponents view Kagan as one of those neocons who now want to become part of the anti-fascist coalition to turn attention away from their own role in paving the way for Trumpism. They refer to him as "the most dangerous intellectual in America.” Kagan is rather fond of the label.
WHAT IS FASCISM?
If Robert Kagan is a conservative, then Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, is on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. He is a liberal leftist, and yet his views are similar to Kagan’s. Or are they similar for precisely that reason?
Stanley’s son has his Bar Mitzva on the weekend, the Jewish ritual celebrating a boy’s 13th birthday and his entry into adulthood. Stanley pulls out a box full of diaries written by his grandmother Ilse in 1930s Berlin. Her elegantly sweeping handwriting exudes conscientiousness. Stanley also shows a ticket from August 1939 for the America Line from Hamburg to Southampton in New York. It feels odd to flip through her diaries.
Jason Stanley’s biography and the story of his family closely tracks 20th century history. It is an exuberant narrative that allows but a single conclusion: fervent anti-fascism.
Ilse Stanley is the central character in this narrative. Born in the Schlesian town of Gleiwitz in 1906, her father was an opera singer and later the senior cantor at the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse in Berlin. She became an actress, trained by Max Reinhardt at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, and secured a minor role in Fritz Lang’s famous film "Metropolis.” She was an elegant Berlin woman who led a double life. She felt thoroughly German and used falsified papers to free more than 400 Jewish and political prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp just north of Berlin.
Her son, Jason Stanley’s father, was born in 1932 and, as a small boy, he would watch Hitler Youth marches from this grandparent’s balcony overlooking Kurfürstendamm. He was amazed by the torches, flags and uniforms, and asked if he could join them. He saw the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse burning during the Night of Broken Glass, seeking safety in the car of Gustav Gründgens, an acquaintance of his mother’s. He was beat so badly by the Nazis that he suffered from epileptic seizures for the rest of his life. In 1938, Ilse’s husband, a concert violinist, received a visa for Britain and left his wife and son behind in Berlin. The boy was seven when he and his mother had to go into hiding as they waited for their visa to travel to the U.S. After the war, he became a professor of sociology and spent the rest of his life studying how societies can descend into evil. Jason Stanley’s resemblance to his father is astounding.
Six years ago, Stanley published a book in the U.S. called "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” The German translation only appeared two months ago, a source of annoyance for Stanley. He also has German citizenship and says that he loves the country despite everything.
So how does fascism work? Modern-day fascism, Stanley writes, is a cult of the leader in which that leader promises rebirth to a disgraced country. Disgraced because immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals and women have taken over the media, the schools and cultural institutions. Fascist regimes, Stanley argues, begin as social and political movements and parties – and they tend to be elected rather than overthrowing existing governments.
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Stanley describes 10 characteristics of fascism.
First: Every country has its myths, its own narrative of a glorious past. The fascist version of a national myth, however, requires greatness and military power.
Second: Fascist propaganda portrays political opponents as a threat to the country’s existence and traditions. "Them” against "us.” If "they” come into power, it translates to the end of the country.
Third: The leader determines what is true and what is false. Science and reality are seen as challenges to the leader’s authority, and nuanced views are viewed as a threat.
Fourth: Fascism lies. Truth is the heart of democracy and lies are the enemy of freedom. Those who are lied to are unable to vote freely and fairly. Those wanting to tear the heart out of democracy must accustom the people to lies.
Fifth: Fascism is dependent on hierarchies, which inform its greatest lie. Racism, for example, is a lie. No group of people is better than any other – no religion, no ethnicity and no gender.
Sixth: Those who believe in hierarchies and in their own superiority can easily grow nervous and fearful of losing their position in that hierarchy. Fascism declares its followers to be victims of equality. German Christians are victims of the Jews. White Americans are victims of equal rights for Black Americans. Men are victims of feminism.
Seventh: Fascism ensures law and order. The leader determines what law and order means. And he also determines who violates law and order, who has rights and from whom rights can be withdrawn.
Eighth: Fascism is afraid of gender diversity. Fascism feeds fears of trans-people and homosexuals – who aren’t simply leading their own lives, but are seeking to destroy the lives of the "normal people” and coming after their children.
Ninth: Fascism tends to hate the cities, seeing them as places of decadence and home to the elite, immigrants and criminality.
Tenth: Fascism believes that work will make you free. The idea behind it is that minorities and leftists are inherently lazy.
If all 10 points apply, says Stanley, then the situation is rather dicey. Fascism tells people that they are facing and existential fight: Your family is in danger. Your culture. Your traditions. And fascists promise to save them.
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Fascism in the U.S., Stanley says, has a long tradition stretching back deep into the last century. The Ku Klux Klan, he says, was the first fascist movement in history. "It would be misguided to assume that this fascist tradition simply vanished.”
That tradition can still be seen today, says Stanley, in the fact that a democratic culture could never fully develop in the American South. That has now resulted in election officials being appointed in Georgia that aren’t likely to stand up to repeated election manipulation attempts by Trump followers. "Trump,” says Stanley, "won’t just spend another four years in the White House and then disappear again. These are not normal elections. They could be the last.”
Some of Stanley’s friends believe he is overreacting. For antagonistic Republicans, he is likely the amalgamation of all their nightmares – one of those leftist, East Coast professors who holds seminars on critical race theory and lectures as a guest professor in Kyiv about colonialism and racism. At 15, he spent a year as an exchange student in Dortmund and had "Bader Meinhof” (with the missing second "a” in Baader) needlepointed onto his jacket. He went on to marry a Black cardiologist who was half Kenyan and half American. His children, who are nine and 13 years of age, are Black American Jews with German, Polish and African roots.
He says that he reads Plato with them – the same Plato who says that democracy is impossible and ends in tyranny – because he wants them to understand how difficult democracy is, but also how strong. Stanley carries so many identities around with him that the result is a rather unique citizen of the world who is well-versed in numerous perspectives and in the world’s dark sides. Which hasn’t been enough to protect him from an ugly divorce. He is a philosopher who seeks to find order in the world’s chaos while finding support from the pillars of his identity.
In her diaries, Ilse Stanley doesn’t write about the dark politics in the dark prewar years, instead looking at her own dark life. She writes about her husband who no longer speaks with her, treats her with disdain and cheats on her. She writes about her depression, her loneliness and her affairs. Ilse Stanley was divorced three years after World War II finally came to an end. She began a new life.
IS PUTIN A FASCIST?
Timothy Snyder speaks thoughtfully and quietly, but with plenty of confidence. Putin is a fascist. Trump is a fascist. The difference: One holds power. The other does not. Not yet.
"The problem with fascism,” Snyder says, "is that it’s not a presence in the way we want it to be. We want political doctrines to have clear definitions. We don’t want them to be paradoxical or dialectical.” Still, he says, fascism is an important category when it comes to understanding both history and the present, because it makes differences visible.
Lunchtime at the Union League Café in the heart of New Haven. The campus of Yale University begins on the other side of the street. Snyder, professor of Eastern European history, is one of the most important intellectuals in the U.S. He is an author, having written books like "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” which examines the political violence in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics which killed 14 million people – at the hands of both Nazis and Communists. He is an activist, whose pamphlet "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” became a global bestseller. And he is a self-professed Cassandra, having foreseen a Russian military intervention just weeks before the country’s annexation of the Crimea, in addition to predicting, in 2017, a Trump putsch attempt. When he met Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv in 2022, the first thing the Ukrainian president told him was that both he and his wife had read "On Tyranny.”
Putin, says Snyder, has been quoting fascist thinkers like Ivan Ilyin for 15 years. The Russian president, he continues, is waging a war that is clearly motivated by fascist motives. It targets a country whose population Putin considers to be inferior and a state that he believes has no right to exist. And he has the support of an almost completely mobilized society. There is, Snyder writes, a cult surrounding the leader, a cult surrounding those who have fallen in past battles and a myth of a golden empire that must be reestablished through the cleansing violence of war.
A time traveler from the 1930s, Snyder wrote in a May 2022 article for the New York Times, would immediately recognize Putin’s regime as fascist. The Z symbol, the rallies, the propaganda, the mass graves. Putin attacked Ukraine just as Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Snyder wrote – as an imperial power.
But Putin’s version of fascism, the historian argues, also has post-modern characteristics. Post-modernism assumes that there is no such thing as truth, and if there is no truth, then anything can be labeled as truth. Such as the "fact” that the Ukrainians are Nazis in addition to being Jewish and gay. The decision as to what truth is and who defines it is made on the battlefield.
The paradox of Putin’s fascism – Snyder refers to it as "schizo-fascism” – is that he claims to be acting in the name of anti-fascism. The Soviet Union under Stalin, he says, never formed a clear position on fascism, and even allied itself with Nazi Germany in the form of the Hitler-Stalin pact, thus fueling World War II. After the war, though, the Soviet Union didn’t just declare Nazi Germany fascist, but also all those by which the leadership felt threatened or those it didn’t particularly like. "Fascist” became just another word for enemy. Putin’s regime feeds off that Soviet past: Russia’s enemies are all declared fascists. And it is precisely in Putin’s supposed anti-fascism, argues Snyder, that his fascism can be seen. Those who label their enemies "fascists” and “Nazis,” provide a justification for war and for crimes against humanity.”’Nazi’ just means ’subhuman enemy’ – someone Russians can kill,” he wrote.
A Putin victory would be more than just the end of democratic Ukraine. "Had Ukraine not resisted, this would have been a dark spring for democrats around the world,” Snyder concluded. "If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.”
Snyder is from Dayton, Ohio, located right in the middle of the "flyover zone.” His parents are Quakers, former members of the Peace Corps with a weakness for Latin American revolutionaries. Ivory tower colleagues like Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School believe that Snyder suffers from "tyrannophobia.” Others think he is paranoid. Snyder says that hardly anyone at the time predicted World War I or the Holocaust. Things are possible, he argues, that cannot be seen in the present.
If Trump win the election, he believes, organized resistance will be the result. Would Trump then send in the FBI or even the military to quell such unrest? What might happen to state institutions? Snyder believes the economy would collapse and institutions like the FBI and the military could be torn apart by conflicts. A few weeks ago, Snyder wrote on the newsletter platform Substack: "Old-guy dictatorship involves funeral planning.” Trump, Snyder argues, is afraid of dying in prison or being killed by his opponents. Autocracies are not forever, and the defeat of autocrats is closely linked to their end.
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How, though, was the rise of Trump made possible in the first place? How can it be that a democracy plunges so deeply into irrationality?
First, says Snyder, Trump’s career is based on a bluff. He was never a successful businessman, Snyder argues, and he only found success as an entertainer, as a television personality. He knows what you have to do to reach people, which, Snyder says, is an important prerequisite for a developing charismatic leader. It is precisely this talent that makes him so successful on social media platforms, where emotions are all that matter – the feeling of "them or us.”
Second: Social media influence our perceptive abilities, Snyder says. Indeed, the academic argues, they themselves have something fascist about them, because they take away our ability to exchange arguments in a meaningful way. They make us more impatient and everything becomes black or white. They confirm that we are right, even if our positions are objectively false. They produce a cycle of anger. Anger confirms anger. And anger produces anger.
Third: The Marxists of the 1920s and ’30s, Snyder says, believed that fascism was merely a variant of capitalism – that the oligarchs, as we would call them today, made Hitler’s rise possible in the first place. But that’s not true, Snyder argues. Big Business, of course, supported Hitler’s grab for power because they hoped he would liberate them from the labor unions. But most of the oligarchs didn’t support his ideas. "So there is a funny way in which the Marxist diagnosis, I think, is now true in a way that it wasn’t a hundred years ago,” says Snyder, “but there aren’t many proper Marxists left to make this argument.”
One of these new oligarchs, Snyder points out, is Elon Musk. Nobody, he says, has done more than him in the last year and a half to advance fascism. He unleashed Twitter, or X, and the platform has become even more emotional, says Snyder, more open to all kinds of filth, Russian propaganda in particular. Musk, Snyder says, uses the platform to spread even the most disgusting conspiracy theories.
Like Robert Kagan, Snyder also believes that democracies have underestimated the danger posed by fascism because they believed for too long that there is no alternative to democracy. "Gerhard Schröder tells us Putin is a convinced Democrat, right? It’s an obvious lie, but you can believe it only if you believe there is no alternative to democracy.” The result, he says, is that "Germany has been supporting this fascist for a long time while being concerned about Ukrainian fascism.”
IS FASCISM A PROCESS?
Paul Mason lives in one of those central London neighborhoods that was repeatedly struck by German rockets during World War II. Which is why there are entire blocks of new buildings from the 1950s and ’60s among the old rowhouses. In Europe, fascism and its consequences are never far away.
Mason is a figure that used to be more common: an intellectual in a center-left party. He is from the working class and was the first in his family to attend university. He has made films for the BBC and worked for Channel 4, he wrote a column for the Guardian and works on Labour Party campaigns.
His books are characterized by big ideas and the broad horizons they open up. "How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance” is his best-known work – dark, alarmist and combative. But in contrast to Kagan, Snyder and Stanley, he was a real Antifa activist who took to the streets in the 1970s and ’80s against the skinheads.
Fascism, according to the core of Mason’s argument, is the "fear of freedom triggered by a glimpse of freedom.” Just as the fascist movement of the 20th century was a reaction to the labor movement, he writes, neo-liberalism has today, on the one hand, dissolved postwar societies, destroyed the power of the labor unions and annulled the privileges of the primarily white and male working class. On the other hand, women have acquired more influence and Western societies have become more pluralistic. The consequence: the collapse of common sense.
Mason is interested in something he calls, citing the historian Robert Paxton, the "fascist process.” Fascism, he says, is not static. Rather, it is a type of "political behavior” that feeds off its own dynamism and is not reliant on complicated ideologies. Fascism, it would seem, can be rather difficult to grasp. Just like Stanley, Mason uses a checklist. Somehow, the chaos of fascism must be forced into order.
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Here is Mason’s 10-point "fascist process”: A deep crisis starts things off – such as the loss of World War I for the Germans early last century or, today, the cluster of recent crises including the financial crisis, migration, COVID and climate change. Such crises produce, second, a deep feeling of threat and the loss of sovereignty. Then, third, come suppressed groups that begin to rise up: women, climate activists, Black Lives Matter activists. People trying to find a path to the future through the crisis.
That triggers, fourth, a culture war. Fifth, a fascist party appears. Sixth, panic develops among members of the middle class, who don’t know whether to succumb to their fears of losing prosperity or to their fears of the radical right. Seventh, the rule of law is weakened in the hope that it might pacify the developing conflicts. Eighth, a weakened left begins arguing about with whom to form alliances in an effort to stand up to the radical right wing. Similar to, ninth, the conservative wing’s handwringing about the degree to which the right wing must be accommodated in order to contain them. And once all those steps have taken place, the hour of fascism has struck. Point 10, the end of democracy. The fascists make up the societal elite.
All of that seems rather schematic, which is how it is intended. But aren’t all Western societies familiar with the steps Mason has sketched out? Hasn’t the feeling that the government can no longer control the borders advanced deep into the center of society? The fear of vaccination mandates? The fear of shifting gender identities, the favorite target of the right wing, along with animosity toward the German draft law intended to make it easier for trans-people to change their genders? The fear of a shift toward the radical climate activists and toward people who fight against racism? The culture war is real – it is already underway. We are right in the middle of Mason’s "fascist process.”
The foundation of the fascist process can today be found online and the networks that have developed there. That is where the fantasies are developed that fuel the process. End-of-the-world delusions. The dream of restoring a national greatness that never actually existed. The idea that our world is heading for an unavoidable ethnic war. And that it is necessary to get ready for the coming battle.
AND THE CONSERVATIVES?
Thomas Biebricher, a professor for political theory and the history of ideas in Frankfurt, has an unusual job: He is one of the few political scientists in Germany who focuses on conservatism.
Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is one of the most successful conservative parties in Europe. It is a party born during the postwar period and rooted in the realization that fascism was made possible in part due to the lack of a commitment to democracy.
The CDU, Biebricher argues in his large study called "Mitte/Rechts” (Center/Right), which appeared last year, has become the exception in Europe. Everywhere else, including in Italy, France and the United Kingdom, the conservative camp has almost completely disintegrated, with center-right parties having lost the ability to integrate the right-wing fringe. Italy was first, when Silvio Berlusconi took over the right with his Forza Italia party – and today, the post-fascists under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are in power. In France, Gaullism, which held sway in the country for decades, has become little more than a fringe phenomenon while Marine Le Pen has become President Emmanuel Macron’s primary challenger. And in Britain, the Tories lost votes to the right-wing populists behind Nigel Farage in the last election.
The term "fascism” only seldom appears in "Mitte/Rechts.” Why? "Because it doesn’t add anything analytically or politically, it immediately sparks the final level of escalation,” he says. Biebricher teaches in Frankfurt, but lives in the Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. He shares an office with the organizers of a literary office.
Conservatism, Biebricher says, is one of the three large political currents of the modern era, along with socialism and liberalism. Born out of the aristocratic and clerical resistance to the French Revolution, it has, the professor argues, diminished over the years to a simple desire to put the brakes on progress. While socialism and liberalism strive toward the future, conservatism is eager to preserve as much of the present as possible. Even if that present is the future that it was recently fighting against.
But ever since the Eastern Bloc collapsed and the speed of technological and societal change has increased, says Biebricher, the principle of pragmatic deceleration is no longer working. Some conservatives see the world passing them by and have given up. Others have begun to fantasize about a past that may never have existed but which seems worthy of defending – "Make America Great Again,” "Make Thuringia Great Again.” Conservatism, he argues, has fragmented into a number of different streams: pessimists, pragmatists and the radicals, who aren’t actually conservative anymore because they have abandoned the traditional conservative value of moderation.
"Those who are eager to brand the radicals as fascists,” says Biebricher, "should go ahead and do so. The term primarily targets the past and doesn’t reflect what is genuinely new. It primarily serves to create distance.”
The authoritarian conservatives, says Biebricher, have dispensed with all of the historical trappings of fascism, instead attempting to rebuild liberal democracy to their liking. "But I would use the term when it comes to Trump and his MAGA movement – because the storm of the Capitol was actually an attempt to violently overthrow the system.”
But this kind of violence can be seen everywhere, says the Austrian political scientist Natascha Strobl. It merely manifests itself differently than it did in the 1920s, when, early on in the fascist movement in northern Italy, gangs of thugs were going from village to village attacking farmer organizations and the offices of the socialist party, killing people and burning homes to the ground. Today, says Strobl, violence is primarily limited to the internet. "And it is,” says Strobl, "just as real. The people who perpetrate it believe they are involved in a global culture war, a struggle that knows no boundaries. An ideological civil war against all kinds of chimeras, such as ’cultural Marxism’ or the ’Great Replacement.’”
Strobl writes against the background of Austria’s recent past, which saw the party spectrum change in the 1990s in a manner similar to Italy’s, with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) growing in strength, a party that didn’t just exude characteristics of right-wing populism, but also maintained ties to the radical right, such as the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement. And despite all of the scandals that have rocked the party, it is again leading in the polls. Parliamentary elections are set for late September, and an FPÖ chancellor is far from unrealistic. Strobl herself has been the target of threats for many years, even finding a bullet hole in her kitchen window on one occasion.
POPULISTS OR FASCISTS?
The accusation of fascism is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of democratic discourse. It is, says political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, the last card that one can play to wake people up and warn them of the gathering storm. But, he argues, it is not particularly useful as a category for describing the political developments of the present. That which reminds some people of fascism, he says, is actually right-wing extremist populism. And the "F-word” isn’t adequate for describing the phenomenon. Indeed, he says, it is so inadequate that it may even serve to reduce the urgency because the comparison with the 1930s seems so implausible and alarmist.
Müller has been teaching at Princeton University in New Jersey since 2005. He has produced one of the most influential theories on populism, and he is the only German author in the widely discussed anthology "Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America,” which was published in the U.S. in March.
Historical fascism, says Müller, is rooted in the massive violence of World War I. Its initial promise was the creation of a new human being in a nation of ethnic peers. It celebrated violence as a source of meaning, and death on the battlefield as not only necessary, but as a fulfillment of humanity. It was, argues Müller, a blueprint for anti-modernity, a thoroughly mobilized and militarized society with a cult of masculinity. An ideology which assigned women one single role, that of child-bearer. It was a movement that presented itself as a revolution – one that promised not only national rebirth but also a completely different future.
Müller sees little of that in today’s right-wing political movements. What he does see, he says, is a right-wing extremist populism that reduces all political issues to questions of belonging and portrays opponents as a threat, or even as enemies. It is a movement that wants to turn back the clock, a movement without a utopia.
The fascism debate has become stuck in the question of "Weimar” or "democracy”? But, he says, it is possible to imagine a different path. You have to think in your own era, says Müller. Which does not mean that there are no dark clouds on the horizon. Populism can also destroy democracy, as it has in Hungary, and it has the potential to trigger racist radicalization.
But how should democracies deal with the populist threat? "There are two extremes,” says Müller, "and both are wrong.” The first extreme is complete exclusion. "Don’t talk to them.” That strategy only serves to confirm the narratives of such parties, which claim that they are the only one’s speaking the truth. "Look at how the elite are treating us. They are ignoring us!”
But the other extreme is just as misguided. Believing that populists are telling the truth about our society and handing them a monopoly over our "concerns and needs.” That, says Müller, only leads to a legitimatization of their positions – to trying to keep up and joining them in unconditional coalitions. Müller refers to this path as the "mainstreaming of right-wing extremism – a development that can be seen virtually everywhere in Europe.”
What is the correct path? "To talk with them, but to avoid talking like them.” It is possible to discuss immigration, he says, without talking about vast conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement,” which holds that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel intended to replace the German people with the Syrians. It is important, he says, to set aside the moral cudgel and make clear: "We are prepared to treat you as a legitimate part of the political landscape if you change your behavior.” Müller says even that is a slightly paternalistic, didactic approach, but that’s not forbidden in a democracy. Particularly given that there is plenty of debate about where, exactly, the red lines run that may actually strengthen democracy.
There is one thing, though, he argues, that makes the situation more complicated. Democracies and their leaders long thought that they had a systematic advantage. That democracy is the only political system that can learn and correct its own mistakes. Today, when authoritarian systems emerge, he says, we tend to underestimate them. When Viktor Orbán appeared and turned Budapest, as Müller describes it, into a kind of Disneyland for the new right, many thought for far too long that things would take care of themselves as they always had. "As an ardent fan of FC Cologne, I know from experience that things don’t always go well.”
But right-wing populist politicians are also capable of learning: They shun images that remind people of the 20th century, says Müller. They avoid large-scale repressions. They limit press freedoms but maintain a couple of alibi newspapers. They rule such that they can always say: "We are democrats. Come to Budapest. Is this what fascism looks like?”
Orbán refers to his government as an "illiberal democracy.” Hungary continues to hold elections, but media pluralism is a thing of the past as are fundamental democratic rights such as freedom of opinion and assembly. Müller says that Orbán’s Hungary should not be seen as a "democracy” just because he is still popular among many Hungarians. Doing so would mean that his critics could only argue in the name of liberalism. And that is exactly what illiberals want, says Müller. But if he is shown to be a kleptocrat and an autocrat, that is when things could grow uncomfortable for Orbán.
And what about Germany, a country Müller sees as the motherland of robust democracy? Are the country’s defenses not failing in the face of the AfD?
"In Germany,” he says, "a more nuanced toolkit is available.” You can ban state party chapters or individual organizations, and you can also strip politicians of certain rights, says Müller. You don’t have to immediately ban an entire party. "You can demonstrate to those elements of the party that haven’t become completely radicalized: ’People, we are showing you where the limits of democracy lie.’ And maybe that can trigger a moderation.” That, too, is a didactic approach, but democracy is ultimately allowed to declare its principles and defend them. "If the party pursues the Höcke path, then it may ultimately have to be banned,” says Müller, referring to Björn Höcke, the ultra-radical head of the AfD state chapter in Thuringia.
But hasn’t the party grown too large for that? "Not necessarily. It would, to be sure, produce political martyrs. But right-wing populists pose as victims anyway.”
AND THE DEMOCRATS?
Sometimes, the debate about the threats facing democracy can give the impression that evil spirits have suddenly been let loose on the world. An attack of the lunatics, a storm of irrationality, an impending relapse into barbarianism. An onslaught that must be fended off with united forces using the biggest guns available. All of that is a reasonable conclusion and it sounds both logical and correct, but might it be that democracies and democrats have also had a role to play in the rise of their enemies?
Philip Manow, born in 1963, is a political science professor at the University of Siegen. His most recent book, which was published by Suhrkamp in May, takes a closer look at the future of liberal democracy. Manow is a provocateur, and he quotes Paul Valéry, the philosopher, who wrote: “That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.” Manow says: The problem isn’t populism, it is liberal democracy itself.
We met for lunch in late-July at the restaurant inside Cologne’s Museum Ludwig – an encounter that turned into a two-and-a-half-hour deconstruction of the political discourse.
A liberal democracy, as Jan-Werner Müller also says, consists of more than just free elections with ballots cast in secret. It is shaped by the idea of human dignity and other universalist ideas. It is rooted in the separation of powers, freedom of opinion, press freedoms, the protection of minorities, the independence of its institutions and the rule of law. It must be robust, which is why, Manow says, democracies are equipped with a high court and domestic intelligence agencies designed to protect the constitution – along with the possibility, though the hurdles are high, of banning political parties. There is also, he says, a kind of political dictum that democracies and its parties erect a kind of firewall against the enemies of democracy.
Liberal democracy, says Manow, sees itself as the product of lessons learned in the first half of the 20th century. On the one hand, the tyrants must be prevented from securing parliamentary power. The events of 1933 Germany must not be repeated. On the other hand, the abyss of the Holocaust, the political scientist continues, led to the establishment of a catalog of human rights by the newly established United Nations as a path to a better world. But the human rights discourse only experienced a breakthrough starting in the 1970s, when communism was definitively discredited by the publication of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Stalin tract "The Gulag Archipelago” and when the West lost its shine in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Civil Rights Movement.
The resulting vacuum of ideals was, says Manow, filled with the idea of human rights universalism as the final utopia – one that didn’t just become a reference point for dissidents in the Eastern Bloc but also came to shape the debate in Western democracies. The institutional manifestation of this debate following the collapse of communism, says Manow, was ultimately decisive. The nations of Eastern Europe took their cue from the liberal-democratic model of Western countries, particularly the German version with its strong constitutional defenses. At the same time, European integration progressed in the 1990s, with borders opening up and a joint currency being introduced. The EU increasingly defined itself as a community of shared values, led primarily by the rule of law and the court system.
Populism, says Manow, should primarily be seen as a counterreaction – as an illiberal democratic response to an increasingly undemocratic liberalism. The political-economic upheavals, whether it was the Euro crisis in 2010 or the migration crisis starting in 2015, put wind in the sails of the populist parties, says Manow, because there was no meaningful opposition within the established parties to policies declared by Merkel (and elsewhere) as being without alternative. Indeed, Merkel herself, he says, became just as inevitable as her policies. When elections were held, the primary question on the ballot was what party would become her junior coalition partner. "That paved the way for the AfD.”
Liberal democracy, says Manow, responded robustly with an arsenal of morally charged values. The populist problem was to be resolved through the judiciary, a strategy adopted without considering the possibility that using law as a replacement for politics was perhaps part of the problem.
But that is a dangerous development in Manow’s view because the political battlefield was brought into the courtroom. The judiciary itself becomes politicized. Ultimately, the high court morphs into just another party-political body, says Manow, like the Supreme Court in the U.S., where in many instances, justices vote along the lines of the party that nominated them. Those who stand for positions that find no place in the institutions, however, develop a kind of fundamental opposition: "The system is ailing and broken and the whole thing must go.”
Instead of legal system, the focus should be returned to electoral principles, says Manow. A body politic includes people with a variety of opinions, convictions and values. There is, unfortunately, no better way, he says, than allowing the people to decide on controversial issues following a public debate. Competition among political parties, elections and public discourse, Manow says, make up the fundamental mechanism of stability in democracies. Liberal democracy, the political scientist argues, produces its crises, while electoral democracy processes those crises.
And what if the populists win the elections? Wait it out, says Manow. Those who believe that voters are fundamentally complicit in their own disempowerment should stay away from democracy, he says. Poland showed that it is possible to vote populists out of power. Orbán suffered significant losses in the European elections. And up until a month ago, it looked like Trump would be the next president of the U.S. Nothing is as certain as it seems. Trump, not Biden, is now the one who looks like a doddering old man – weird, in fact. Kamala Harris’ strategy: a rejection of gloom and hate. An approach of uniting rather than dividing, with a happily relaxed tone, positivity and an undertone of gentle derision. Looking forward rather than backward.
THE VERTIGO MOMENT
The Bulgarian political scientist and adviser Ivan Krastev spends his summer vacations on the Black Sea. In the evenings, his son and his son’s friends play games, and last year their game of choice was "Secret Hitler.” It is certainly possible that Krastev gave them the game to see what would happen. It was his son who said that it was more fun to be a fascist in the game. Why? Because the fascists play as a team, and because the democrats are their own worst enemies, paralyzed by distrust and mutual suspicions. The game, says Krastev, clearly shows why the populists win. Not because they are so strong, but because the democrats are so confused. They want the right thing, but they frequently make the wrong decisions.
Berlin, the Grand Hyatt Hotel on Potsdamer Platz. Krastev, born in 1965 and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, is on his way to Poland via the German capital. He is someone political leaders call when things are complicated. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Economy Minister Robert Habeck have both met with him in the past and he is in demand in other capitals as well as one of the continent’s most interesting thinkers, an analyst who pulls the world apart for them before then reassembling it. For his part, he sees himself more as the kind of uncle that exists in every Bulgarian village, the guy who others find both funny and clever. A person who others come to when they need advice, almost like going to the psychiatrist. Listen, Krastev says in his rapid, Bulgarian-accented English, what he is going to say may be rather interesting, but it might not actually be true.
“Listen, he says, I think we are dealing with something that I would call the other ’Extinction Rebellion.’” The "Great Replacement” right wing, he believes, cannot be understood without looking at demographic developments and especially the fears they trigger. That, for years, has been Krastev’s greatest focus. People cross borders, some on their way in, others on their way out. European societies are aging. And birthrates are falling, without, Krastev says, anyone offering a plausible explanation as to why.
“It’s the fear of disappearing,” he says. The fear of “one’s own language and culture vanishing.” The fear that migrants could change political realities by voting for those who were allowed to come into the country. That the many new people will change life and change the cities – and that those who have long been here will be stuck, because the newcomers can simply leave if they don’t like it anymore, while they are damned to stay. Everything shifts, says Krastev, the relationships of people to each other and to their own country. The racist fantasies that result, Krastev believe, can certainly be interpreted as a new form of fascism, as the fascism of the 21st century.
What now unites society, from the left to the right, he says, is their feeling of impending doom. Which is challenging for democracy. If fascism is knocking on the door, Krastev says, then urgent action is necessary, but democracy depends on compromise, which takes time. While democracy may not really have clear ideas for the future, he says, it definitely wants to prevent the past from becoming that future.
Krastev says that he searched long and hard for a metaphor for our times before finally finding it in Milan Kundera’s "The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” an Eastern European author, of course. Europe, says the Bulgarian, is experiencing a vertigo moment. Vertigo essentially means fear of heights, dizziness on the precipice, the fear of plunging into the depths. But Kundera has a different definition of vertigo: As the emptiness beneath us that lures and seduces us. We want to fall, yet desperately fight against it. There is, says Krastev, this right-wing desire to finally put an end to everything, to Europe; a feeling that everything must fundamentally change. A century ago, fascism had an agenda and a promise: Mussolini propagated an imperial Italian future while Hitler promised to expunge all that was foreign. The new parties, though, says Krastev, don’t have such a vision. They only have suicidal fantasies.
Never mind the fact that most populists, Krastev believes, don’t even believe that they will ever hold power. They often win by chance. Brexit? Bad luck. Trump? Also. "It’s as if the right wing just date their fears the whole time, and one day, they’re married to them.” The paradox, Krastev believes, is that fascists suspect that the other side might actually be right. Which is their greatest fear.
Fascism in the 20th century was rooted in dread of the evil other – the communists, the Jews, the enemies. Fascism in the 21st century is rooted in fear. What is the difference between dread and fear? During the pandemic, people dreaded the virus, a deadly attacker. There was an enemy that could be identified. But fear is less specific. There is no clear attacker, it is inside oneself, and in a certain sense, says Krastev, it is the fear of oneself.
Krastev says that he has developed patience with politicians. The world is changing quickly; things happen, and politicians must respond with decisions. But that doesn’t mean that their decisions will solve the problems. Politics, Krastev believes, is learning to live with the problems, and politics knows no clear victories. Politics is the management of panic. A battle against vertigo, the endless emptiness beneath us.
So if this fear within is the precondition for modern-day fascism, could any one of us become a fascist? It is, says Krastev, interesting to watch what happens when people play "Secret Hitler.”
Captain Höcke
Greiz, a town deep in Germany’s east, south of Gera and west of Zwickau, calls itself the "Pearl of Vogtland,” as the region is called. It is a beautiful town with a castle on the rocks above and another down below on the banks of the river. The Thuringian chapter of the AfD is holding its summer festival here, with blue balloons and a bouncy castle. It is in the heart of Björn Höcke’s electoral district.
The posters for the event include a photo of Höcke where he looks a little bit like Tom Cruise in "Top Gun.” He is wearing mirrored sunglasses, a bit like aviator sunglasses. And if you look closely, you can see a passenger plane reflected in the lenses. It takes a bit for the penny to drop. The plane is supposed to be a deportation flight of the kind Höcke is constantly talking about, a flight taking illegal immigrants back where they came from once the AfD secures power. As if Captain Höcke were flying the plane himself. Did AfD finally discover irony? Or is it just weird?
Greiz looks like many other towns in eastern Germany. Nice looking and clean, but seemingly devoid of people. Almost 40,000 people lived here in 1970, but now the population is just over 20,000. There isn’t much life on the streets of the old town, almost as though the townsfolk still believe they are living in a dictatorship and have elected to remain in the safety of their own homes. It isn’t difficult to imagine a resident of a western German city quickly growing lonely here and perhaps even entertaining radical thoughts. On the other hand: Wouldn’t a Greiz native also feel rather lost in Hamburg?
Around 500 people have gathered in the castle gardens on the shores of the river. There are a few hooligans, some Identitarians with their severely parted hair and polo shirts, rockers with Trump T-shirts, militia types and vaccine truthers who look like aging hippies. Beyond that, the crowd includes people from the working class and middle-class laborers. The police presence is not overwhelming.
The sun is shining, some are sipping beer – real Thuringians. The mood is neither hostile nor inflamed. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that the Antifa has only been allowed to hold their counter-protest across the river. In other cities, as colleagues have said, things can get wild.
Höcke’s appearances in the media are often tense, his eyes flickering with panic and disgust. Here in his electoral district, though, he exudes control. He is, it must be granted, a good speaker and holds forth without notes. He seems to feel right at home on stage. He is wearing jeans and a white shirt, and he begins his speech by talking about the Olympic Games that just got started two days ago. His focus is the scene during the opening ceremony in which drag queens and trans-people, as Höcke describes them, portray da Vinci’s "Last Supper.” It is, the AfD politician insists, an expression of "what is going fundamentally wrong not just in this country, but in all of Europe and the West.” He speaks about the self-hatred of Germans and Europeans and of wanting to overcome European culture and identity. "There is no self-hatred with the AfD. Period. Those who feel a sense of self-hatred should go to a therapist.”
The German manner in which he says terms like "drag queens” and "trans-gender models” clearly expresses his disgust. He speaks of the widespread decadence in the West and of the urge "to shred our gender identity.” In his speech, he is constantly sending people into therapy. And to those who have their doubts about there only being two biological genders, he says: "My recommendation is that you just open your pants and see what it looks like down there.” Applause.
Much of his speech focuses on the destruction of "European culture,” the destruction of what is "normal.” He talks about the schools and the childcare centers, about the new draft law in Germany that will make it easier for people to change their genders, about public broadcasters, about freedom of opinion and about the German government’s coronavirus policies, which he portrays as a state crime. And he focuses on migration as the mother of all crises, one which, he says, has transformed Germany into the world’s welfare office. For airplanes full of migrants, he says, only permission to take off will be granted in the future, not to land.
Höcke’s speech flirts with what allegedly cannot be said and can only be hinted at. As though there was a secret and dangerous truth. "You know what I’m talking about,” he says. Or: "I want to express myself diplomatically.” Or: "You’re not allowed to say that.” Or: "I don’t have to expound on that.” Dark powers are out and about that are targeting him and targeting Germany, that is his message. In conclusion, he warns his listeners in Greiz to avoid voting by mail. He tells them to only go to their polling station late in the day and to remain there as the votes are counted – and to report any irregularities to the AfD. He also tells them to make sure that the care-worker in the retirement home doesn’t fill out grandma’s ballot. You know what I’m talking about.
It is all rather perplexing. Back in Berlin, Ivan Krastev makes one of his Krastevian jokes. An American judge, he relates, once said that he may not be able to define pornography, "but I know it when I see it.” The reverse is true with fascism, says Krastev: It is simple to define, but difficult to recognize when you see it.
The "F-word.” F as in fascism or F as in "Fuck you.” It is permissible, as a court in Meiningen ruled, to refer to Höcke as a fascist. The question remains, though, what doing so actually achieves.
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