In their latest piece of totally rational and level-headed reporting, Der Spiegel sets out to "identify evil" and asks which of our right-populist politicians might be "secret Hitlers"

That picture depicts a very bad man who doesn’t get nearly enough press these days. Probably you haven’t heard of him. His name is Adolf Hitler, and although he committed suicide in an underground bunker 79 years ago, he still represents Europe’s greatest problem. Hitler is not like other mortals; he may not really be dead, and his spirit is likely to return at any moment. Perhaps it already has. This is why our foremost news magazine, Der Spiegel, chose this image to head their cover story on “The Secret Hitlers,” a bizarre opus of current-year political lunacy penned by Lothar Gorris and Tobias Rapp.

“Is fascism returning?” Gorris and Rapp want to know. “Or is it already here, in the form of [Donald] Trump, [Viktor] Orbán [or Björn] Höcke? And if so, could it disappear again?” What follows, they explain, is “an attempt to identify evil.”

This is the kind of insanity that comes over you when you elevate establishment political ideology into a civic religion. You reduce the entire project of state politics to a dubious exercise in piety, where the aim is not to achieve good outcomes or develop pragmatic solutions, but to engage in moral peacockery. For the Gorrises and the Rapps of our discourse, the greatest problem facing the liberal faithful of the Federal Republic is not mass migration, deindustrialisation, soon-to-be-insolvent pension programmes or the overblown state entitlement system, oh no. It is finding and rooting out mythological political demons and preventing the second coming of the secular antichrist.

“How Fascism Begins”: The present cover of Der Spiegel, depicting Björn Höcke, Marine le Pen and Donald Trump as the new fascists. Establishment German hysteria about “the right” is now achieving an intensity to rival American hysteria about race during the Summer of Floyd.

Gorris and Rapp (for convenience, I will refer to these feeble-minded men henceforth as Grapp) open with an extended anecdote about a 2016 board game called Secret Hitler.

The setting is the year 1932, the Reichstag in Berlin. The players are divided into two groups: Fascists and Democrats, with the Democrats making up the majority, which sounds familiar. The Fascists have a decisive advantage at the start: they know who the other Fascists are, which also reflects the truth in the history books. The Democrats don’t have this information; every other player could be friend or foe. The fascists win the game if they get six laws through the Reichstag or if Hitler is elected Chancellor. To win, the Democrats must pass five laws or expose and kill Hitler.

The basic premise of the game is that everyone pretends to be democrats. In truth, the real democrats would only have to trust each other and the fascists wouldn’t stand a chance. But it’s not that simple, because sometimes the democrats have to vote in favour of a fascist law for lack of options and therefore fall under suspicion of fascism. Which is exactly what the fascists want.

One realisation: there is no guarantee of the right strategy that will ultimately see the good guys win and the bad guys lose. One wrong decision that feels right, and Hitler is Reich Chancellor. It was all chance, just as there was no inevitability in 1933. The other realisation: it can be fun to be a fascist.

The cryptofascist myth will never cease to amaze me. Absolutely everybody in 1933 knew who “the fascists” were. The ones in Italy literally called themselves fascists, which was one way to identify them. The ones in Germany openly derided liberalism and dreamed of a nationalist revolution that would put an end to the hated bourgeois democracy of the Weimar Republic. Hitler was a national politician who wrote and spoke openly of his aims. Secret Hitler in no way “reflects the truth in the history books.” It is a deformed fantasy about modern politics, which reflects nothing so much as the burning demand for and the vanishing supply of actual Nazis to hyperventilate about.

Now it is true that a lot of erstwhile liberals went over to National Socialism after the Nazis seized power, but these were not the secret fascists of Grappian fever dreams. The were just followers, as are a great many of the self-professed liberals active today. Were communists or illiberal nationalists to take over tomorrow, millions of people would line up behind the new political ideology like the sheep that they are, and I suspect that Grapp would be right at the head of that line.

Because our crack fascist identifiers suffer from a crushing lack of self-awareness, they declare that “relapsing into fascism is the primal fear of modern democratic societies.” Such a relapse, they explain, “long sounded hysterical and unimaginable,” but “now it seems serious and real.” They go on to provide an unhinged and paranoid list of all the fascistic personalities and fascistic developments blooming right underneath our noses:

Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in India. Giorgia Meloni’s election victory in Italy. Marine Le Pen’s normalisation strategy in France. Javier Milei’s victory in Argentina. Viktor Orbán’s autocratic dominance in Hungary. The comebacks of the FPÖ in Austria or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. The AfD in East Germany. Nayib Bukule’s autocratic rule in El Salvador … The threat of Trump's re-election and the fear that he could really get serious in a second term. The attacks by British mobs on migrant shelters. The neo-Nazi march in Bautzen. The pandemic. The war in Ukraine. Inflation.

Aside from perhaps some of the right-wing demonstrators against gay pride in Bautzen, I fail to find any actual fascism in this list, which anyway descends rapidly into incoherence. I don’t understand how the Ukraine war or inflation can be fascist, for example. The pandemic certainly represented an authoritarian moment in European politics, but the response was orchestrated everywhere by the most rabid self-described lovers of democracy – the very people who are pretending to be so exercised about fascism right now.

Grapp don’t explain any of this, of course; for them and their readers, the fascism in all of these things is self-evident. Instead, they proceed to introduce us to various Fascism Understanders, who promise to identify the respawned Hitlers lurking within our democracies.

First up is the American neoconservative Robert Kagan, who has been losing his mind about Trump for a solid eight years now. That is a long time to maintain such a fever-pitch of political overexcitement, but then again Kagan is a very special person.

“We have lived,” [Kagan] says, “in a time when we were led to believe that the rise of liberal democracies with their strong universal human rights was inevitable, almost inevitable. But that is not true. Their rise was the result of historical events such as the Great Depression. And the Second World War, which was fought in the name of freedom and created a completely new, better world.”

What Kagan means: Because liberal democracy was never inevitable, it must always be defended. It must not relax, it must not sleep because people believe that the end of history has been reached. No natural law protects democracy from someone like Trump or from fascism or from the Christian nationalists who are backing Trump.

This is not totally wrong. Liberalism is a fundamentally oppositional ideological system. It understands itself always and everywhere to be arrayed against illiberal enemies, and for this reason it is congenitally incapable of relaxing. Thus its contemporary propagandists now spare no effort to reincarnate the big mad moustache man ahead of every last election.

This time it could be serious. If Trump wins the election, Kagan believes that the old system will be destroyed ... Trump would first use the Department of Justice to take revenge on his enemies. He would militarise immigration policy and have hundreds of thousands of illegals rounded up. Little by little, the system of checks and balances would be dismantled. First the immigrants would lose their civil rights, then the political opposition … would be arrested and charged. “And that's enough,” says Kagan. “The system would still look the same, but in reality it would be destroyed.”

The amount of projection here is just incredible. The only people who have been arresting and charging the political opposition in America are Kagan’s card-carrying fellow liberals.

Our next Fascism Understander is that venerable Twitter lolcow Jason Stanley, who misses no opportunity to inform the world that he is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University (video credit) …

… and who considers himself an epochal intellectual titan:

Stanley is qualified to Understand Fascism primarily because he is the author of a very deep and sophisticated children’s book on How Fascism Works. As Grapp explain, our philosopher has broken new ground in identifying the “ten characteristics of fascism”:

First, every nation has its myths, its glorification of a beautiful past. The fascist version of a national myth, however, needs greatness and power.

Second, fascist propaganda portrays the political opponent as a threat to one’s own existence and traditions. It is “us” against “them.” If “they” are in charge, this means the end of the nation.

Third, the leader determines what is true and what is false. Science and reality challenge his authority. Complex perspectives are a threat.

Fourth: Fascism lies. Truth is the centre of democracy. The lie is the enemy of freedom. Those who are lied to cannot vote freely. If you want to rip the heart out of democracy, you have to get people used to lies.

Fifth, fascism is based on hierarchies, and these are the biggest lies. Racism is a lie, no group is better than another. No religion, no ethnicity, no gender is better.

Sixth, those who believe in hierarchies and their own superiority can easily become nervous and afraid. Fascism declares its followers to be victims of equality. German Christians are victims of the Jews. White Americans are victims of the equality of black Americans. Men are victims of feminism.

Seventh: Fascism ensures law and order. What is law and order is determined by the leader. And he also determines who violates it, who has rights and who is deprived of them.

Eighth: Fascism is afraid of sexuality. Fascists fuel fears of trans people, of homosexuals who don’t just want to lead their own lives, but want to destroy the lives of ‘normal people’ and target their children.

Ninth: Fascism hates the cities. They are places of decadence, of elites, of immigrants, of crime.

Tenth: Fascism believes that work makes you free. Minorities and the left are lazy by nature.

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that this is not the kind of high-level political analysis that people will still be reading in AD 2250. In fact this whole list just seems nuts to me. All nations have myths of “greatness and power.” They may sometimes be laughable or naive, but myth-making like this is central to nationalism generally. Fascists – the actual historical ones – regarded communists as the great threat to their “existence and traditions”; right now, it is the establishment “defenders of democracy” who characterise phantom “fascists” as a threat to their own existence and their own traditions. Perhaps this is simply what political conflicts look like. All regimes engage in propaganda and aspire “to determine what is true and what is false.” Our self-satisfied democratic regimes lie to us all the time; if indeed “truth is the centre of democracy,” then our democracies died a long time ago. Explicit hierarchical understandings are present everywhere outside leftism and its softer cousin, liberal egalitarianism. Despite their ideological rejection of hierarchy, leftists and egalitarians inevitably construct hierarchical societies anyway, because humans are hierarchical chimps. It seems a bad idea to cede to “fascism” the entire domain of “law and order” and to cast “fascism” as the sole defender of traditional sexuality. That will probably get a lot of people interested in whatever this “fascism” is. The alleged “fascist” hatred of cities seems like an ad-hoc swipe at the demographics of right-leaning voters in America. The only point where Stanley makes any sense is the last one, because of course the interwar fascists in Italy and Germany represented themselves as workers’ movements. I am not sure, however, that opposing aspects of the modern welfare state really amounts to the same thing.

Stanley goes on to make various strange statements. For example, he claims that “fascism” has a long history in America, and that the Ku Klux Klan “was the very first [American] fascist movement.” He also says that “a democratic culture was never able to develop in the southern states,” which is why “election officials … in Georgia … are unlikely to oppose the manipulation attempts of the Trumpists a second time.” For Stanley, it is clear, “fascism” is just a term he rubs on anybody whose culture or politics he finds offensive. This makes him a very serious person worthy of mass media interviews like this one.

Grapp, apparently reluctant to leave New Haven, next have lunch with their third Fascism Understander, Timothy Snyder, a European historian at Yale who is “one of America’s most important intellectuals.” Snyder mainly tells them about all the ways that Vladimir Putin is a fascist:

[Putin] is waging a war for obviously fascist motives – against a country whose population is supposedly inferior, against a state that supposedly does not exist, and with the support of an almost completely mobilised society. There is, writes Snyder, a cult of a leader, a cult of the dead of past battles, a myth of a golden empire that must be rebuilt through a war of healing violence.

A time traveller from the 1930s, Snyder wrote … would immediately recognise Putin's regime as fascist. The Z symbol, the rallies, the propaganda, the mass graves. Putin had invaded Ukraine as Hitler had invaded it, as an imperial power.

Putin, Snyder explains, is above all a “postmodern” fascist, because “postmodernism assumes that there is no truth.” Thus postmodern fascists like Putler “can declare anything to be the truth” and believe that “the decision about what truth is and who determines it is made on the battlefield.” This sounds a bit like that Bush aide, who famously told Ron Suskind in 2004 that “We’re an empire now,” and that when the United States acts, “we create our own reality.” Perhaps the anti-fascist neoconservatives whose interventionist policies defined the Bush administration were also postmodern fascists in the mould of Putin? This all gets very confusing.

Snyder adds that Putin is not only a postmodern fascist; he is also a “schizo-fascist,” by which he means that Putin claims to be opposed to fascism even though he supports fascism, and that he characterises his opponents in the Ukraine as fascists even though they’re not fascists. Snyder believes that “If Ukraine does not win” the war, then “decades of darkness await us.” That is how dangerous postmodern schizo-fascism is.

As a kind of footnote to this magisterial political analysis, Snyder observes that Trump is also a fascist, and that his rise is being assisted by oligarchs like Elon Musk. In this way, Trump is an even truer fascist than the fascists of the interwar period. Here Snyder’s argument becomes especially tangled and esoteric:

According to Snyder, the Marxists of the 1920s and 1930s believed that fascism was just a variant of capitalism. The oligarchs, as we would call them today, had made Hitler’s rise possible in the first place. But that is not true. Of course, big business supported Hitler’s rise to power because it hoped he would free them from the trade unions. But most of the oligarchs didn’t think much of Hitler’s ideas. “Today, the Marxist diagnosis is much more accurate than it was 100 years ago,” says Snyder, “there are just far fewer Marxists.”

So, Marxists said interwar fascists were just capitalists supported by the oligarchs, except they weren’t really, but Trump has the support of oligarchs, and so that makes him a doubleplus fascist, and the only reason we can’t see this is because the Marxists aren’t around anymore.

Musk, Snyder explains, has oligarchically supported fascism primarily by reducing censorship on Twitter. In this way he has “disinhibited” the platform and caused the site to “become even more emotional, even more open to all kinds of filth, even Russian propaganda.” At the same time, “Musk uses his platform to spread even the worst conspiracy theories.” Fascists, as we all know, are very against social media censorship, because it is only by silencing our critics that we can defend our liberal democratic freedoms, like the freedom of expression.

Our next Fascism Understander is a British ex-Antifa activist turned journalist and author named Paul Mason, whose latest book explains How to Stop Fascism. Mason says that fascism is the “fear of freedom” that is “awakened by the ‘idea of freedom’.” I don’t know what that means and I doubt that Mason does either. It hardly matters, because Mason also believes that fascism in addition to being a fear is also a “process,” in particular one that consists of ten steps. In the beginning there is 1) a “deep crisis,” which 2) “gives rise to a deep sense of threat,” in response to which 3) “oppressed groups” like “women, climate activists, and Black Lives Matter Activists” “rise up,” causing 4) “a culture war,” which 5) provokes the emergence of “a fascist party,” which 6) gives rise to “panic among the middle classes,” such that the powers-that-be decide 7) to “undermine the rule of law” to “pacify the conflicts,” at which point 8) “the weakened left is divided,” and 9) the “conservatives … accommodate the radical right in order to contain it,” and then finally you have a great big poof and you arrive at 10) “the end of democracy.”

It’s interesting that Mason seems to acknowledge, however implicitly, that the populist opposition he derides as “fascists” are in fact a reaction to the excesses of the left. All that anybody would have to do to short-circuit this ominous fascistic spiral, in Mason’s scheme anyway, would be to exercise some restraint at step 3). I wonder why they can’t ever seem to do that.

We are very deep into the article now – so deep that Grapp can be confident almost everybody has stopped reading. This is where they stick their less sympathetic Fascism Understanders, those of them who don’t seem to think we are enduring any kind of fascistic revival at all. There is the political scientist Thomas Biebricher, who thinks “fascism” is primarily a polemical term for conservative “radicals” who “have abandoned … moderation” and who are “trying … to … rebuild liberal democracy in their favour.” Perhaps worried that he’s making too much sense, Biebricher hastens to emphasise that “Trump and his MAGA movement” are actual fascists though, “Because when they stormed the Capitol, they were actually trying to overthrow the system by force.” Next comes Jan-Werner Müller, who sees fascism as a historical phenomenon distinct from the “right populism” of the present day. And the clearest-eyed of all is Philip Manow, who argues that this “populism … is a counter-reaction, an illiberal democratic response to an increasingly undemocratic liberalism.” I am still not sure how the populists, who do nothing but advocate for traditional democratic freedoms, are illiberal, but at least we are no longer in the Lunatic Ten-Point Fascism land of Jason Stanley and Paul Mason.

To chase these small scraps of sanity off the page, Grapp conclude with a scary tale of a potentially fascist political rally held by Björn Höcke in Thüringen:

Just under 500 people have come to the castle gardens down by the river. A few hooligans, Identitarians with sharply parted hair and polo shirts, rockers with Trump T-shirts, militia types, anti-vaccination activists who look like old hippies, otherwise workers, middle-class craftsmen, and a discreet police presence.

[Björn Höckes] … radiates aplomb. He is – it has to be said – a good speaker, he talks without a scripts, he seems to feel at home on stage. He wears jeans and a white shirt and begins his speech with remarks about the Olympic Games, which opened two days earlier. He discusses the scene at the opening ceremony in which drag queens and trans people, in his view, parodied da Vinci's Last Supper. He calls it an expression of “what is fundamentally wrong not only in this country, but in Europe and the West” … He talks about the self-hatred of Europe and the Germans and about wanting to overcome European culture and identity. “There is no self-hatred with the AfD. End of the announcement. Anyone who feels self-hatred should see a therapist.”

The way he pronounces words like “drag queens” and “transgender models” … has the tone of contempt. He speaks of the widespread decadence of the West, of the urge to “shred our gender identity” …

Large parts of his speech are about the destruction of “European culture,” the destruction of what is “normal.” About schools and kindergartens, about the Self-Determination Act, about public media, about freedom of expression, about Covid policies … He calls migration the mother of all crises, which has turned Germany into a global social welfare centre. He says that for aeroplanes carrying migrants, there will only be permission to take off, but no permission to land.

The problem for Grapp, is that nothing Höcke says sounds all that crazy. In fact the man seems eminently reasonable. Trans ideology is a massive dumpster fire that no sane person wants anything to do with; mass migration has been a catastrophe; the pandemic response was criminal and terrifying; postwar guilt culture is psychologically unhealthy and sooner or later it will also prove to be self-defeating. All of this is abundantly clear, and the only retort Grapp have is that Höcke might be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler and that the plainly true things he says are part of an ever-metastasising, resolutely indefinite “fascist” tradition.

Maybe it is not the best idea, to take all of the honest statements about what has gone wrong in Western politics, and all the clear suggestions for how we might put things right, and seal them up in one massive bottle called “fascism.” That tactic might turn out to have some unintended consequences.