On the spectre of cryptofascism and the enduring thesis of a hidden, shadow politics known hardly to ourselves

"Denn welcher Mensch weiß, was im Menschen ist, als allein der Geist des Menschen, der in ihm ist?"

Some time ago, I made a small decision that substantially improved my thought. I resolved that I would make self-identification an important criterion for accepting the validity of all political labels. For me to agree that any given ‘-ism’ is meaningful or worth thinking about, I decided I would require that real people identify personally with that ‘-ism’; and to take anybody seriously as a representative of that ‘-ism,’ I would further require that he espouse that identity himself.¹ This is a trivial commitment to intellectual honesty, but it comes with substantial payoffs. Alongside saving me the tedium of many unproductive arguments, it has banished from my mind a great lot of cumbersome functionless furniture. I no longer have to think about “racism” or “totalitarianism” or even “capitalism” very much; most uses of “fascism” and the like are now also beneath my notice. One you have gotten rid of these fake -isms, you discover that they are obscuring many real and under-appreciated phenomena that some people would prefer you not think very closely about.

Now, extending this minimal charity to others does not guarantee they’ll return the favour. Most often I am called a “Nazi,” though in the first phases of the Ukraine war my critics decided that I was a “Putin apologist” and presently many claim to have detected my latent “Zionism.” This kind of political name-calling is tiresome, and I mention it only by way of exclusion. Here I do not want to talk about random internet assholes who run around accusing everybody of whatever -ism they presently find most abhorrent. Those people are idiots.

Beneath much polemical posturing, however, there often lurks rather more serious assumptions. Underpinning our rampant -ism inflation is the idea that there exists political radicals or extremists who deliberately obscure their views, hiding them behind disingenuous labels and whatever it is that “dogwhistles” are supposed to be. This is a guiding premise of our political enforcers in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, repeated throughout the literature on their domestic spy operation. Mathias Brodkorb, for example, explains that the “dilemma” of the constitutional protectors consists in the fact that the “Cunning enemies of democracy do not necessarily present themselves as such.”

Acting in silence, and eluding state authorities and the public, is seen as a necessary condition for a successful revolution. It is therefore not just a matter of tracking down and combating illegal activities: action must be taken in advance.

Some pages later he returns to the idea:

The dilemma of the constitutional protectors is that enemies of the constitution do not usually declare their hostility to the constitution openly. As a rule, no extremist party will call for the abolition of democracy, the abrogation of the validity of human dignity or the independence of the courts unless they need to.²

I propose to call this the Cryptofascist Thesis. It is the idea that there are a lot of people running around – whether in the Republican Party or in Alternative für Deutschland or on Substack or someplace else – who are strategically advancing one set of political ideas, while harbouring within their breasts a wholly different political programme, which they will implement on that happy day when somebody hands them the keys to the kingdom.

The more I think about the Cryptofascist Thesis, the more I find it equal measures fascinating and absurd.