The rise of Nationalist Populism: Authoritarianism 101

Ever since World War II, people in the Western world have been asking rhetorically how a nation of the education and cultural excellence of Germany could have believed in and rallied around such a sinister, bigoted, megalomaniacal and xenophobic leader as Adolf Hitler. Perhaps there is no single, clear-cut response to that question. But part of the answer is that such an autocratic, über-nationalist leader,  whose stilted them-and-us world vision led to the most tragic global conflict in the history of the human race, was a product of his era, a supremely-driven opportunist who saw clearly how to take advantage of the widespread sense of discontent, disenfranchisement, humiliation and despair bred in his nation as of the end of World War I, in order to build a witheringly powerful and highly militarized movement “to make Germany great again.”

Hitler’s so-called Nazi moment evolved by challenging the democratic system of the post-World War I Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles that gave birth to it. Indeed, many of the problems emerging from Germany’s loss of World War I, and from the framing of the Treaty of Versailles by the war’s victors, undermined the new democratic German Reich from the outset. In my book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, I recall how renowned economist John Maynard Keynes foresaw Germany’s postwar difficulties and advocated building a strong new German democracy rather than punishing the German people as a whole for the errors of a war-mongering monarchy.

Here are a few lines from that passage: “Renowned economist John Maynard Keynes was appointed as a British delegate to the Paris Peace Conference but resigned after his advice regarding the terms of the treaty went totally unheeded…Keynes attacked the treaty ‘for its malevolence, its return to mercantilist militarism, and above all for the malicious reparations Germany was forced to pay.’

“Keynes’s analysis, in this sense, proved prescient, referring to the terms of the treaty as ‘Carthaginian’ and warning that the economic hardships that they were forcing onto Germany would create a situation in which the very peace that the treaty was meant to establish would be vulnerable from the outset, and would ruin rather than restore order in Europe. Already less than half a decade later, Adolf Hitler had risen to a position of incipient popular leadership on the tide of bitterness that the prolonged humiliation of the German people had wrought and, by 1933, he had become the dictator at the head of the so-called Third Reich that governed the country, on the strength of a policy of rabid pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism and imperialistic expansionism aimed at the establishment of absolute German rule over the whole of continental Europe.”

Today, a new strain of populist nationalism is taking shape in the Western world. In Western Europe, such movements have given birth, over the past half-decade or more, to far-rightwing political parties that are not always averse to flirting with the pre-World War II roots of Fascism and Nazism. Others are merely extreme nationalist movements, skeptical of the European Union as a workable model for governance and prone toward a return to separate national states and isolationist policies. One of the most prominent among these is the French National Front, headed by Marine Le Pen, daughter of  so-called “Devil of the Republic”, Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extreme-right Holocaust apologist and French chauvinist, who, running in 2002, on a Euro-skeptical, ultra-nationalist right-wing populist platform—which his supporters sought to pass off as “mainstream conservative”—managed to make it to final-round voting for president where he was ultimately trounced by veteran politician Jacques Chirac. In other words, Hitler, largely through his vitriolic public diatribes against the system, against foreign interests and, especially, against Jews—particularly Jewish  bankers, businessmen and Marxist intellectuals but, in the final analysis, against Jews in general—managed, through a virulent form of populist nationalism, to convince a critical mass of the beleaguered, post-World War I, German public that he knew where the root of all of their problems lay, and that he and he alone had the courage, strength and iron will to provide expedient and final solutions for all of them. In short—and this bears repeating—Hitler knew how to convince people that he could “make Germany great again.” And in order to achieve that goal and a future of promised prosperity in the absence of fear, Hitler’s followers were willing to deposit their faith, and most of their rights, in their national leader, as were Italians under the Fascist regime of Hitler’s ally, Benito Mussolini.

But while by far the most successful, the French National Front is not alone in the EU. For instance, the astonishing success of the United Kingdom’s so-called  “Brexit” movement in winning a national referendum to leave the EU was applauded by Le Pen and her ilk, while it took Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron by complete surprise and swiftly ended his career as head of the country’s government. While many other issues were cited as catalysts for the Brexit movement and its success, most observers agree that immigration was the clincher as was an extreme-nationalist campaign. Just as surprised as Cameron by the outcome of the Brexit referendum were its chief promoters, former London mayor and rightwing Conservative Boris Johnson and far-right UK Independence Party firebrand Nigel Farage. Although logically pleased with the effectiveness of their campaign, neither was quite sure how to deal with the complex domestic and international mess wrought by a popular vote to leave the European Union with Johnson turning down a chance to replace Cameron as PM, and Farage stepping down as leader of his party.Daughter Marine has successfully sought to improve the public image of the National Front, and, as a result, the party has been rising in the polls since she took over as its head in 2011. In France’s latest elections, Marine Le Pen’s movement startled the country and the EU by capturing a third of France’s parliamentary seats and, in subsequent regional elections,  taking six of the nation’s thirteen freshly re-drawn regions. Le Pen’s National Front is viewed by political analysts as quasi-fascist in ideology and at least authoritarian, populist and ultra-nationalist in style. This is the first time since World War II that such a xenophobic, anti-Euro, anti-immigration party has done so incredibly well, becoming a major force in a major European nation.

Should anyone have been surprised by the Brexit outcome, however? The short answer is, not if they knew the simple rules of nationalist populism. As Hitler and his chief political strategist, Joseph Goebbels, knew all too well, playing to the frustration, pride and hatred of the masses is a powerful and explosive weapon for use in seizing political power. While both Johnson and Farage may have understood that triggering popular pride in the country, xenophobic distrust of the EU and popular disapproval of immigration would give them a strong hand with which to confront Cameron’s campaign to remain part of Europe and while the former prime minister may have felt sure he had the majority of the country on his side, as career politicians, none of the three was used to the swift changes that come into play when political solutions are sought outside the framework of representative democracy. In parliamentary democracy, issues are fully debated and solutions take shape through a process of drafts, compromises, modifications and multiple votes and approvals before they are passed into law. But when the tools of direct democracy, such as the referendum, are applied, issues are decided swiftly, mostly on the tide of gut-reactions, beliefs (as opposed to proven facts) and sentiments than by any other means.

So if Cameron, Johnson, Farage and the rest of the UK’s politicians were taken by surprise at the Brexit outcome, it was only because they failed to understand that if the decision to leave the EU were left up to a popular referendum the decision of that plebiscite would either have to be honored as the will of the people, or it would have to be rejected as non-binding in law. In which case, there would be hell to pay because of the outrage of “exiters” already whipped into a nationalistic frenzy in the weeks leading up to the popular poll. One might conclude that if Britain’s right-wing nationalists had been as adept as France’s at cashing in on popular rage, frustration and jingoism, nationalist populism could have had a considerable leg up on the mainstream democratic competition there as well. Fortunately for British liberal democracy, however, once the country’s far-right nationalists had the power of the Brexit referendum behind them, they appeared to have no idea what to do with it and have only succeeded in sinking Great Britain’s government into a quagmire of difficulties related to its less than enthusiastic mandate to disengage from the European Union.

Nor are France and Britain alone in Europe in showing signs of an emerging far-right nationalist trend. Indeed, almost every country on the continent has spawned political manifestations of xenophobic and isolationist movements based on disappointment in the Euro-economy, and, more notably, in the wake of the Middle East migration crisis and the bigotry and religious hatred that it has generated. And a number of them are gaining traction within the local political spectrum. As Thomas Klau of the European Council on Foreign Relations points out, “(Just) as anti-Semitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century.”

I will be talking more about the current American nationalist populism phenomenon and about the causes behind the re-emergence of this phenomenon worldwide in upcoming articles.Still, although Europe may be perceived as the area of the West that is most vulnerable to the repercussions of the Middle Eastern and North African migrant crisis, the most surprising and rapidly emerging manifestation of nationalist populism has flourished over the past year in the United States, a country that has to date avoided acceptance of the direct consequences of the migrant crisis, having so far taken in less than three thousand of the world’s 65 million displaced people—mostly victims of wars and crises in which the US has been at least morally/politically accountable on an indirect level when it has not been directly responsible due to its intervention in these regions’ conflicts. This strong trend toward xenophobia, religious bigotry, re-emerging racism, isolationism and a them-and-us view of the world and of the United States as a militarily empowered and politically entitled super-power that should be able to command the world according to its whims and perceived needs has coalesced around the figure of flighty and flamboyant real estate billionaire Donald Trump, who is shaking the Republican Party to its foundations and scaring mainstream liberals and conservatives alike out of their wits, while drawing applause and votes from disenfranchised “Anglo” supremacists and jingoistic isolationists as well as from the far-right political rivals of his competitor for the presidency, Hillary Rodman Clinton.