The far right is difficult to define globally. In general, it tends to defend an exclusionary nationalism (with ethno-racial or religious roots); it sees the past as the moral reserve that sustains it; it has an instrumental conception of liberal democracy when it does not reject it altogether; it believes in the inequality of human beings and in the inevitability of social inequality; it coexists with capitalist (dis)order when it does not celebrate the most exclusionary versions of capitalism. The differences from country to country are as important as these common traits. For example, pride in the past means very different things depending on the country and region. In Europe, pride in the past centers on colonialism and imperialism.

In former European colonies, where the original populations were almost completely exterminated (North America and Oceania), this extermination is silenced because it is considered to have been the price or necessary evil “to get where we are today,” implying that where we are today is immeasurably superior to where we started, thanks to the epic deeds of European colonists. In Asia, pride in the past focuses on science, philosophy, religion, and culture in general, which European colonialism vandalized or ignored.

This aspect of pride in the past is particularly evident among Islamic peoples, who consider themselves the great losers in the confrontation with the Judeo-Christian world and recall the House of Wisdom of Baghdad in the 9th century to illustrate the magnitude of their historic defeat. In South America, pride in the past on the far right is eminently racist, against the backdrop of slavery and the elimination of indigenous peoples. I focus in this text on the European far right.

After almost a century of relative peace during the 19th century, the end of the 19th century in Europe was very turbulent both internally and internationally. European politics was dominated, internationally, by imperial rivalries and, internally, by the class struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie. It was a historical moment dominated by intense ideological disputes. The Russian Revolution of 1917 gave a huge boost to these disputes while generating nationalist ideological reactions. The DNA of the far right in Europe can be summarized as follows: replacing class struggle with identity struggles (especially racist, nationalist, and religious) to naturalize the most violent forms of capitalist exploitation. Since then, the far right has been the conservative response to the social crises created by the creative destruction of capitalism, illustrated by recurring crises of capital accumulation.

The ideological framework of the far right varies from crisis to crisis, but there are recurring themes. If we focus on the 20th century, the dominant themes are those I identify below. To a large extent, they were defined by Adolf Hitler, based on the many fragments of reactionary politics from his youth in Vienna (1913). Hence, today's far right is not very creative. Today's far-right leaders are copies of a leader who was also a copy of other leaders of his time, but whom the circumstances of Europe in the early decades of the 20th century allowed to go from copy to original. Although there are many differences between the original and the various copies, I think it is appropriate to establish the original as a term of comparison for what we see today.

The personal trajectories of today's leaders are very different from Hitler's, but the scaffolding they use to build the reactionary edifice is basically the same. Hitler never completed any academic training, was rejected twice by art schools in Vienna, never wanted a steady job, and, although he called himself a painter in Vienna, he became enraged when asked if he was a house painter. But that matters little to the far right because it focuses on the Hitler who followed the vagrant and urban odd-jobber Hitler.

If we analyze the conduct of this Austrian, who only became a naturalized German citizen in 1932, a year before running for president of the German Republic, we see that he cataloged a set of prescriptions that continue to be followed today by all those who aspire to destroy democracy, using all the tools that democracy provides them. Let's look at some components of this catalog. The quotes from Hitler are from his many speeches throughout his career and also from Mein Kampf [My Struggle], written in 1924 during the nine months Hitler was imprisoned after the failed coup (Putsch) in Munich in November 1923.

On human nature

From the days of hunger and nights spent in municipal shelters, Hitler learned something that he would repeat in his speeches: “Everything that man has achieved has been due to his originality and brutality.” Cunning, the ability to lie, distort, deceive, and eliminate any sentimentality or loyalty in favor of cruelty, were the basic ingredients of the fundamental assertion: the manifestation of will. Inequality between human beings and between races is a law of nature. Today's far right does not proclaim racist eugenics but establishes nationalism as a privilege to which only a few have access, suggesting that even some of these are only nationals, not because they belong to “us,” but because of the corruption or complacency of officials who deleteriously destroy the “soul of the country.” Exclusionary nationalism serves to naturalize social exclusion and internal colonialism in our day, illustrated by the way it treats immigrants, whether those it leaves to drown in the Mediterranean or those who work in the fields and cities of Europe.

The construction of a single enemy

It is necessary to choose a single enemy and focus all criticism on it. According to Hitler, the art of leadership consists “in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and doing everything to ensure that nothing distracts that attention. The genius leader can make his different adversaries appear as one, all belonging to a single category.” For Hitler, the enemy is Marxism (social democracy, communism) and the Jews. They are not two enemies; they are one. In a speech on February 27, 1926, Hitler stated, “If necessary, a single enemy means several enemies.” This enemy is responsible for all the evils of society.

Germany's surrender (betrayal) in 1918 and all the socio-economic and political disasters that followed in the Weimar Republic were the work of the same enemy. This enemy conspires against society, not only for what it does, but also for what it is. It is an inferior race. Jews are not human beings; they are the embodiment of evil. Therefore, there is no nationalism without racism. Today, as we know, the enemy of choice is the left and immigrants. They seem like two enemies, but they are one.

The main enemy is the internal enemy

Germany had lost World War I because it had not been able to overcome its enemies. For Hitler, Germany did not lose the war; the army, to which he belonged as a corporal, maintained its integrity. Germany was betrayed by internal enemies who brought about its surrender. In his speech in February 1926, Hitler invokes the glorious past of the German Empire and colonies to conclude that the evils that befell it were due to internal rebels. “These were not citizens; they were scum, a scum of traitors.” In the years following the end of the war, the political militancy of the communist working class was intense and violently expressed the country's unrest.

It was repressed with even greater violence, both by right-wing forces and by socialists. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated in 1919 with the complicity of the socialist government. There was then talk of the failed German revolution (1918-1923). It was in this context that Hitler knew how to replace class hatred with an appeal to racist citizenship.

Negative solidarity

The unity and consensus that are promoted aim to destroy the status quo—the system. There is no need to waste time devising alternative solutions because these will emerge spontaneously once the enemy has been destroyed. Unity is for destruction, never for construction, because only the need for destruction is “obvious.” Construction requires compromises that must be kept in the dark, in ambiguity, and in the convenience of the moment to gain power. For Hitler, it was not the program that was important, but the image. In 1920, the party's program was designed to please everyone except Jews, capitalists, and those who had made fortunes from the war. The central objective was to mobilize popular dissatisfaction with the status quo. The important thing was to declare society sick, not to go into detail about what a healthy society would look like.

Negative unity must be as strong as what is to be destroyed is important. To achieve this, it is necessary to construct the recent past as a disaster and dramatize its scale without nuance so that the gravity of the situation is considered irremediable within the current political system. Germany did not lose the war; traitors caused it to surrender and humiliate itself as a nation with the Treaty of Versailles and the conditions imposed on it. Today, the politics of hatred and incitement to polarization are the preferred tools for creating the narrative of the current disaster, both socially and politically and economically, which, while having a grain of truth, is far from the whole truth.

Democracy is only a means to other ends

Since his days in Vienna, Hitler cultivated a total contempt for democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and parliament. He devoted fifteen pages of Mein Kampf to demonstrating that “the majority represents only ignorance and cowardice... the majority can never replace the man.” It is the strong man who leads the masses, eliminates corruption, and restores self-esteem to the country.

In Portugal, for example, the far right has been heard using the rhetoric of the strong man as the country's urgent need. “We need three Salazars.” Salazar was the dictator who dominated the country's politics between 1926 and 1974 and who, incidentally, never had any interest in inspiring the masses and leading them.

Hitler used legal and democratic means as long as they offered him the best opportunities to defeat his enemies. In fact, legality is an ideal weapon when used to disarm Democrats: legal processes are slow and thus give more time to the rapid conquest of power. The instrumental use of legality means, on the other hand, that it must be discarded when it gets in the way.

Absolute control over the party

Hitler's political rise was a long and torturous process, from joining Anton Drexler's German Workers' Party to becoming the undisputed leader of the National Socialist Party (the Nazi Party). His remarkable persistence was his greatest secret in the face of the contempt or indifference of many. He became accustomed to testing his arguments in endless meetings in Munich's beer halls. His politics began as street politics. But he became convinced early on that a leader should not tolerate internal dissent because it gives ammunition to an enemy that is already very powerful.

After the failed Munich Putsch in 1923 and Hitler's imprisonment, the National Socialist Party was reduced to very little. In northern Germany and the Rhineland, the party was dominated by the Strasser brothers, and in their view, the party's two main banners were anti-capitalism and nationalism, both of which were equally important. Tensions with Hitler were evident, as Hitler wanted an alliance with capitalism. At that time (1925-26), the Strassers had hired a young man who was not yet 30 years old for propaganda tasks. His name was Paul Josef Goebbels. The tension with Hitler was so great that the young Goebbels even called for the expulsion of the “petty bourgeois” from the party.

Hitler maneuvered the party, partly by resorting to his indisputable skills as an orator. Shortly thereafter, Goebbels switched sides to Hitler after listening to him give a fiery two-hour speech. A few years later, the Strasser brothers were expelled from the party. In 1926, Hitler established the Uschla (Committee for Investigation and Resolution), which he used to maintain total control over the party. The other side of total control of the party is the exceptional character of the leader. Hitler cultivated his eccentricity, exaggeration, and surprising behavior. Power apart can only come from a being apart.

There is no truth or lie; there is the repetition of what suits us until it is considered the truth

One of Hitler's greatest lessons was learning to lie with conviction. He practiced it throughout his life. For Hitler, the exercise of physical force, although fundamental, is never enough if it is not accompanied by spiritual force. He wrote, “The force that combats a spiritual power remains a defensive force if those who wield it are not also the apostles of a new spiritual doctrine.” When one lies, one must tell big lies. He wrote, “A grossly immodest lie always leaves a trace even after it has been denounced.” The collapse of a nation can only be prevented by a “storm of brilliant passion,” but only those who are passionate are capable of awakening the passion of others.

On good terms with the masses and with money

Hitler always cultivated an enormous contempt for the “masses.” The “masses” had been his companions in Vienna, and their lack of what Hitler believed he had (culture) made them repugnant in his eyes. He wrote in Mein Kampf, “I don't know what disgusted me most at that time: the economic misery of my companions, the coarseness of their morals and customs, or the low level of their intellectual culture.” He hated the entire ideology of the working class: contempt for the nation and the homeland, for law, religion, and morality. According to him, the poor working class had been poisoned by the indoctrination of socialists who exploited the difficult conditions in which workers were forced to live for their own benefit.

Hitler wrote, “To be a leader means to be able to move the masses.” But he also noted, "I have learned that the masses are only attracted to those who are strong and uncompromising... They do not know how to make a liberal choice and tend to feel that they have been abandoned... I have also come to the conclusion that physical intimidation is important for both the masses and individuals... The power of the masses to understand is weak. On the other hand, they forget quickly. Therefore, effective propaganda must be limited to basic needs and expressed in a few stereotypical formulas."

If the masses meant votes, money was essential to fuel propaganda and maintain the organization. That is why Hitler always wanted to be everything to everyone he saw as a means to achieve power. So he waved the flag of anti-capitalism and sent Goering to Berlin to strengthen ties with big business. By 1929, Hitler was already being hailed by big business and big industry, which saw in his qualities as an agitator the future that best suited capital in a crisis: an anti-democratic and anti-working-class policy.

It will certainly be the Europeans who are most vulnerable or most resentful of the threats of downward social mobility who will fill the ballot boxes with votes for far-right parties, but they will not be the ones paying the costs of abundant and expensive propaganda, both in the traditional world of advertising and in the new world of social media.

If the conditions of the people improve, this fact is denied or declared to be precarious and short-lived

Hitler's project benefited from very special initial conditions. When, in 1923, a country humiliated by the terms of surrender imposed on it declared itself unable to continue paying war reparations, France occupied the rich Ruhr region, the energy and industrial heart of Germany. In addition to the humiliation, the economic situation deteriorated further. The devaluation of the mark increased, and with it, the economic crisis, unemployment, and the despair of millions of workers and their families deepened. Hitler astutely took advantage of all the elements of this crisis, combining them into a single diagnosis against a single enemy.

In 1923, 30% of party members were unemployed. His interpretation remained uncompromising: “Until the nation rids itself of the murderers within its borders, no external success will be possible.” Hitler's hatred, rather than being directed at the French, was directed at the corrupt gang that ruled the regime. This was the context that led to the Munich coup. In court, Hitler took full responsibility but added, “I am not a criminal for that reason. If I am here today as a revolutionary, it is because I am a revolutionary against the Revolution. There is no high treason against the traitors of 1918.” And the traitors are always the same: socialists, communists, and Jews.

From 1925 onwards, conditions in Germany began to improve, and Germany was admitted to the League of Nations (1926) (which it left ten years later by Hitler's decision). The prophecies of apocalypse and imminent disaster were no longer effective. From then on, Hitler began to insist on the precarious and temporary nature of the improvements. Out of pure propaganda instinct, this was the best way to persist in his march to power. The Great Depression of 1929 would prove him right.

Epochal circumstances

Far-right leaders create a lot of artificial reality, but they generally do so from fragments of real reality. There are circumstances that favor the authoritarian leap, and there are conditions that, on the contrary, prevent it. From 1924 onwards, Germany began to recover, and, as we have seen, Hitler felt it necessary to take more centrist positions. Perhaps everything would have remained that way if, in the meantime, the Great Depression of 1929 had not occurred. Massive unemployment and the proliferation of strikes—in short, the profound social crisis that followed—were the great impetus for the clarification and resurgence of the party. At the same time that the party's militias (the SA, Sturmabteilung) were stirring up social unrest, Hitler declared himself against the strikes so as not to lose the support of the big capitalists he had already secured.

When, in 1930, Strasser, leader of the party's radical wing, asked him (shortly before being expelled from the party) if, in the event of coming to power, he would nationalize the large capitalist group Krupp, Hitler replied, “Of course I would leave it alone. Do you think I would be crazy enough to destroy the country's economy?” Shortly afterwards, Goebbels wrote, “We are not against capitalism; we are against its abuse... For us, property is sacred.” In September 1930, to the astonishment of the world, the Nazi party achieved a resounding electoral success. Then came the red carpet we all know. First, the red of glory; then, the red of the innocent blood of millions.

European democracies are not currently in any existential danger, but the times ahead do not bode well for either the world or Europe. The global growth of the far right is a symptom (not the cause) of what is to come. I will not discuss here the more general question of the incompatibility between capitalism (based on infinite capitalist accumulation) and democracy (based on the principle of popular sovereignty). I will simply state that neoliberalism (the globally dominant version of capitalism since the 1980s) has been destroying everything that democracy meant in terms of well-being and human security (living without fear and without basic needs) for the vast majority (let's say, without exaggeration, for the working classes). This destruction is reaching limits that are expressed in the transition from the welfare state to the malaise state. It is this transition that feeds the far right.

The responses of the governments across the political spectrum (right, center, and center-left) have not opposed this destruction and seek to respond to the malaise with repressive measures, rather than measures that guarantee the restoration of well-being. The crisis of deteriorating living conditions runs parallel to the crisis of political representation. As I have shown, repression and negative solidarity are in the DNA of the far right, so it is no surprise that the far right is growing less because of its own merits than because of the demerits of the forces that should oppose it.

The latter have “forgotten” that without progressive taxation there is no relative social welfare in capitalism. They forgot that in the immediate post-war period, the highest incomes were taxed at over 80%, and yet the rich did not become poor or cease to prosper. They forgot that without quality public social policies (education, health, pensions, and transportation), it is not possible to guarantee the well-being of the population and that this guarantee cannot be provided by the private sector, whose legitimate objective is to accumulate wealth, not distribute it.

Democracy has been distorted and replaced by a new type of regime, electoral authoritarianism, which is prevalent in countries as diverse as India, Russia, the US, Turkey, El Salvador, and Hungary. The far right prefers electoral authoritarianism to dictatorship for a simple political calculation: it is apparently more legitimate, especially in a world that still remembers dictatorships well. But to maintain this regime, attention must be diverted from the real causes of unrest (largely self-regulated capitalism, especially in the financial sector), turning consequences into causes. Immigration is today the paradigmatic case of this transformation. But, as Hitler said, the use of repression is never effective if it is not animated by a spiritual design, be it Make America Great Again (MAGA) or the pride of being European and Christian.

Corruption is another case of transforming consequences into causes. Corruption is endemic to neoliberalism because it is based on the promiscuity between the market of political values (which cannot be bought or sold) and the market of economic values (values that have a price and can be bought and sold). It thus violates the central principle of liberal democratic theory since John Locke, who proposed the total separation of the two markets of values. Corruption is therefore as endemic to neoliberalism as the fight against it.

The important thing is to hide the real causes of the population's discontent, whether they be the rising cost of living, stagnant wages and the suffocation of union power, the rising cost of housing that can consume more than half of a family's income, or the scandalous liberalization of drug prices, which are becoming increasingly inaccessible, especially for the chronically ill.

In the current European climate, two enemies have been invented to distract attention from the real problems. The internal enemy is the immigrant, especially if they are Muslim; the external enemy is Russia. No European can imagine life in their country without the participation of immigrants. No European citizen is capable of seeing Russia as a threat, especially if they remember that Russia was invaded twice by Europeans (Napoleon and Hitler) and never proposed to invade Europe. The invasion of Ukraine has ancient and recent historical reasons. It is reprehensible in every way, but it does not mean the invasion of Europe.

Today, Europeans know that the war between Russia and Ukraine could have ended three months after it began if the US and its lackeys (Boris Johnson, apparently well paid for this) had not prevented the signing of the peace agreement that was practically concluded. Europeans now know that the war initially had two objectives. On the one hand, it aimed to amputate Europe from one of its regions, Russia, in order to prevent Europe's access to cheap energy from Russia and thereby accelerate Europe's decline and dependence on the declining US empire. On the other hand, it aimed to block China's access to Europe and the Western world via Russia.

Later, the war profiteers and the arms industry lobbyists, with their embassies in Brussels, convinced a mediocre and ignorant political class to promote the war on their own initiative. This political class did not even realize that all the benefits would go to US industry, while the costs would fall exclusively on Europeans. Suddenly, Europeans heard their leaders talking about war as if it were the most important political mission of the coming years. Older Europeans remember the recent past and wonder, perplexed and powerless. After World War II, Western Europe was the great global promoter of peace, actively mediating the resolution of several local wars. It was the cradle of the great peace movement. Later, it took the lead in ecological concerns and was the cradle of the global environmental movement. How is it that suddenly both the peace movement and the environmental movement have disappeared, and Europe has become a continent at war against a threat that only the political class can see?

The invention of enemies is thus fundamental to concealing the main cause of Europeans' unease in the coming years: military budgets are increasing at the expense of social policies. European politicians have found themselves “forced” to lie to their citizens. When the latter realize this, there will be social unrest, and the response will be repressive, since in this system no other response is possible. Therefore, those who claim to be against the system are the ones who invest most in the full and, therefore, repressive enforcement of this system. They lie twice, which is why their lies are so easily confused with the truth.

Will democracy survive? Will its transformation into electoral authoritarianism be enough? History does not repeat itself. This does not mean that the echoes of the past do not sound strangely familiar to us. Neither the differences nor the similarities are pure coincidence.