How the extreme right breaks a post-war taboo
This week I've been pinging back and forth between two books that at first glance seem to have little in common. “Post-war: A history of Europe since 1945”, by Tony Judt, and “Identity crisis: The 2016 presidential campaign and the struggle for the meaning of America”, by John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck.
'Postwar' is a work of popular history about Europe in the decades between the Second World War and the fall of the Soviet Union. The tone is narrative: it reads as if someone sat down with Judt and asked how Europe worked, and he began an aloud answer that lasted 960 pages. Although Judt clearly relied on a vast amount of primary and secondary sources in writing it, most of it remains behind the curtain of his own confident statements about what happened and why.
'Identity crisis' is very different. Rather than laying out a confident narrative, it showcases his work with almost obsessive precision, packing paragraphs with data and statistical analysis, then pausing every few pages to bring it all together in an eloquent diagram.
For example, there is an entire chapter on how Trump exploited existing weaknesses within the Republican Party, accompanied by endorsement data showing how the party elite failed to rally behind a mainstream candidate. Of course, one of the reasons the “Identity Crisis” can take this approach is that it focuses exclusively on one election rather than decades of history.
Why did I read two such different books? Sometimes my reading choices can seem disjointed and scattered, as if I'd tried different lenses on the world and in turn discarded them after they didn't give me the perspective I was looking for.
And yet, as I look back at my notes, I see how these two specific books are part of my quest to answer a question I've been thinking about since 2016: what was it that suddenly seemed to change, first with Donald's triumph Trump? in the Republican primaries, and then through the success of the Brexit referendum in Britain, Trump's victory in the 2016 general election and the subsequent electoral victories of far-right populist parties and politicians in Europe, South America and the United States ?
Books like “Identity Crisis” are a good way to understand the mechanisms of what changed during those crucial primaries and elections in the United States — how race and immigration became more salient to voters and how that exacerbated the effects of a racial realignment that was This has been happening since the mid-20th century, when the struggle for civil rights reshaped party politics. I found it clarified my thinking and helped identify what actually did and did not change in the many elections that people warned (or promised) would change everything.
Judt's book is about Europe and was written long before Trump started his presidential campaign. But his analysis of how modern European identity was formed around the common idea of rejecting Nazism, and the Holocaust in particular, offers a new perspective on why the increasing share of far-right voices in certain countries has come to be seen as such feels like an important moment.
This is the case even in countries where such parties have won only a minority of votes and have been kept out of power by a “cordon sanitary” policy that blocks them from coalition governments.
In Europe's postwar political culture, Judt writes, ideological distance from Nazism was a way to define morality. That was what made far-right politics taboo: even if ultranationalist, authoritarian parties did not directly embrace Hitler's ideology, their politics were incompatible with a national identity focused on atoning for the Holocaust and rejecting the ideas that led to it. Perhaps the popularity of the far right is a sign that this taboo is breaking down – a major shift, even in places where those parties have not gained much actual power.
“Recognition of the Holocaust is our contemporary European ticket,” writes Judt, who was born into a Jewish family in London in 1948. “The recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews has become the definition and guarantee of the continent's restored humanity.”
Judt writes about Europe, but it is not difficult to see how a similar process played out in the United States, where victory over Nazism became part of the story of American exceptionalism.
“That is why mainstream politicians, as far as they can, avoid the company of demagogues like Jean-Marie Le Pen,” Judt writes of the co-founder of France's far-right Front National, describing the Holocaust as “much more than just another undeniable fact.”
That reminded me of a political rally I witnessed in Dresden, Germany, in 2017. Björn Höcke of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party complained that Germans were “the only people in the world to have a monument of shame in the heart of their country.” planted. capital”, a clear reference to the memorial in Berlin for the Jews murdered during the Holocaust. He called on the country to reclaim a history that had been “treated as rotten.”
After the speech, Höcke was denounced by mainstream politicians and by many even within his own party. But the crowd that evening was passionately supportive, chanting, “Deutschland, Deutschland,” as Höcke publicly challenged a central tenet of German political identity: the need to commemorate and atone for the Holocaust.
I suspect that much of the fear about the success of the far right has not only to do with their actual opportunity to seize and exercise power – which is still remote in many places – but the sense that any gains in the elections they book a A sign that a fundamental taboo is eroding, and with it a shared story about political identity and purpose.
Reader Comments: Books you recommend
Audie Klotz, a reader, recommends 'Prophet Song' by Paul Lynch:
Those of us, like you, whose jobs require us to constantly think about some of the world's most horrific situations, rely on some degree of abstraction or distance for our own sanity. (I agree about Jane Austen!)
Every now and then, however, we turn to fiction, not as an escape, but as a reminder of the human cost. Lynch's novel describes, within his signature writing style, the progressive collapse of a society and family as a result of authoritarianism and civil war. The message is not humanitarianism – helping “others” out there – it is a plea not to think you can keep your head down and only hope for the best.
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