The Weekly Sift

What if both kinds of Democrats are taking the wrong approach to resisting fascism?

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The victory of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region eight days ago led to some interesting thinking this week. AfD in Germany is sort of like MAGA in America, but sort of not. Comparing the two creates opportunities to tease apart the various strands of each.

At the New Republic, Perry Bacon interviewed historian Thomas Zimmer, who introduced the topic like this:

[I]f you approach [AfD] as the German equivalent to MAGA, that gets you actually pretty close. It gets you very much in the correct direction. It’s make Germany great again. They definitely share the same enemies. They’re similarly fueled by this sort of sense of radicalizing grievance, right? It’s defined by this sort of resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them, right? 

In a sense that this is of this desire to restore dominance over those who they deem lesser somehow. And who they deem lesser—that’s very much … racialized and gendered. It’s the grievance of predominantly white male people who are consumed by this feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top.

So it’s very anti-egalitarian more than anything, anti-pluralistic. And I think it’s also, just like the MAGA movement, not at all conservative, right? In no reasonable sense of the word, in conserving, preserving, is this a conservative movement. They’re all in on radical measures. They talk about revolutionary change. They’re extremists.

In short, both MAGA and AfD fit the definition of fascism I gave back in 2015 when I started using that term to describe Trump and his movement.

Fascism is primarily a phenomenon of social psychology. I would summarize it as a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

• styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past,
• identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,
• helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,
• under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),
• reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),
• all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.

The thing that makes fascism hard to talk about coherently is that it’s not really a political or economic philosophy at all. There aren’t defining principles like democracy’s human rights and the sovereignty of the People, or communism’s public ownership of the means of production. It’s purely an Us-against-Them movement. Any action at all — like adding a gilded ballroom to the White House — can be fascist or not, depending on who wants to do it and who benefits.

While the similarities may be instructive, so are the differences. Paul Krugman looked at the economics of Germany and Saxony-Anhalt, and concluded that many of the economic explanations of MAGA’s popularity may not hold water.

[R]elative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics. And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Saxony-Anhalt sits within the boundaries of the former East Germany, and after reunification it went through a period of having much higher unemployment and much lower per capital income than the rest of Germany. So it qualified as a “left-behind region” in the same way rest-belt Ohio or coal-country Kentucky does. But both factors have virtually vanished over the last 20 years, and Saxony-Anhalt is much closer to the German average in both areas than it has been since reunification. So AfD is not a reaction to economic despair.

What, then, is the moral of this analysis? Mostly it’s negative: Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.

Zimmer hits a similar point from the other direction: If economic issues aren’t what picks out Saxony-Anhalt as an AfD stronghold, what does that say about the progressive Democrats’ strategy for resisting MAGA?

Every single one of these Western European countries, aside from the UK, has a significantly stronger social welfare net than the United States. It doesn’t matter. There’s no correlation whatsoever across Northern and Western Europe between the strength of the social welfare net and the strength of the right-wing parties. There’s no correlation whatsoever. You have countries with super strong social welfare systems, like the Scandinavian countries, and yet the far right over there is also basically as strong as anywhere. Like, polling at 25 to 30 percent, whatever, right? And sometimes they get more and sometimes they get less, but roughly speaking, they have gotten stronger and stronger.

But the moderate/centrist Democratic approach fares no better. What is sometimes called “popularism”, adopting right-wing positions that poll well, doesn’t work either.

Again, we have a mountain of evidence that adopting these far-right positions on immigration and on any other sort of, quote-unquote, “culture war issue,” and adopting their framing—the effect of that is, you’re not gaining back voters from them. Because A, voters will generally see this as merely a tactical adjustment. They will not believe you, right? B, you are constantly legitimizing and normalizing this sort of framing of the problem. If the Labour Party in Britain constantly tells the people, Oh yeah, no, the far right is correct. Immigration is this great threat. It is the biggest problem that we’re facing, then people do not vote for the Labour Party. They vote for that party that says, We are the answer to this, the far right, these sort of ethnonationalists. And so the only thing you’re doing is you’re shifting the entire discourse to the right by adopting their frameworks and their answers to the problem, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

The current UK government is a good example. In the last two years, things have gotten significantly worse for trans folk and immigrants in the UK, just as the right-wing parties demanded. So you’d expect voters to say, “OK then, we don’t need a far-right party to represent our interests.” And yet, polls indicate that the right-wing Reform UK party has nearly doubled its support since 2024.

So if the key motivator for right-wing politics isn’t economic despair and can’t be mollified by serving up scapegoat groups like trans folk or immigrants, what should we do?

Zimmer points to an interesting clue:

There was a very, I think, revealing question in these exit polls on Sunday in this Saxony-Anhalt election, where people were asked, do you feel like you’re getting what you deserve in Germany, or less than you deserve, or more than you deserve? And the voters who said, “I’m getting less than I deserve,” the AfD got most of those people, right? And so, to look at this and say, Oh, they probably mean wages or social security, or they don’t know how to pay the rent—no. They didn’t say that, because they were also asked those questions, but that’s not what they said. They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question. And this who is deserving is so clearly defined in racial, and gendered, and sort of ethnic terms, right?

In other words, some percentage of the population is nostalgic for a more hierarchical society, where men are above women, Whites are above Blacks, straights above gays, and so on.

It would be nice if that weren’t the issue, because then we could offer a win-win solution: We’re all good people. If we all get opportunity, we all get a safety net, and so on, then we’ll all be happy.

I think there’s just this sort of enormous incentive to sanitize the discourse, and sanitize these sort of political choices of people who are coded as, quote-unquote, “regular folks.” And that’s sort of white people, right? That’s white conservative people.  We are constantly asked to come up with explanations of what they’re doing politically that sort of preserve their innocence, right? There’s this sort of idea of white innocence, right? And, by the way, this is not a new thing. When David Duke in the early ‘90s was close to winning a governorship in Louisiana, the next day what you read in the Los Angeles Times was, Oh, goodness me, economic anxiety must really be quite pressing in Louis— That sort of thing, right? It’s always been like that, right? Sort of this sanitizing thing.

Instead, progressives need to

accept that, unfortunately, a significant portion of the people around us are simply not on board with this idea of an egalitarian pluralistic democracy, and that is a fight that you cannot hug away. You cannot find the right tone, and then they will be all, OK, we get it now. You can’t just—I don’t know. Again, you can’t just solve it with just economic policy. But then what do you do? And at that point, I have to admit, me personally, I have to admit, I don’t know. Other than, you have to fight the fight, right? You have to accept you are in this fight, and you have to fight it and win it.

In other words, we need to make the idealistic case for egalitarian society — because that’s just what’s right. And that means defending everybody, even the unpopular folks that the Right is framing as scapegoats.

In other words, Abdul el Sayed has it right:

We are being told that if we do not line up against other people’s rights, then ours will be taken away. But it is when we line up against other people’s rights that we are assenting to ours being taken away. And I think we need to understand that rights are rights are rights are rights. And that there is a responsibility — right? when you break a finger in sports, they tie it to the other finger. And I think we have to think that way. Which is to say: You may never understand how somebody uses their rights. But you damn well better show up for their rights if you would like people to show up for yours. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, if your coalition is not uncomfortable, it’s not big enough. And so we’ve got to ask people [when] rights are on the chopping block, [people] who might never understand how somebody else might use their rights, to show up for one of those rights.