Europe's Ghost Dance

Why rolling back the clock is the world's most popular political sentiment

Before we move on, I'd like to cite another example of cargo cult thinking, one that happens to be very prominent at the moment all over the world.

Recently, a number of far-right parties have come to power in Western Europe. This is disconcerting, but I'm actually pretty nonplussed so far. The key phrase is so far. Why? It has to do with why these parties are so popular, as well as their approach to taking power and governing.

Let's take a look at why people are choosing to elect far right politicians in so many countries.

The most basic, and most fundamental reason, is that life has gotten a lot harder for most people living in these countries in almost every conceivable way over the last few decades, and especially since the pandemic hit in 2020. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine this year, things have gotten even harder still. And there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel, only more darkness.

It's become a lot harder for Europeans to enjoy the same lifestyle as their parents did. Housing costs are out of control. Wages—although much better for Europeans than Americans thanks to unionization—have not risen high enough to make people as comfortable as they used to be. Unemployment is a perennial bugbear, even for the well-educated. Business owners are being crushed by high energy costs and find it harder to make payroll. Inflation is at a forty year high. Generous social benefits, long considered a birthright for Western Europeans, are under increasing strain under the austerity measures imposed by penny-pinching politicians in the service of neoliberalism.

Fundamentally, it's just harder for the average person in industrialized countries to make a living, whether in Europe, North America, or Japan/Korea. And ordinary people are understandably upset about that.

So these far-right political parties come along with a message that everything was better back in the old days. That's because it was! But it had nothing to do with homosexuals being in the closet, low divorce rates, and abortion being banned. Yet that seems to basically be the pitch these parties are making to the public:

This monumental rise is thanks to the dramatic changes in Swedish life over the past three decades. Once one of the most economically equal countries in the world, Sweden has seen the privatization of hospitals, schools and care homes, leading to a notable rise in inequality and a sense of profound loss.

The idea of Sweden as a land of equal opportunity, safe from the plagues of extreme left or extreme right, is gone. This obscure collective feeling was waiting for a political response — and the Sweden Democrats have been the most successful in providing it. It was better in the good old days, they say, and people believe them. Back to red cottages and apple trees, to law and order, to women being women and men being men.

Sweden Is Becoming Unbearable (New York Times via Web Archive)

Return to the past, we are told, and everything will be fine. That's the common sentiment I hear from all these far right political parties. Why does this message resonate so much?

I think it derives from the fact that people in the very recent past lived at an absolute zenith of human history. The intelligent decisions made in the aftermath of the Second World War secured prosperity for subsequent generations. From that devastation arose perhaps the highest living standards anyone has ever experienced, along with a level of comfort and leisure that most people haven't enjoyed since.

In France it was known as Les Trente Glorieuses, or three glorious decades. In Germany it was known as Wirtschaftswunder, or the German Economic Miracle. In Italy it was known as Il Boom. In Spain it was El milagro español. In Sweden it was the Record Years. The United States was perhaps the greatest beneficiary of all since its industrial plant remained intact, and every other industrialized country in the world was in debt to it. The U.S. didn't bother developing a social safety net because it didn't need one. Read literature or biographies from that time and you will marvel at just how easy life was for the average person. Whether you were a businessman or a worker, life just wasn't that hard.

More generally, pretty much every industrialized nation underwent an unprecedented economic boom during those years. This is sometimes referred to as The Golden Age of Capitalism. People want that back. They're desperate to get that back, and they don't know how.

Another reason is the fact that these far-right parties have been more-or-less excluded from power for pretty much all of the post-war period (with a few exceptions). That means that they can, for all intents and purposes, disavow any responsibility for the mess that industrialized economies have become of late under neoliberalism. That exclusion is benefiting them politically right now.

This was also a result of World War Two. In the aftermath of that war, far right parties were so tarnished that their political programs became toxic. People in Western democracies were rightly horrified at what those parties and their rabid followers had unleashed, so they effectively excluded them from political participation for the the next several generations. Far-right parties and movements were vilified by most of the general public and existed only on the margins.

As a result, during the Golden Age, right-thinking voters dutifully oscillated between moderate center-left and center-right parties in succession. Both of these parties, despite their surface differences, believed in more-or-less the same things. They were both grounded in the philosophy of liberalism—let the markets do as they please and let people live how they like, with minimal interference from the State. Enshrine protections for marginalized groups. Open your economy up to the One Big Globalized Market. Balance the budget. Lower taxes on the rich. Empower banks and the private sector. Sell off state assets. Let labor be mobile and footloose. Embrace diversity. Focus on economic growth and GDP above all else.

This wasn't a big deal when that philosophy delivered widespread prosperity for all. But now that life's getting harder and harder for most ordinary people, that philosophy is increasingly coming under attack. People swing back and forth from center-left to center-right (or from Republicans to Democrats here in the U.S.), and yet nothing really changes. Life just keeps getting harder and harder for most people. The social order seems to be falling apart. And so, the only option voters have left is to vote for some of the fringe parties who’ve been excluded from political participation until now in the desperate hope that maybe something will change—that things might, if not actually get better, at least stop getting worse. They want to take a chance and see what happens if they look outside the Overton Window—sort of a "fuck around and find out" attitude.

And the mainstream corporate and national media apparatus has been a willing enforcer of the exclusion of these far-right parties and their ideas from the political discourse which has only made them stronger, since it allows them to effectively wash their hands of the current state of affairs. As any parent knows, forbidden fruit becomes the tastiest fruit of all.

In an attempt to protect traditional Swedish democratic values, the mainstream media has often shunned and canceled Sweden Democrats officials and supporters, especially in the party’s early years. But now it seems that this response actually might have had the opposite effect. Individuals leaning toward the Sweden Democrats for various reasons have felt stigmatized: Some haven’t been invited to family gatherings, and in a few cases have even lost their jobs. This has not only fed the party’s self-image as a martyr, but also nurtured even more loyalty among its supporters.

One could argue that the traditional parties have had their part in creating the perfect storm. The Social Democratic party has named the Sweden Democrats their main enemy in the election campaign, making other alternatives almost invisible in the public debate. Us or them, was the strategy. Many, predominantly male Swedes, chose the Sweden Democrats. As for a conservative party like Moderaterna, they have seen their voters abandon them for Sweden Democrats and so Moderaterna reacted by emphasizing the similarities between the two parties until it reached a point where it became hard to distinguish any differences at all.

The older generations who grew up in the shadow of World War Two have largely died off. The younger generations have no memory of that conflict, so they don't have the instinctive aversion to far right ideas that their grandparents (who remembered the War) and parents (who grew up listening to stories from their parents) had.

The fundamental animating sentiment of these parties seems to be a return to the past and a retreat from globalization that seems to deliver less and less generalized prosperity and fresh economic crises every year. All of them are virulently anti-immigration, at a time when immigration is sure to increase as a result of a deteriorating climate and the resulting compounding crises. They bear skepticism for the supranational institutions that developed in the aftermath of the War. And they mix coded appeals to Herrenvolk democracy with a nostalgic appeal to a lost Golden Age when everyone believed the same things and lived according to repressive conservative social mores. This program, they tell us, will ameliorate the accelerating crises and solve our most pressing problems. But will it? I'm skeptical for a number of reasons.

Why I'm Not Worried

I don’t think we're headed for a recrudescence of fascism in Western Europe for a couple of reasons.

The first is that, despite their upswing in popularity, all of these far right political parties can only appeal to the masses by running away as fast as possible from even the slightest hint of fascism. This means that extreme right-wing political philosophies are still clearly seen as toxic by the general public, and still bear the stain of war and genocide. What this means is that, should these parties move farther to the extreme right, they will almost certainly lose popular appeal. In other words, as long as they remain "right-lite," the public will accept some of their more moderate positions, but if they become too extreme they will be tossed from power. To crib from Tropic Thunder, "never go full Nazi." For example, in Sweden:

“Helg seger.”

Those two words, spoken by Rebecka Fallenkvist, a 27-year-old media figure and politician from the Sweden Democrats, the far-right party that took 20 percent in Sweden’s general election last week, sent shivers down spines throughout the country. It’s not the phrase, which is odd and means “weekend victory.” It’s the sound: one letter away from “Hell seger,” the Swedish translation of the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil,” and the war cry of Swedish Nazis for decades.

Ms. Fallenkvist was quick to disavow any Nazi associations. She meant to declare the weekend a victorious one, she said, but the words came out in the wrong order. Perhaps that’s true. But the statement would be entirely in keeping with the party Ms. Fallenkvist represents which, after a steady rise, is now likely to play a major role in the next government.

Meanwhile, in Italy:

Last fall, in preparation for the election campaign leading up to the vote on September 25, [Giorgia] Meloni sent out internal memos to party groups instructing them to stop making extreme statements, to refrain from making references to fascism and, above all, to refrain from the so-called Roman salute, a gesture with an outstretched right arm which resembles the Hitler or Nazi salute. The politician wants to move the party from the political fringes, from the extreme right to center right. Meloni is seeking to remold the party and pitch it as a conservative champion of patriotism that appeals to the middle class...

Italy election: Who is Giorgia Meloni, the star of the far right? (DW)

If they were unable to stop these actions—if they were to go "full Nazi"—I expect they would lose popularity pretty quickly, at least in Western Europe. It appears those beliefs are still too toxic to be out in the open (of course, the fact that so many members of these parties harbor such sentiments in private is still a bit disconcerting).

But the main reason I don't see these parties as remaining popular is that their philosophy just won't work. And when they, too, become tarnished by failure—just like the mainstream liberal parties they currently campaign against—voters will abandon them just as quickly.

And that's where cargo cult thinking comes in. These parties want to superficially remake societies into a kind of imaginary lost past in the hope of bringing back the postwar prosperity—when men went off to the factory and women took care of the home and cooked meals for their husbands. When there were no dirty, smelly, foreign criminals lurking about. When deviants and reprobates were confined to the shadows where they belong.

Liberalism is short of answers to our current situation. Blaming people’s real, genuine pain on impersonal economic forces and insisting that as a result, nothing can be done, has never been a winning political formula (as libertarians have been finding to their dismay since forever). While far right parties are still strongly resistant to socialism, they at least allow people to vent their anger and frustration on various out-groups, which is more than mainstream liberal parties offer. As Carl Beijer writes, “Marxist scholarship has often identified this as the animating drive of fascism itself: when capitalism has failed and a class struggle against the rich is foreclosed, the precarious middle class starts to look for some other out-group to blame its problems on.”

But antisemitism, in addition to turning off mainstream voters, is just so 1930s. So instead they pivot to the another vulnerable minority group: homosexuals and people with gender identity issues—the Jews of the twenty-first century. In every society, such people are tiny minority, and thus easy targets for blame and recrimination.

Listen to the current rhetoric about these groups and replace them with "Jews" and you could be forgiven for thinking that you've time-warped back to the 1930s. Putin even awkwardly inserted rhetoric about “sexual deviation” and “gender identity” into what was essentially a geopolitical speech proclaiming the annexation of Ukrainian territory. It's hard to imagine Hitler doing the same thing back in the day, unless you replace them with Jews. The hysterical fear of "wokeness" in the United States today—adopted by both the far left and far fight—serves a similar purpose (as does “critical race theory”).

Another example of cargo cult thinking from the far-right involves the declining birth rate. One might suspect that things like stagnant wages, runaway housing costs, ballooning educational requirements, crushing debt, expensive child care, and a musical chairs job market are the cause, and that dealing with those things might help. Instead, the far right seems to believe that compelling heterosexual couples to produce MoAr BaBiEs!!! by the sheer force of state power will somehow create economic growth and make those issues disappear. “My tribe big” seems to be the thinking here, as if we were still living in the Neolithic era (which is where our stone-age brains still seem to reside much of the time).

Moral decay? Family life's the best it's been for 1,000 years (George Monbiot)

It's another tragic misunderstanding of cause and effect, just like building bamboo control towers and grass runways in the jungle. It's a sort of twenty-first century Ghost Dance. If we adopt certain outward behaviors, the logic goes, we'll appease God or the spirits or whoever and bring back the prosperity our ancestors enjoyed. But the real reason for the postwar boom was rooted in actual, material, political, and economic circumstances. Bashing gay people, expelling immigrants, outlawing abortion and fetishizing nuclear families won't fix that, or make life any easier for people. The underlying material conditions need to be addressed, and no one is willing to do that, because there is no realistic way to bring those conditions back. That’s not a wining formula for achieving power.

These reactionary visions are appealing to a lot of people. But whether you love it or you don’t, I don't see top-down attempts at recreating an idyllic past though political will and legal repression as having much of a chance at succeeding. And it certainly won't bring back the levels of prosperity and ease that previous generations enjoyed. I liken it to unbaking a cake and expecting it to return back to the original flour, eggs, milk, butter and sugar from which it was made. Burning books and intimidating schoolteachers is not going stop the middle class from dying, either.

While regrettable, though, these sentiments are understandable. It seems to confirm the thesis of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth by Benjamin Friedman.

While dressed up in a lot of intellectual language, it’s really common sense. Friedman's basic argument is that wealth and prosperity makes societies more tolerant. But when a growing economy is supplanted by a stagnant or shrinking one, such attitudes go out the window. People turn against each other to preserve what little they have in the face of declining living standards. They become like animals fighting over limited resources, shoving each other out of the way like pigs at a trough. People turn on each other and look for scapegoats. When that happens, it is marginalized groups who are the first to feel the pain, but it doesn’t stop there.

That's where we seem to be headed. The nightmare scenario is if these parties continue to gain popularity to the point where they can essentially take over the government and shield themselves from opposition. Then they can use the machinery of the state to suppress dissent. This seems to be where a number of countries are already at, including Russia and Hungary. It seems to be where the United States is heading as well. I already live in what is effectively a one-party state, and I suspect we'll probably see the end of genuine, popular democracy in the United States in the not-too-distant future.

So the widespread embrace of far-right politics seems to me to be a desperate attempt to try and bring back the prosperity of the postwar years and arrest social deterioration via a kind of magical thinking. What really was the cause of post war prosperity? And why did it end? Those are questions for next time.