Adopting Trump’s style, European far right copies leftist language to sell fascism

People protest during an anti-fascist demonstration as far-right party Vox members gather in Madrid with Argentina's President Javier Milei and other European far-right leaders in Madrid, Spain, May 19, 2024. | Paul White / AP

Around the world, we have been witnessing the rise of new right-wing and neo-fascist political forces at the same time as we have experienced the demise or marginalization of strong left-wing forces.

We face a new and more virulent Donald Trump presidency in the U.S., and at the same time, we have seen the success of Giorgio Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party in Italy, Modi’s fundamentalist Hinduism in India, Javier Milei’s neoliberal extremism in Argentina, Victor Orban’s authoritarian regime in Hungary, and the jack-in-the-box rise of Nigel Farage, who sees himself as a prime minister in waiting, in Britain.

As Naomi Klein vividly describes in her book Doppelganger, the new right has taken advantage of the left’s fractiousness, disunity, and failure to forge a consensus on key issues to build its own successful political movements. This kind of scenario would have been unimaginable only a few decades back, when the right was comprised of a few small, unreconstructed fascist sects.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and one of the leaders in the U.S. of the new right, has taken a leaf out of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels’s book and developed the latter’s strategy of adapting the clothing and language of the left to his own ends.

The right loves using the German fascists’ full name, National Socialist German Workers Party, rather than the shortened term Nazi in order to deliberately conflate fascism with socialism and communism in the public’s mind.

As we know, Hitler only belatedly incorporated the term “socialist” into his party’s name in order to sow confusion and win over working-class voters, which he managed to do very successfully. The National Socialists were soon unmasked as firm upholders of rampant capitalism, not socialism.

Of course, drawing comparisons between 1930s Germany and our world today can be dangerous, but there are undoubted parallels from which we can learn. Once again, world capitalism is in a deep crisis, and fascism is seen in some quarters, once again, as offering an apparent way out.

Just as the Nazis did, the neo-fascists today, recognizing the widespread anger among large sections of the population at the way the super-wealthy are destroying our societies with impunity, are pretending to attack the unaccountable oligarchs and super-wealthy tech CEOs, big pharma, and authoritarian government.

This is, however, mere rhetoric in order to win over the disaffected working classes; they have no intention of doing anything about the super-rich and tech monopolies who are or will be funding them.

Trump, one of the chief perpetrators of “fake news” accusations, charges the left with creating fake news, such as fictitious climate change or a non-existent COVID-19 pandemic. During that pandemic, any discussion of actual disaster capitalism became blended into dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denial, deliberately sowing confusion and fear.

The dangers of extreme climate change have also been recast as a fiction created by the left to destroy jobs in the fossil fuel industries and enforce expensive green measures on all of us. As Farage puts it: “We may have made one of the biggest and most stupid collective mistakes in history by getting so worried about global warming.”

Racism has also been camouflaged as a concern about mass immigration. Farage, again: “In Britain, what we’ve done is say to 485 million people, ‘You can all come, every one of you. You’re unemployed? You’ve got a criminal record? Please come. You’ve got 19 children? Please come.’ We’ve lost any sense of perspective on this.”

And he goes on, “We do have, I’m sad to say, a fifth column that is living within our own countries that is utterly opposed to our values, we’re going to have to be a lot braver…in standing up for our Judaeo-Christian culture.”

Increasingly today, there is a close coordination between far-right groups internationally. Trump’s confidante Elon Musk, for instance, has also backed Farage and supports Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the neo-fascist AfD in Germany. In the last few days, he’s been promoting Canadian Conservative politician Pierre Poilievre.

In December 2024, Orban met Donald Trump and Musk at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. “USA today. The future has begun! An afternoon in Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Michael Gwaltz,” he tweeted.

In the most recent EU elections, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen invited Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to team up and form a right-wing super-grouping that would be the second-biggest party bloc in the European Parliament. Indeed, the neo-fascists and their right-wing fellow travellers do now form the biggest grouping in the EU parliament.

The neo-fascists have successfully rebranded themselves, shedding the more extreme accoutrements of their past, such as open Nazi sympathies, overt racism, and antisemitism, as well as a love of uniforms. Instead, they have clothed themselves in the raiments of the “left” under the guise of libertarianism, combined with nationalism.

The liberal left is, ironically, now characterized as “fascist” and accused of authoritarianism by those very same forces that are promoting exactly this. They say that the left is attempting to dictate our sexual attitudes, imposing draconian measures to control our hard-won freedoms (e.g. during the pandemic), and corrupting our children by forcing schools to teach anti-racism and promote homosexuality.

While fulminating against the Black Lives Matter movement, Tucker Carlson, the TV pundit late of Fox News, said that “white people are practicing open race hate.” There is, these neo-fascists argue, a liberal-left conspiracy imposing central control and dictatorship.

They also accuse the liberal left of creating fake news, thus reversing reality and encouraging their followers to doubt everything they read and watch. Turning words and concepts around so that black becomes white and peace becomes war reduces language to meaningless words. We are witnessing the “mass unravelling of meaning,” as Naomi Klein terms it.

Neo-fascism, financed by powerful capitalist interests, has also learned to utilize social media in ways the fascists in the ’30s could only have dreamed of and have been able to outflank the left in this field.

So, what can we on the left do to counter the seemingly irresistible rise of neo-fascism? There is no easy answer, but a prerequisite is to struggle towards the broadest possible consensus in an attempt to create a united front.

As a priority, we need to address the real problems faced daily by millions of ordinary working people and refine the language we use so that it addresses those concerns. If we fail to achieve this or even some of it, we abandon our potential supporters to the seductive rhetoric of the Machiavellian right.

Morning Star

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CONTRIBUTOR

John Green

John Green is a journalist and broadcaster. He has authored and edited several books and anthologies on a wide range of subjects including political biographies, labor history, poetry, natural history, and environmental affairs.