If the dread and nausea induced by an increasingly authoritarian Donald Trump aren’t enough for you to get your fix, might I suggest turning your attention to what’s been happening in Germany? Back in July, The New York Times reported on far-right infiltration of Germany’s military — a problem considered so serious that an entire unit of the elite KSK was disbanded by the German authorities, and which I discussed here. But further reporting makes clear that the threat of far-right extremism in Germany is even worse. An article last month discusses how German politicians and others now worry that far-right infiltration of German institutions reaches beyond the military into other agencies of government. The aims of these far-right networks appear to be violent, anti-democratic, and borderline apocalyptic:
One central motivation of the extremists has seemed so far-fetched and fantastical that for a long time the authorities and investigators did not take it seriously, even as it gained broader currency in far-right circles.
Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X — a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.
The Times details how the German government is investigating and starting to prosecute a group called Nordcreuz. Its members appear to have been catalyzed by the arrival of Muslim refugees in the country over the past several years, as Germany welcomed those fleeing the civil war in Syria. Its members compiled lists of politicians they considered enemies, in apparent anticipation of a day when they might round them up and worse: the supplies they gathered included vast amounts of guns and ammunition, body bags, and quicklime, which the Times notes can be used to cover the smell of decomposing bodies.
An American reader cannot miss the parallels with the right and far right in the United States that have been emboldened by the election of Donald Trump. One of the men charged by the German authorities in the Nordcreuz case, Marko Gross, says that:
Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”
Substitute the idea of putting Hilary Clinton in jail, being upset about taco trucks in American cities, and longing for a day when everyone’s last name was Smith, Schneider, and Miller, and this could be the spiel of any MAGA-hat wearing American. It also appears that Gross and his confederates push this logic to its murderous extreme, anticipating and even wishing to hasten societal breakdown and conflict in which the old hierarchies will be re-established at the barrel of a gun.
What is happening in Germany is no abstract concern for Americans. Germany is a close ally of the United States, and a democratic Germany is an anchor of peace and stability in Europe. The rise of right-wing, illiberal sentiment, as registered in the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, as well as the right-wing movements documented by the Times, show that America’s ally is at real risk. The U.S. lost thousands of lives destroying Nazi Germany in World War II, and that effort as well as the re-building of Germany after the war involved vast sums of American expenditure. To now see people who are such obvious moral descendants of Nazism plotting murder and destruction of the German government should be a red alert for any American concerned with our national security and the role the U.S. has played, however imperfectly, in advocating for democracy around the world, and in protecting the democratic society that the great majority of Germans have built over the past seventy-plus years.
Under Donald Trump, the conflicted record of the United States in supporting democracy around the world has been replaced by an open embrace of authoritarian leaders. From Viktor Orbán in Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, to the OG authoritarian Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump sees in such illiberal rulers a template for his own preferred form of governance. At the same time, the forces that seem to be propelling the German far right in this era appear similar to those that propelled the rise of Donald Trump: racial hatred, fear of demographic and cultural change, and a commitment to male dominance (I have yet to read of a single woman being involved with the German paramilitary and apocalyptic organizations; at any rate, men seem to be calling the shots).
And so, in another pass through the looking glass, right-wing Germans have begun to look to Donald Trump himself for inspiration in their opposition to a democratic German government and increasingly multicultural society. Neo-Nazis approve of his white supremacism, while the AfD party has adapted his “America First” message into a “Germany First” one. As the Times puts it, "Trump “is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene”; according to an expert on far-right extremism, the U.S. president “has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right.” If the “savior” reference puts you in mind of the QAnon movement in the United States, it should: for QAnon’s second-largest presence in the world is now in Germany and Britain; in Germany, its crypto-racist and anti-Semitic beliefs have merged with the extremist tenets of the far right. (In yet another horrifying parallel to events in the United States, combined forces of neo-Nazis, QAnon types, anti-vaxxers, and others have banded together to protest against pandemic-related restrictions). And in addition to the neo-Nazis, paramilitary types counting down to societal collapse, and QAnon adherents, an overlapping yet distinct group known as Reichsbürger “do not recognize Germany’s post-World War II Federal Republic and are counting on Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to sign a “peace treaty” to liberate Germans from their own government”; one prominent QAnon leader who supports this conspiracy theory organized the sending of some 24,000 tweets to the American and Russian embassies in Germany “calling on Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to ‘liberate’ Germany from Ms. Merkel’s ‘criminal regime’ and prevent ‘forced vaccination’ and ‘genocide.’”
The rise of the far right in Germany is much more than a harmless freak show; its adherents are already committing violence beyond the as-yet unexecuted fantasies of Nordcreuz and members of the German special forces. The Times reports that, “Over the past 15 months, far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau. Mr. Trump featured in the manifesto of the Hanau killer, who praised his ‘America First’ policy.” It is not necessary to be an expert in the intricacies of German politics to recognize this basic fact: defeating Trump in the United States is a way to help defeat extremist far-right movements in Germany.
But beyond the “vote for Biden, foil a German neo-Nazi insurrectionist” angle here, the inspiration that extremist, anti-democratic forces in Germany draw from right-wing developments in the United States should focus attention on the fact that the battle to preserve democracy here in the United States is a major, but not the only, front in a broader authoritarian assault against liberal democracy around the world. And just as we see authoritarian forces drawing inspiration from each other’s movements, defenders of American democracy should draw sustenance from the fact that millions of like-minded people are defending their own democracies overseas. If retrograde movements around the globe have been energized by knowledge of a shared illiberal cause, then the great democratic majority around the world should draw sustenance and inspiration from its shared fight for democracy.