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  The politicians at the vanguard of today’s anti-immigrant movement are far savvier than their predecessors. In Europe, Hitler cast a long shadow over politics for decades, making it difficult for viable leaders to emerge on the far right of the political spectrum. Today’s anti-immigrant politicians have therefore gone to great pains to distance themselves from past populists with a penchant for scapegoating minorities and foreigners. They and their intellectual enablers warn that the presence of large numbers of Muslims poses a dire threat to European civilization, but they are adamant that there is no comparison between hostility to Muslims today and the anti-Semitism of the past. Jews never killed anyone, they claim; their transgressions were simply in the imagination of anti-Semites.22 They forget the consequences of another violent act that shook Paris in November 1938, nearly seventy-seven years to the day before the carnage at the Bataclan.

  In the summer of 1936, the fifteen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan left his hometown of Hanover, where his Jewishness was making it impossible to find work. He went first to Belgium then headed south, stowing away on a tram, surrounded by factory labourers commuting to work across the border and made his way illegally into France, where he stayed with an aunt and uncle in Paris.23 At a time when Poland was stripping its Jewish citizens of their nationality and the Nazi government was preparing to remove Jews from Germany, Grynszpan was caught in between.24 Although he was born in Germany, he did not hold German citizenship, thanks to German law’s emphasis on blood descent; his family was Polish. As Hitler cemented his hold on power, this legal distinction became deadly.

  Two years later, on November 3, 1938, Grynszpan received a letter from his sister. “On Thursday evening rumours circulated that all Polish Jews had been expelled from a city. But we didn’t believe it,” she wrote. Then the Gestapo came to their door, and a police van took them away. “Each of us had an extradition order pressed into his hand,” his sister told him. “They didn’t permit us to return home anymore.”25

  In the newspapers, Grynszpan had already read of rampant disease and suicide attempts among the Jews deported to the Polish border; he knew his parents and sister were among them. When his uncle refused to send money to the family, Herschel was furious. He left the house and checked into a cheap hotel near Paris’s Gare de l’Est. The next morning, Monday, November 7, he bought a gun from a nearby shop and took the Metro to the German embassy near the Quai d’Orsay. He told the security officers at the gate that he wished to apply for a visa and requested to see a diplomat once inside.26

  Grynszpan was led to an office and closed the door behind him. With the price tag still hanging from the gun, he calmly fired five shots at Ernst vom Rath, the twenty-nine-year old German consular official on duty. Three of the bullets missed; two struck Rath in the abdomen. Grynszpan showed no remorse. “From the moment I read my sister’s postcard on Thursday,” he told his French interrogators, “I decided to kill a member of the embassy.”27

  His victim did not die immediately, and Adolf Hitler and his propagandists put the attack and the dying man’s struggle to immediate use. Hitler granted Rath a diplomatic promotion and sent his personal doctor to Paris to treat him. Joseph Goebbels immediately instructed Germany’s pliant press to ensure that the assassination “completely dominate the front page.”28 The headlines blared: “Jewish Murder Attempt in Paris—Member of the German Embassy Critically Wounded by Shots—The Murdering Knave a 17-year-old Jew”. Another hinted of what was to come: “The Shots in Paris Will Not Go Unpunished!”29 Not even the Führer’s private physician could save him. Rath succumbed to his injuries on the evening of November 9 and quickly became a Nazi martyr.

  When the news reached him, Hitler was in Munich, celebrating the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, when he had tried and failed to overthrow the Bavarian government and landed himself in prison, where he dictated the text of Mein Kampf to his cellmate Rudolf Hess.

  Hitler made it clear that no restraints should be placed on the “outraged people” of the Third Reich in retaliating for the Paris attack. “For once,” Goebbels wrote in his personal diary, “the Jews should feel the rage of the people.”30

  Crowds had gathered at Munich’s Old Town Hall to celebrate the putsch anniversary, and Goebbels knew how to stir their emotions. By then, the papers had dutifully trumpeted news of the shooting. “Ernst vom Rath was a good German, a loyal servant of the Reich, working for the good of our people in our embassy in Paris,” Goebbels intoned. “Do I need to tell you the race of the dirty swine who perpetrated this foul deed?” he continued. “A Jew! Tonight he lies in jail in Paris, claiming that he acted on his own, that he had no instigators of this awful deed behind him.”31

  In the minds of Nazi propagandists, Grynszpan could not possibly be an isolated criminal; he had to be part of a larger plot. The Nazis’ goal was to assign collective blame for the shooting and thereby legitimize collective punishment. “Comrades, we cannot allow this attack by international Jewry to go unchallenged!” Goebbels exclaimed. “Our people must be told, and their answer must be ruthless,” he declared. “Together we must plan what is to be our answer to Jewish murder and the threat of international Jewry to our glorious German Reich!”32

  What followed would come to be known as Kristallnacht. Later that night, Goebbels sent directives to the police and party officials, ordering spontaneous acts of violence. Synagogues were to be burned, Jewish shops vandalized, and all Jews with weapons disarmed and shot if they resisted.33 Kristallnacht was a dramatic break with previous policy and a wake-up call to world leaders who had assumed Hitler was not a serious threat; it was the first instance of mass state-directed violence against Jews.34 Even the graffiti to be plastered on Jewish property was prescribed: “Revenge for the murder of vom Rath!”35

  At the time, most Jews saw Grynszpan as the direct cause of their misfortune and deeply resented him. The World Jewish Congress denounced the assassination, and Jewish writers sought to disown Grynszpan. With hindsight, many now regard him as a forgotten hero and valiant exemplar of Jewish resistance.36

  On a moral level, there is no comparison between Grynszpan’s act and the gratuitous violence of the Bataclan massacre in Paris, but there are parallels between the reactions that followed each attack. Regardless of whether the perpetrators were Jewish or Muslim, opportunistic politicians sought to capitalize on public anger. Both incidents were used to mobilize support for ostracizing, expelling, or stripping rights from an entire group due to the acts of a few of its members, or even to justify outright violence against them.

  There has been no state-sponsored violence against Muslims in Western Europe, but the language used by populist politicians to target a group and all its members, from labeling North African minorities “scum” to calling for “de-Islamization,” has a not-so-distant precedent.

  As World War II ended, there were a few prominent thinkers who foresaw that, despite the horrors of the Holocaust, a new backlash against another minority could one day arise. Not surprisingly, those who predicted that this danger might one day return were German Jews who survived the war.

  Decades before the Swiss town of Davos became a destination for global elites to mingle at exclusive parties and earnestly discuss the fate of the world, it was better known for hosting a debate that marked a decisive rupture in European thought. In 1929, Ernst Cassirer, an assimilated Jew and one of Germany’s most prominent philosophers, squared off against Martin Heidegger, the rising star of German philosophy. Cassirer, a lonely defender of the Weimar Republic, argued for the continuing relevance of Enlightenment reason, whereas Heidegger advanced the revolutionary idea that all humans were “thrown” into the stream of history, unable to escape it or change its course. Four years later, in 1933, Heidegger was appointed head of the University of Freiburg, declared his support for Hitler, and joined the Nazi Party. Cassirer fled to England, then Sweden, and finally to the United States. He died in April 1945, three weeks before the Nazis surrendered. Before his dea
th, Cassirer wrote, “the new philosophy did enfeeble and slowly undermine the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths” that gave rise to Nazi dictatorship. As a defender of Weimar Germany’s doomed liberal constitutional government, he was sceptical of thinking that abandoned the quest for “objective and universally valid truth.” In his view, “such philosophy renounces its own fundamental theoretical and ethical ideals. It can be used, then, as a pliable instrument in the hands of the political leaders.”37

  Cassirer had been a defender of the Weimar Republic’s constitution several years before it collapsed into fascist tyranny. Even at a moment when the Nazis had won only 2 percent of the national vote, he knew all was not well in Weimar Germany and was at pains to prove that liberal democracy was not an un-German import. Constitutionalism was “by no means an alien presence in the whole of German intellectual history, let alone an intruder from beyond,” Cassirer declared in a speech at the University of Hamburg.38 Instead, he maintained, it was rooted in German philosophy and idealism.39 As the years that followed tragically proved, Hitler and Goebbels managed to seduce most Germans with a very different set of authentically German political ideas.

  In Cassirer’s view, it was the propagation of what he called political myth—the carefully crafted sense of a collective destiny and duty—that transformed a constitutional democracy into a genocidal state in the span of a few years. “Germany’s whole social and economic system was threatened with complete collapse,” he recalled. “The normal resources seemed to have been exhausted,” paving the way for a dramatic rupture.40 In times of peace, an orderly rational society “seems to be safe against all attacks.” But in politics, Cassirer warned, “we are always living on volcanic soil.” The eruption comes if a society’s collective wish is frustrated—when, as he wrote, “all hopes of fulfilling this desire, in an ordinary and normal way, have failed.” A society’s fears and desires then become embodied in a strong and all-powerful leader. And at such a moment, Cassirer warned, “the former social bonds—law, justice and constitutions—are declared to be without any value.” All that matters is the power of the leader and the myth he propagates.41 It was a danger, in Cassirer’s view, that could strike even in a modern democratic state. Rather than assume that democracy was stable, he insisted, citizens should “always be prepared for violent concussions that may shake our cultural world and our social order to its very foundations.”42

  The risk remained because the force of political myth is never truly vanquished. “It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity,” Cassirer wrote. He foresaw the rise of spin doctors, who would play a central role in the manipulation of news. “The new political myths do not grow up freely.… They are artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans,” he argued. The molding of public opinion, he predicted, would become much more important than any army’s arsenal. It was not the military rearmament of Germany that had laid the foundations for Nazism, he maintained. That was merely “the necessary consequence of the mental rearmament brought about by the political myths.”43

  The Myth of the State was the last book Cassirer ever wrote, and it was published posthumously. He was not optimistic despite his exile in the United States. “We are always threatened with a sudden relapse into the old chaos,” he warned. “We are building high and proud edifices; but we forget to make their foundations secure.” The Nazi myths were dismissed by many Jews and intellectuals as “so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously,” he recalled. “We should not commit the same error a second time.”44

  By the early 1990s, both the threat of a relapse into chaos and Cassirer’s dark warnings had almost completely disappeared from political debate. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union was a thing of the past, and despite the gathering war clouds in the Balkans, where nationalist leaders were propagating the sort of myths of racial superiority that would once again bring genocide to European soil, there was giddy talk of a “peace dividend.”

  But the idea of “the end of history”—the popular idea that liberal democracy had definitively triumphed over communism after the Cold War—was always a fantasy. Since 1989, the world has seen state-sponsored mass murder in Bosnia and Rwanda and the resurgence of authoritarian powers. Indeed, the prevailing model of governance that exists in most Western European countries today was never inevitable, and its long-term survival is by no means guaranteed.45

  Nor was democracy a guarantee of liberalism, as so many reflexively assumed. In 1997, long before he was a household name on CNN, Fareed Zakaria wrote an essay entitled “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.” The reflexive American assumption that democracies are necessarily liberal, with independent institutions and political freedoms, was wrong, he argued. “Today the two strands of liberal democracy, interwoven in the Western political fabric, are coming apart in the rest of the world. Democracy is flourishing; constitutional liberalism is not,” he warned.46

  Twenty years later, Zakaria’s fear—at the time focused on countries like India and Venezuela—is coming to pass in the West as well. In his book on the topic, The Future of Freedom, Zakaria pointed out that the great political philosophers had foreseen the clash as early as the eighteenth century. Immanuel Kant, the intellectual forefather of those who adhere today to the theory that democratic governments are more peaceful, was never a fan of democracies. Kant thought they risked becoming tyrannical. Likewise, James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville had worried about the tyranny of the majority. Populist leaders, they knew then, had no time for courts or parliaments that check their power.

  Democratization is not an unqualified good; it can go badly wrong if the majority’s preference happens to be aggression. After all, there are many countries where most voters might favor systematic killing or expulsion of disliked neighbours or ethnic minorities. For Zakaria, it was liberalism, not democracy, that had kept the peace.47

  For democracy to remain on track in turbulent conditions, Zakaria insisted, the institutional “guardrails” must be strong. If they are not, a state could veer catastrophically off course. To survive, democracies would have to bind themselves to the mast, as Odysseus did when sailing past the beguiling songs of the sirens, constraining themselves from the temptation to overreach or self-destruct.48

  “Constitutional liberalism is about the limitation of power; democracy is about its accumulation and use,” Zakaria wrote.49 At a moment when President Trump is openly questioning the legitimacy of federal judges appointed by Republican presidents and French mayors are seeking to ban religious Muslims from public beaches due to their choice of swimwear, it is a lesson worth recalling. “The institutions and attitudes that have preserved liberal democratic capitalism in the West were built over centuries,” Zakaria argued. “They are being destroyed in decades. Once torn down they will not be so easy to repair.”50

  Five years after Zakaria’s essay on illiberal democracy first appeared, Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned all of Europe by defeating the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, and advancing to the final round of the 2002 French presidential election. Terrified by the prospect of a far-right victory, the French left—including Communists, Greens, and Socialists—threw their support behind the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac, a pillar of the centre-right establishment who had served as mayor of Paris for eighteen years before becoming president in 1995. This electoral strategy effectively isolated Le Pen’s Front National (FN), depicting it as a cancerous force in the French body politic.

  Two weeks later, on May 5, Chirac won the election with an astronomical 82 percent of the vote, trouncing Le Pen by the biggest margin in a French presidential election since 1848. Raucous celebrations spilled into the streets of Paris. “We have gone through a time of serious anxiety for the country. But tonight, France has reaffirmed its attachment to the values of the republic,” Chirac declared in his victory speech. Then, speaking to the joyous crowds in the Place de
la République, he lauded them for rejecting “intolerance and demagoguery.”51

  But May 2002 was not, in fact, a moment of triumph. Rather it was the dying gasp of an old order, in which the fate of European nations was controlled by large establishment parties.

  Jean-Marie Le Pen was an easy target for the left and for establishment figures such as Chirac. He was a political provocateur who appealed as much to anti-Semites and homophobes as to voters upset about immigration and drew his support largely from the most reactionary elements of the old Catholic right. He was a familiar villain, and his ideology represented an archaic France, a defeated past. Moreover, he did not seriously aim for power and never really came close to acquiring it; his role was to be a rabble-rouser and to inject his ideas into the national debate.

  In 2017, Europe’s new far right is different. From Denmark to the Netherlands to Germany, a new wave of right-wing parties has emerged over the past decade and a half, and they are casting a much wider net than Jean-Marie Le Pen ever attempted to. And by deftly appealing to fear, nostalgia, and resentment of elites, they are rapidly broadening their base.

  Unlike her incendiary father, Marine Le Pen ran a disciplined political operation during the 2017 presidential campaign and has proven that her party can win half the vote or more in regions from the Côte d’Azur in the south, where she took 49 percent, to Pas-de-Calais in the north, where she won a 52 percent majority. She and her Danish and Dutch counterparts are not—as some on the left would like to believe—unreconstructed fascists or inconsequential extremists with fringe ideas lacking popular appeal.

  These parties have steadily chipped away at the establishment’s hold on power by pursuing a new and devastatingly effective electoral strategy. They have shed some of the right’s most unsavory baggage, distancing themselves from skinheads, neo-Nazis, and homophobes. And they have deftly co-opted the causes, policies, and rhetoric of their opponents, seeking to outflank the left by blending a nativist economic policy—more welfare, but only for us—and tough anti-immigration and border security measures. By painting themselves as the protectors of social benefits that are threatened by an influx of freeloading migrants, they appeal to both economic anxiety and fear of terrorism.