Nazi-communist-fascist-whatever: this is what establishment panic looks like

Last week, The Atlantic magazine published a piece with a bold headline: “Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” The article, by liberal internationalist Anne Applebaum, argued that Trump’s language mirrored the language used by all three dictators. This was roundly mocked, as Josef Stalin was a Soviet communist, Adolf Hitler was a German Nazi, and Benito Mussolini was an Italian fascist. But, while Applebaum may not be a household name, but she is immensely influential amongst the Western establishmentarians (by chance, just days after her article published she won a major German peace prize).

Her views are also widely shared by her fellow establishmentarians across the West. If you are a populist-right politician, odds are you have been compared to one of the aforementioned figures. The Guardian had a breathlessly reported “exposé” which said that, as a youth, Brexiteer Nigel Farage was seen as a fascist by his teachers. MEPs (and plenty of other Brussels-based establishmentarians) have called Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a fascist so many times they’ve worn out the word. The international press scare-mongered over Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s rise, with one article saying her “white womanhood [was] central to fascism” (whatever that means).

This is only a bare, tiny smattering; there are literally thousands of examples. This is of course not to say that being called Hitler is something new for figures on the right; though George W. Bush is beloved by liberals today, much of the 2000s was spent treating him as if he were Hitler’s second coming. But the increasingly outrageous commentary – no longer is it enough to call the populist-right Hitler, now they must be called Stalin-Hitler – is reflective of establishmentarian panic over a single fact: they are, simply put, losing. They are at the “last-gasp” stage of holding onto power, fighting hard not to be washed out by a rising populist-right tide which is determined to reverse the failures of the past thirty years of post-Cold War establishment rule.

Part of the gasp-inducing establishment panic stems from the fact that only even a decade ago, this situation would have been simply unfeasible. Imagine explaining any of the following to a liberal democrat in 2014: “Donald Trump is closing in on his second non-consecutive term as president of the United States.” “Nigel Farage’s party came in third in the U.K. parliamentary elections” “The Brothers of Italy,” who polled at 2 percent in 2014, “are running the country.” Just ten years ago, most Western populations could choose between a few liberal democratic, globalist, free-trade supporting parties. But now, they have real populist-right choices opposed to globalism and unlimited free-trade – and Western establishments are flummoxed.

Which explains the increasingly silly descriptions being attached to populist-right figures; but, like anything else, the more those labels are thrown around, the less powerful they become. If anyone who is establishment-sceptic becomes akin to a fascist (or in Applebaum’s bizarre phrasing, a fascist-communist), then the label simply loses its weight.

And the increasing failure of scaring voters by using these terms may explain why the establishment is increasingly turning to much less silly and much more serious weaponry: judicial lawfare. Right-wing victories – Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, Meloni’s win, Poland’s Law and Justice winning repeated elections, Orbán winning four elections in a row, among other happenings – concerned establishmentarians. But it was when those figures started changing their judiciaries by putting in new judges to replace older ones that they really started to panic.

All of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court justices faced blistering Democratic opposition, and some faced outrageous smear campaigns. When Poland’s Law and Justice reformed Poland’s courts, the new judges were smeared by media as “a tool” of the government. But when Poland’s new government, headed by Donald Tusk, wanted to undo those changes, they were hailed as heroes “undoing” judicial politicisation. Which is, on its face, silly; no one thinks that Tusk is going to be putting in truly unbiased judges. He will, like literally any politician, put in judges who will rule in a way he prefers. It’s just that when he does it, he is putting in judges with the “correct” ideology. 

This is the same situation, though magnified, in Hungary. There, Orbán’s Fidesz party has won every national election since 2010. No Brussels bureaucrat, no study, has ever shown that he won through fraud; Hungarians simply support his government. Because he has been in power for so long, the judicial system is, naturally, stacked full of judges who think along Fidesz’s lines. This is no different from how the American courts looked after twenty years of Democrat rule (by 1953, 20 years of rule meant every member of the Supreme Court had been appointed by the Democrats). You win, you get to pick the judges. But when Republicans appoint six out of nine justices, they are “destroy[ing] the independent judiciary.” When Orbán does it, he is, in the words of Human Rights Watch, making an “assault on the judicial system.”

Why the double-standard? It is because the judicial system is often the last hope of establishmentarians. Yes, they lose elections – but as long as they have judges on their side, they can stave off the populist-right until they get back in power. We have seen repeated examples of this. An Italian judge agreed to put former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini on trial for keeping migrant ships from docking in Italy, and another court just ordered that 12 migrants recently sent to a processing facility in Albania must be returned to Italy because, in the court’s argumentation, each case must be approved by migration courts – meaning endless delays. 

But panic and relying on aging judges is not a permanent solution. Major electoral models like 538 Opinion Polls see Trump as more likely than not to return to the White House. Orbán continues to lead national polling, as does Meloni’s coalition. Across the West, voters are no longer being swayed by scaremongering from Western establishments. They have had enough.