In the Musk revolution, lessons from the 20th century will be deleted | Rafael Behr

3 hours ago 1

History isn’t winning the argument. Across Europe and the US, defenders of democracy have mobilised every precedent to warn against a slide into authoritarian rule. They have underlined every rhyme and assonance in the rhetoric of today’s far-right movements to highlight echoes of past atrocity. It isn’t working.

Evidence of the old virus spreading stimulates vigilance in people who are already alert for the signs, activating the immunity of people who are well vaccinated. They aren’t the ones who need convincing.

Not long ago the smarter kind of nationalist felt obliged to disavow notoriously vicious expressions of their creed. Marine Le Pen’s campaign to decontaminate France’s Front National once required estrangement from her Holocaust-denying father. In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the party he founded – since renamed Rassemblement National – for claiming the Nazi occupation of France had “not been particularly inhumane”, among other offences.

All was forgiven when Le Pen senior died earlier this year. His daughter said she bitterly regretted his ostracism. The RN is the largest party in France’s fractious parliament and has a decent chance of capturing the presidency in 2027.

The creeping normalisation of far-right politics cannot simply be attributed to ignorance. The number of living witnesses shrinks with the passage of time, but the story of Europe’s collapse into the abyss has been retold for subsequent generations with ample moral urgency. The wickedness of the Third Reich has hardly been neglected in the classroom or under-reported in popular culture.

Germany used to be held up as a model of collective atonement – a case study in the successful application of history to invigilate political moderation. That has not thwarted the rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party with well-exposed neo-Nazi connections and a 20% share – second place – in opinion polls going into federal parliamentary elections later this month.

The AfD plays artfully on the boundary between what is banned by German law and merely taboo when it comes to public representations of national socialism. One poster in last year’s regional elections depicted a young blond couple with one outstretched arm each, either side of three blue-eyed children, under the slogan “we’ll protect your children”. The party said the parents’ gesture represented domestic security in the shape of a roof. It just happened also to look like the Nazi salute.

No wonder Elon Musk is a fan. The billionaire tech industrialist, no stranger to that infamous gesture, routinely boosts the AfD from his X platform. He called the party the “best hope for the future of Germany” in a video link to an election rally last month. He has said that “only the AfD can save Germany”, and argued that one of the party’s co-chairs, Alice Weidel, cannot possibly belong to the same political tradition as Hitler because she is in a same-sex partnership with someone from Sri Lanka.

Crowd carrying placards including one with AfD on a circular prohibition sign

Musk has commercial and ideological incentives to meddle in German politics. The only Tesla plant in Europe is in Brandenburg, just outside Berlin. The AfD is committed to low taxes and deregulation, as well as mass expulsion of migrants and rapprochement with Russia.

The fit with a Trumpian worldview is natural, but that doesn’t fully explain Musk’s compulsion to boost the party. He seems especially attracted to the far right in Germany precisely because that is where a breach of the cultural firebreak has the most symbolic potency. Getting the AfD over the line into the German mainstream is the ultimate stress-test of historical conscience as inoculation against extreme nationalism.

Release from the collective burden of 20th-century history is a significant part of the AfD’s appeal. Germans whose living standards have stagnated, whose bills have gone up and who nurture so many of the other economic and cultural grievances that drove US voters to support Donald Trump, want to make Germany great again. And they want to be able to say so without the cringing caveat of apology for the second world war.

“There is too much focus on past guilt,” Musk declaimed to his audience of AfD activists. “We need to move beyond that.” This is the ideological bridge between Old World European nationalism and the new Trumpian crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which also seek redress for historical prejudice and injustice. The common theme is a celebration of virile white folk and a morbid dread that their long run of supremacy (entirely earned by merit, of course) is being sabotaged. The instruments of its decline are mass migration and emasculation through doctrines of gender fluidity.

The ambition to rewrite history and erase its inconvenient chapters is common to all revolutions. They tell the same story: all that is rotten about the present is a legacy of decadence that must be purged without mercy so the brighter new future can arise.

This strain of thinking was present in Trump’s first term, but it is more pronounced and more extreme this time thanks to the prominence of Silicon Valley tech-utopian machismo in the mix. The spirit of this new era was expressed by Peter Thiel, billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, in a semi-coherent but wholly sinister op-ed published in the Financial Times on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration. Thiel compared Joe Biden’s administration to the ancien regime of Louis XVI and, having hinted at various conspiracy theories ranging from Covid-19 to the Kennedy assassination, declared that “there will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past”.

Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, made the same point more succinctly last week when commenting on Musk’s slash-and-burn tactics as Trump’s commissar for government efficiency. “There’s a revolution,” he said. “Some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

These people are not ignorant of history. They are threatened by it, and their default solution to any threat is deletion. They control powerful levers for directing the global flow of money and information. They are not hiding their view that the past, as traditionally narrated to warn against the very thing they represent, should be recoded. And they find a receptive audience in people who also know some history and are tired of being rebuked for it; people who are happier to believe that the real enemies of freedom and democracy are the hypocrites and scolds who censure and censor them with moralising parables about their great-grandparents.

That doesn’t make it any less important to teach the lessons of history. But it does suggest that the usual way of imparting those lessons has stopped working, which means – and I really want to be wrong about this – they will have to be relearned the hard way.