Balancing democracy and disagreement

We do a very dangerous thing when we decide that opinions are beyond the Pale, and one risk is that we just fan the fires: it's happening now with the "far Right"

I’ve never known the public square so polarised, so intolerant and so full of people, Left and Right, who combine overweening certainty of their own virtue with absolute unwillingness to countenance the existence of any other valid views, and it’s eating away at our democracy. I accept that I may be influenced by my own stances, but I do think that it is a combination of traits more common on the Left (though it is to be found on the Right); if I had to analyse it, I’d say that people of the Left tend to think they’re morally correct, while those on the Right more often think they’re actually correct. But adjudicating between two increasingly misnamed wings of the debate is not the point.

There are several famous and often misattributed quotations about the importance of learning from the past. Perhaps the most used is the adage that “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” which Edmund Burke may or may not have said, or perhaps George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Mark Twain may have been nearer the truth when he (allegedly) observed that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. Napoleon said that “History is a set of lies agreed upon”.

It is, in any event, untrue. Aldous Huxley, the English writer who had the misfortune to die on the same day as President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, certainly highlighted an important aspect of the past when he said “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history”. If you doubt it, look at the German Army, or rather its opponents. The Kaiser’s soldiers made dramatic headway in the West in August 1914 because they followed the Schlieffen Plan and violated the neutrality of Belgium, sweeping around the French armies and seizing the initiative. When Germany struck at France again in 1940, following Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) which had largely been authored by then-Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein, how did they get the drop on the Allies? They came through Belgium. And when Hitler’s armies made one last counter-attack at the end of 1944, still hoping to change the course of the war and force a negotiated peace, they attacked, yes, through Belgium. Truly we learn nothing.

I dwell on this because what popped into my head earlier was the title of Laurence Rees’s dazzling six-part documentary, The Nazis: A Warning from History. It made a connection because there has been a great deal of discussion recently of the rise of the populist right, which some label as “far right”. As I wrote at the end of last year, I think we are too free with the label “far right”, because it is not just descriptive, it is makes a very clear value judgement, and it placed those to whom you attach it outside the political mainstream and also outside the need for respect or civility. Once you decide someone is on the “far right” (the same applies but with rather less force to the “far left”), you are dismissing them, saying they are malign, freeing yourself from the need to engage intellectually with them, and, at least implicitly, condemning those who support them.

This tendency reaches its inevitable but limitative idiocy in Godwin’s Law, with which you are probably familiar: the jocular maxim, originally applied to discussion boards on the internet and devised by author and attorney Mike Godwin, that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. Therefore, just thus evening, for example, I wearily entered a brief debate with someone on Twitter who was quite happy to suggest that Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg was in some way a Hitlerian figure. Whatever you think of Rees-Mogg, the idea that he resembles the Führer in any way which is meaningful is an absurdity, even if he has had some sharp words for judges and may have stringent views on the criteria for would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers. I think once you reach that stage you have shut down any meaningful conversation.

Of course the far right exists, though we may all approach the definition differently. I think, for example, that Donald Trump very clearly represents a danger to the United States Constitution and the rule of law, given his ongoing insistence that he was victorious in 2020’s presidential election, his threat to indulge in “retribution” against his political enemies if he is re-elected as president and his casual suggestion in September last year that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark MIlley, should have been executed for making contact with his Chinese opposite numbers in the dying days of Trump’s presidency. Those incidents alone indicate to me that Trump is sufficiently unpredictable, unmoored and unconcerned by anything resembling the rule of law that he should not be trusted with public office.

Is the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, in the same ballpark as Trump? I am less sure. She certainly has some unsavoury associations in her path; she opposes same-sex parenting, believes in robust measures against illegal migration and has moved in circles which regularly peddle conspiracy theories about George Soros. Is she a direct threat to Italy’s constitutional order? Of that I am less sure. In any event, my point is that there is nuance. Some people are on the far right and beyond the Pale, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is.

The issue, however, is tackling the far right or populist right, as it seems to be enjoying a period in the sun: apart from Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, the 2022 legislative elections in France saw a strong result for the Rassemblement National, the party led by Marine Le Pen which was once the Front National of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. In Germany, the party now at the head of the opinion polls is the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) led by Geert Wilders is the largest party in the Dutch parliament and in Hungary, Viktor Orbán, leader of Fidesz, has been prime minister since 2010.

What prompted me to think about this more widely was an article in Politico about the coalition negotiations in the Netherlands, which have unexpectedly collapsed with the walkout of Pieter Omtzigt, founder of a new centre-right party called Nieuw Sociaal Contract. The coalition talks have been occurring for nearly three months now, slowed by the fact that most parties had traditionally refused to work with the PVV, regarding it as extremist and Islamophiobic, but are now having to re-examine that stance in the light of the PVV’s strong showing. What is particularly interesting, if potentially concerning, is that, as the negotiations have dragged on, and perhaps as some voters develop a suspicion that the other parties are seeking somehow to exclude the PVV from the system, support for it has grown. The PVV now scores 32 per cent in the opinion polls, up from 24 per cent at the election, and would win 50 seats in the Dutch parliament as opposed to the 37 it seized in November.

I wrote at the time of the election in the Netherlands that it was lazy, potentially misleading but fundamentally dangerous to write Geert Wilders off as a “deplorable”, to use Hillary Clinton’s word. Even if you disagree profoundly with his policies, it is obvious that his electoral success, like the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, owes at least something to a popular sense of frustration, disenchantment and disenfranchisement: voters looked—still look—at aa landscape, politically, economically or culturally, that they don’t like, which no longer serves them as well as it did, about the changes to which they were never consulted. As a result, many just wanted to kick against the traces, register a protest, however inchoate. The anger was visceral and incoherent, which led to strange outcomes, like the ability of Donald Trump, an extremely wealthy property developer with an inherited fortune, to pose as a champion of the ordinary working man and woman, or the affection in some parts of the British electorate for Boris Johnson, with whom many identified, despite his peripatetic, slightly Bohemian upbringing, exotic heritage and educational privilege.

If this argument is at least partially correct, and I think it is, then it is as plain as day that any apparent attempt by “establishment” forces to frustrate or deny “populists” will only potentiate their support. We are seeing this most dramatically in the United States, where Donald Trump, facing dozens of indictments in several jurisdictions, has been able to create a narrative that he is being persecuted by his enemies who are illegitimately exploiting the criminal justice system. For some people, this is reinforcing their support for Trump.

The excellent historian and columnist Katja Hoyer makes a similar point in The Spectator about her native Germany. The ongoing popularity of the AfD is causing great concern, and this was exemplified by reports of a meeting which some senior members of the party had attended at an hotel near Potsdam last November; the gathering was to discuss the concept of “remigration”, forced deportation an undefined “model state” in north Africa, and was addressed by Martin Sellner, an Austrian nationalist activist involved in the Identitäre Bewegung Österreich, the branch of the Identitarian Movement in Austria which opposes liberalism, internationalism and multiculturalism. The meeting was a perfect story for the media: its location in a well-appointed lakeside hotel near Berlin recalled the luxury villa a few miles away at which the Wannsee Conference was held in 1942 to plan the Final Solution, while the notion of mass relocation was redolent of the Nazis’ Madagascar Plan, an idea considered in 1940 which would have seen the Jewish population of Europe transferred to Madagascar, then a French colony off the south-east coast of Africa.

The AfD involvement hinged on the attendance of Roland Hartwig, one of the party’s early recruits and a member of the Bundestag for North Rhine-Westphalia from 2017 to 2021. He was an aide to the AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, and was alleged to have undertaken to present the ideas raised at the conference to his colleagues, but was dismissed from his position in the furore which followed.

There were large public demonstrations against the AfD after their involvement in the Lehnitz meeting was revealed. 50,000 people marched in Hamburg, and 35,000 in Frankfurt, as more than 100 gatherings took place across the country. The federal chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the SPD, described the “remigration” plan as “an attack against our democracy and in turn on all of us”, while his party colleague and successor as first mayor of Hamburg, Peter Tschentscher, told demonstrators “We are united and determined not to let our country and democracy be destroyed for the second time since 1945”.

There have been suggestions that the political establishment should go further and examine banning the AfD. This is not wild speculation: Article 21 (2) of Germany’s Basic Law or Grundgesetz, the constitution approved in 1949:

Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.

The Federal Constitutional Court has jurisdiction over this issue, and twice parties with representation in the Bundestag have been suppressed under the provision, the Socialist Reich Party in 1952 and the Communist Party of Germany in 1956. There have been repeated attempts to ban the ultra-nationalist Heimat, formerly the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), in 2001-03, 2011, 2012 and 2016-17, which have failed for a variety of reasons from procedural irregularities to the party’s relative unimportance. Equally, many are sceptical of the prospect of proscribing the AfD. Dr Horst Meier, a constitutional lawyer and author, conceded that the process was possible but added “a ban makes no sense”, telling the BBC that “the competition between parties needs to happen on the political stage, not in court”. The federal vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck of the Greens, has appeared sympathetic to banning the AfD but even he conceded that attempting to proscribe it and failing—as happened with the NPD—would cause massive damage.

Thorsten Frei, a CDU member of the Bundestag from Baden-Württemberg, provided a more sensible insight into facing the challenge of the AfD.

We have to ask ourselves a different question. If a party like the AfD polls so high there must be reasons. There’s no point in insulting voters.

This is the argument Katja Hoyer pursues. She notes that, while the revelations about the meeting in Lehnitz triggered public demonstrations against the AfD, the party claims it also had 1,900 new membership applications in the same time period. As she argues:

Simply attacking the AfD, rather than trying to find out why Germans are turning to the party, risks sending a message to its supporters that they are being ignored. Too many protesters on the anti-AfD marches seem more keen to condemn, rather than understand AfD voters.

Hoyer draws the analogy of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in which she famously dismissed supporters of Donald Trump as “a basket of deplorables”. She also points to a recent survey in which only 66 per cent of respondents considered the AfD to be a “rightwing extremist” party (a description to which only six per cent of AfD members themselves assented); that is a hefty number but it means that one in three voters does not think of the AfD as extremists. Or, to put it another way, one in every three voters is being chided by the political community for not being liberal and tolerant enough.

None of this is to say that all opinions are valid and acceptable, and that extremism either does not exist or has as much right to be considered as any other viewpoint. I mentioned The Nazis: A Warning from History earlier, and we can surely draw a lesson from the doltish Franz von Papen, the Centre Party politician who served as Hitler’s first vice-chancellor in 1933. He persuaded the aged president, Paul von Hindenburg, to appoint the Nazi leader to the chancellorship in the belief that he and his conservative colleagues would be able to manipulate Hitler from behind the scenes. When the wisdom of allowing the Nazis into power was questioned, Papen responded:

What do you want? I have the confidence of Hindenburg! In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal.

In fact Papen was placed under house arrest during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, sacked as vice-chancellor and despatched to Austria as Germany’s ambassador. From 1939 to 1944, he was German ambassador to Turkey, and became one of only three defendants at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946 to be acquitted.

There are two arguments here, I think. The first is that if a party many think is “extremist” is fuelled by disenchantment and exclusion on the part of the electorate, it is simply foolish and damaging in practical terms to turn that party in a pariah or a collection of martyrs. There is at least a prima facie case that exactly that is happening in the Netherlands and in Germany. If your principal accusation is that your opponents will not listen to you or attend to your concerns, it hardly damages your credibility if they then seek to place legal injunctions on you or circumvent you in other ways.

There is a more difficult ethical question. When Enoch Powell made the speech on immigration in Birmingham in April 1968 which would be immortalised as the “Rivers of Blood” speech, he knew he was being provocative and his use of unsubstantiated anecdotes about the behaviour of immigrants was at best irresponsible. But he said a great deal in the speech, as he always did in any public utterance, and a great deal gets lost in the focus on the headline. After relating the incendiary opinion of a constituent of his in Wolverhampton South West that “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”, Powell, partly as a sly bit of anticipatory self-defence, poses a difficult question.

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so… I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else.

This must to some extent be true. I have never subscribed to the theory that Members of Parliament are simply delegates of their electorate, empty vessels to convey the opinions of the voters, and are absolutely entitled to exercise their judgement as legislators; indeed, I think it is often a duty. And there are instances of Parliament clearly taking a different stand from the majority of the public and persisting. Last February, I wrote about the gradual abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom: the last execution took place in 1964, the death penalty was abolished for murder in Britain in 1969 and Northern Ireland in 1973, and the final capital offences were removed in 1998. Yet opinion polls suggest there is still a substantial body of support for the reintroduction of capital punishment, and it is conceivable a majority could be created depending on how the question was phrased (support seems to increase the more limited and specific the boundaries are). Despite that, there has not been a serious legislative attempt at restoration in generations. It has simply been decided by the political community to be off the table.

But there must be a line somewhere. There must be an extent to which elected representatives are obliged, at least morally and intellectually, to listen to the grievances of the electorate. They may disagree, they may counter-argue and they may refuse to take the action suggested, but I think Powell was right when he said that he could not “shrug my shoulders and think about something else”.

On the subject of immigration and nationality, which is the wellspring of grievance for the AfD, the PVV, Fratelli d’Italia and so many other right-wing parties, we hear over and over again, often quite correctly, that the debate is dominated by misinformation, by misconception, by the public believing things which are simply not so. In those instances, there assuredly is an onus on politicians to attempt to inform, to push back against untruths or deceptions or attempts to mislead. That is not achieved by prohibitions on parties or exclusion from the political process.

I am wary of concluding that “it’s all very difficult”, because while that is almost always true, it is not enormously helpful or constructive. I would offer three general conclusions.

The first is that we are far too careless and profligate with language. The labels of “far right” (or “far left”) and “extremist” are provocative enough, but to label someone a “fascist” or a “Nazi” must either mean something very serious and very specific, or else it simply coarsens language itself and will eventually see the term taken out of service because it has lost all meaning. For example, do I think Donald Trump is an extremist? Absolutely: he has proven that by word and deed hundreds of times over, and he is a clear danger to the constitutional order and security of the United States. Do I think he is a fascist? The argument can certainly be made: his apparent wish to use the justice system to pursue his enemies is mark against him in that regard (though one must cautiously recall how close to the wind posthumous liberal icon Robert F. Kennedy sailed when he was attorney general in his brother’s administration), and the unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of an election defeat is a strong sign of authoritarian tendencies.

Do I think Donald Trump is a Nazi? No. I think it’s an unhelpful and meaningless comparison, used only for the purposes of condemnatory hyperbole. When we say “Nazi” we think of genocide and mass murder. We remember the industrialised attempt to remove a whole ethnic group from the pages of history. To try to elevate Trump to that kind of bestial pantheon is plainly absurd; worse, it undermines any valid criticism you may already have made of him. Political calumnies accumulate and have an effect en masse, and if you too far you endanger the whole process. You cannot retract one excessive charge without casting doubt on the judgement behind the others. But relying on abuse is also lazy. If we are diligent and informed, we should not need to call Trump a Nazi; the evidence that he is an extremist and an authoritarian should be quite enough to make the point that he is unfit to hold office. Language matters, and it is much better to use rapier than a bludgeon, the carry our precision bombing rather than flatten a wide area and hope you hit your target.

My second observation would be that in general we should presume in favour of freedom of speech, freedom of association and against the proscription of organisations. I have always believed that those with obnoxious views are more likely than not to hang themselves if merely given a sufficient supply of rope, and it is much the best way to see them condemned. The most glorious example, of course, was the decision by historian David Irving in 1996 to sue the American author Deborah Lipstadt for libel. He argued that her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory, had deliberately distorted evidence in order to portray him as a Holocaust denier. English libel law places the burden of proof on the defence, providing her legal team, led by Anthony Julius of Mishcon de Reya and Richard Rampton KC, with a huge challenge. But they rose to it magnificently. The judgement, given in 2000, dismissed Irving’s claim on the grounds that Lipstadt’s accusation of distorting the evidence was substantially true. It finished Irving’s career.

Not every matter is a deliciously clear-cut as the Irving trial was. But my guiding principle in this area is generally that ideas shouldn’t scare you, and bad ideas should be argued down. If you can’t do that, there’s something else wrong. So if a political party wants to restrict immigration, tell them why it’s a bad or impractical idea. If something’s not fair, say so. For the nastier end of the spectrum—discrimination, incitement, violence—laws already exist and should be applied. It simply seems both cowardly and counter-productive to refuse to have a discussion. Moreover we exist in a political climate in which one of the very last things we need is an ever-narrower band of “approved” ideas and opinions beyond which no-one can stray. We need to be more tolerant, not less, even if that brings us up to the borders of tolerating intolerance.

My third and final point is connected. I think the most corrosive element in public life at the moment, more than ignorance, more than sanctimony, more than prejudice, more than intolerance, but feeding on them all and in turn nourishing them back, is our burgeoning unwillingness to see good faith in our opponents. Rory Stewart in his and Alastair Campbell’s podcast The Rest Is Politics talks about “disagreeing agreeably”, and I know Rory gets it, but that only traces the outline of the problem. It’s so much more than manner and manners, courtesy and patience. It’s the belief that your interlocutor is a normally good and well-intentioned person, who is espousing the beliefs he or she is because they are for the common good, or make sense, or simply work. It’s getting away from the hair-trigger assumption that an opponent must be motivated by greed or hatred or racism or misogyny or any other kind of poison.

Of course there are bad people out there. There are malign and selfish people, and there are people who simply can’t summon the energy or determination not to act cheaply or basely. Very few of us leave the better angels of our natures permanently unchained, and that is a reflection of what it is to be human. I am not naïf or inexperienced or sheltered, but I do believe firstly that most people in the public sphere are motivated by more good than bad, and second that most of us can discern quite easily those who are ill-intentioned. If you take the approach so prevalent on social media of dismissing someone for their political identity—Never trust a Tory, that kind of nonsense—not only do you poison your own political well, but you also disqualify yourself from even the faintest benefit of the doubt. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

In essence we need to be patient, and we need to maintain a plurality of opinions. Reaching too quickly for condemnatory labels is often unfair to those to whom we apply them, but it also makes us intellectually lazy and incurious. We deceive ourselves and let ourselves down. But if that high-minded argument doesn’t sway you, it’s also counter-productive: if we demonise and exclude those who already feel demonised and excluded, we can hardly be surprised when it doesn’t resolve the situation. Be more thoughtful, more analytical, but do it for yourselves and for all of us.