A very interesting analysis of the current political development in Europe
Emmanuel Todd is a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris
Cross-posted from Emmanuel Todd’s Substack
Emil Nolde, Masks Still life, 1911
References to the 1930s are multiplying. The degeneration of American democracy seems to take us back to that of the German Weimar Republic. Trump, through his enjoyment of violence and lies, through his exercise of evil, irresistibly takes us back to Hitler. In Europe, the rise of movements categorised as far-right forces us to look back on our history.
However, Western societies no longer resemble what they were in the 1930s. They have aged, become consumerist and service-oriented, women are emancipated, and personal development has replaced partisan allegiance. How does this compare with the societies of the 1930s: young, frugal, industrial, working class, male-dominated, party-affiliated? It is this socio-historical distance that had led me to consider at first, until now, the parallel between the ‘far right’ of the present and that of the past to be invalid. But political doctrines exist, today as yesterday, and we cannot simply postulate the impossibility, for example, of a Nazism of the elderly, a consumer Francoism, an emancipated women fascism or a Croix-de-Feu LGBTism.
The time has come to compare the doctrines of our present with those of the 1930s. Here is an outline of what a comparative study of five historical phenomena might look like: Hitlerism, Trumpism, Netanyahuism, Le Penism. I will briefly add Macronism at the end. The centrist and pro-European extremism that is leading France into chaos compels us to examine this. Is this extremism really so centrist?
This will be an impressionistic approach, without any claim to exhaustiveness or even coherence, whose aim is to open up avenues for thought, not to draw conclusions. I am exaggerating features and colours to place the concepts in relation to each other. I am deliberately exaggerating to catch up with or even anticipate the acceleration of history. An expressionist approach might be a more appropriate metaphor.
Let us begin with the general dimension of racism or xenophobia.
The rejection of an “other” defined as outside the national community, with varying degrees of intensity, is common to Hitlerism, Trumpism and Le Penism. In the case of Hitlerism and Trumpism, it is the notion of racism, explicit or implicit, that is common. The Nazis considered Jews to be a race in the biological sense. Black people, those barely concealed targets of the trumpised Republican Party, are also defined biologically. Le Penism, on the other hand, can only be associated with the concept of xenophobia. Arabs and Muslims are defined by their culture. One of the characteristics of the French obsession with immigration remains its fixation on Islam and its inability to target Black people, whose mass arrival is nevertheless the new element in the migration process. The rate of mixed marriages among Black women is very high in France, but remains insignificant in the United States.
A common feature of Western ‘populisms’ is, of course, their rejection of immigration: Reform UK, the Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats), the AfD, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, like Trump or Le Pen, pass the test of this common denominator. Is this enough to define them as far-right, in the same way that Nazism and fascism were far-right? I don’t think so. There is a crucial difference between today’s populism and the Hitlerian or Mussolinian far right: Nazism and fascism were expansionist, with the aim of projecting the power of the German (Aryan) or Italian (Roman) people outwards. They were aggressive, nationalist and conquering. They relied on mass parties. It is hard to imagine today’s populists organising Nuremberg-style parades. The RN’s salami and wine aperitif parties are certainly anti-Muslim, but still less impressive than Hitler’s war ceremonies. From Nuremberg to Hénin-Beaumont? Really?
The only Western populism that would pass the expansionism test 100% today would be that of Netanyahu. West Bank settlements, genocide in Gaza: establishing a link between Hitlerism and Netanyahuism is inevitable.
French, British, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian and Italian xenophobia, unlike Nazism and Fascism, are defensive. We are not dealing with peoples who want to conquer, but with peoples who want to remain masters in their own homes. This is why the cultural dimension prevails today in Europe over the racial notion and why we can only speak here of xenophobia. This xenophobia is conservative, whereas Hitler’s racism was revolutionary because it disrupted the social order. The notion of nationalism therefore does not apply to current European populism, nor does the notion of the far right, or else we would have to introduce oxymorons such as ‘moderate nationalism’ and ‘moderate far right’. I prefer to speak of popular conservatism.
Personally in favour of controlled immigration, I must admit the legitimacy of this xenophobia because I accept the axiom that a human group that carries a culture, conscious of existing as a community, in short, a people, has the right to want to continue to exist. In concrete terms: a people can control its borders. Nazism, with its soldiers stationed from the Atlantic to the Volga to enslave or exterminate other peoples, was something else entirely.
Trumpism represents a mixed form because it combines a central defensive, anti-immigration element with a strong potential for aggression towards the outside world. It is not expansionism in the strict sense of the term. It is the previous expansion of the American military apparatus and the role of the dollar in imperial predation that have made possible Trump’s violent acts against other peoples and nations: Venezuela, Iran, us, the subject peoples of Western Europe, and of course the Arabs, with the Palestinians as the main target. The gradual integration of Israel into the Empire, beginning in 1967, means that by 2025 it will be almost impossible to distinguish Trumpism from Netanyahuism. But Trump, beyond his Nobel Prize-worthy antics, is indeed the chief culprit in the genocide in Gaza through his long-standing encouragement of Israeli violence: this simple fact places Trumpism on the side of Hitlerism. Trump is still at the wheel: American accelerations and brakes regulate Netanyahu’s genocidal aggression. I am lucky: as I write, Trump, frightened by the reaction of Arab countries to the Israeli raid on Qatar, and in particular by the strategic alliance between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, is backing down. He orders Netanyahu to apologise for the bombing of Qatar, and Netanyahu complies. Trump imposes an agreement with Hamas on Israel, and Netanyahu signs. What next? Trump is a pervert, impossible to say.
The concept of Trumpo-Netanyahuism, rather ugly I admit, allows us to identify the Jewish question as a similarity between the American crisis of the years 2000-2035 and the German crisis of the years 1920-1945.
In my opinion, Trumpism’s radical pro-Israel stance masks a visceral and vicious anti-Semitism: the identification of all Jews with Netanyahuism, a truly monstrous historical phenomenon and a cancer in Jewish history, will only serve to renew the Nazi conception of a monstrous Jewish people. I am talking here about anti-Semitism 2.0.
I am aware that few readers will agree with me on this point. But I am merely speaking here as a regular prophet of the Old Testament. “We were not chosen to be on the side of the powerful. History never ceases to set this trap for us.” How many times have Jews believed themselves to be saved by the strong, by the powerful, by authority, by an empire, even designated by privilege – financial and intellectual success, importance in the Bolshevik party – only to be ultimately thrown to the wolves to furious peoples… My heart bleeds when I see so many French Jews, who today believe themselves to be on the winning side, justifying Netanyahu’s policies. But it is indeed a trap that is opening. Thanks to Trump, the entire planet is becoming anti-Semitic. American Jews, the majority of whom reject Netanyahu’s line, are wiser and fairer. But already, Jews who are hostile to Netanyahu, academics or not, are suspected by the authorities of being anti-Semitic. Perversity reigns. Trumpism reigns.
When will the trap close? One day, inevitably, Christian nations will make peace with 1.6 billion Muslims. The Jews will then be abandoned by their fans and, now alone, thrown to the wolves of other angry peoples.
Promised lands follow one another, disasters follow them. Nightfall, an early short story by Isaac Asimov, the great American science fiction author, seems to me to be a metaphor for the long series of dramas that make up Jewish history: within a powerful civilisation, a remnant of prophecy announces a mysterious catastrophe… it arrives, surprising… civilisation collapses… then, slowly, it is reborn, it flourishes… a remnant of prophecy announces a mysterious catastrophe… it arrives, surprising…
In truth, the mere return of the Jewish obsession to the heart of the West validates the hypothesis of a threatening continuity between the past and the present.
Zombie Protestantism and Nazism, zero Protestantism and Trumpism.
The economic crisis of 1929 was a well-known determining factor in the Hitlerisation of Germany. Six million unemployed people caused German society to escape any ideological pullback. Hitler’s elimination of unemployment in a matter of months sealed the fate of liberalism.
The religious context of the rise of Nazism, just as important, is less familiar: between 1870 and 1930, the Protestant faith vanished in Germany, first among the working class, then among the middle and upper classes. Catholic regions resisted. In 1932 and 1933, the Nazi voting map thus mirrored that of Lutheranism with fascinating accuracy. Protestantism did not believe in the equality of men. There were the elect, designated as such by the Lord even before their birth, and the damned. Once Protestant metaphysical belief had disappeared, what remained was hysteria caused by fear of the void left by its unequal content, with Jews, Slavs and so many others as the damned. In the United States, Protestantism of Calvinist origin targeted Black people. The Calvinist people, fixated on the Bible, identified with the Hebrews, which limited American anti-Semitism in the 1930s and protected the Jews. Well, protected them until the recent emergence of the evangelical fixation on the state of Israel.
In Catholic France (particularly in the Paris Basin and on the Mediterranean coast), the collapse of faith and religious practice from 1730 onwards transformed equal opportunities for access to paradise (obtained through baptism, which washes away original sin) into equality among citizens and the emancipation of Jews. The republican idea of the universal man replaced that of the universal Catholic Christian (katholikos means universal in Greek). This was a very different programme from Nazism, but it represented, long before Nazism, the first massive replacement of a religion by an ideology. In revolutionary France, as in Nazi Germany, however, the potential for social and moral guidance provided by religion had survived belief: individuals remained members of their nation and their class, upholding a work ethic and a sense of obligation towards the members of their group. The capacity for collective action was strong, perhaps tenfold. This is what I call the zombie stage of religion. Nazism corresponded to this zombie stage, hence, unfortunately, its economic and military effectiveness.
I could supplement this religious explanation of ideology with an explanation of religion itself, influenced by underlying family structures, which were unequal in Germany and egalitarian in the Paris Basin. But here we can content ourselves with a continuity from Protestantism to Nazism and from Catholicism to the French Revolution.
We find Protestantism in Trumpism. We then find inequality associated with negrophobia. However, we are no longer at the zombie stage of religion but at its zero stage. Common morality has disappeared. Social efficiency has disappeared. The individual floats, particularly in this America of absolute nuclear family structure, individualistic and without well-defined rules of inheritance. We must therefore expect something else from Trumpist ideology: inequality as always, but less stability in the delirium, brutal oscillations that do not fundamentally originate in the brain of a vulgar and vicious president, but in society itself. Fortunately for us, the capacity for collective, economic and military action is greatly diminished.
In the case of Trumpism, we should note the emergence of pseudo-religious nihilistic forms that include an obscene reinterpretation of the Bible, such as the glorification of the rich. Significantly weaker than Nazism in terms of racism, Trumpism goes further in its economic immorality.
Nazism was simply and explicitly anti-Christian. Trumpism claims to be religious, but in the manner of a satanic cult, through the inversion of values. Evil is good, injustice is justice. Hitler was only the Führer, the guide of the German people to their martyrdom; Trump is not Satan, but I suspect that for his Satanist fans, his red cap is that of the Antichrist.
In the case of Le Penism, there is no unequal Protestant heritage. This is the real mystery of the National Rally: xenophobic, it was born in Catholic territory. Worse still, its first strongholds, on the Mediterranean coast and in the Paris basin, were those of the Revolution: egalitarian in terms of family life and de-Christianised since the eighteenth century. So? Is the National Rally unequal? Egalitarian? A mystery to us, the RN is probably also a mystery to itself. Its rejection of the other stems from a perverse egalitarianism that demands rapid assimilation of immigrants rather than perceiving them as fundamentally different. Above all, the RN, strongly determined by its rejection of immigrants and even their children, is nonetheless constantly reminded of the French egalitarian tradition because its voters hate the ultra-rich, the powerful, in short, our stupid elites, and not just immigrants. This is why the union of the right is struggling to succeed in France. In one form or another, the union of the oligarchs and the (white) people against foreigners poses no problems in the United States, the United Kingdom or Scandinavia, where conservative popular forces and classical right-wing forces easily agree. In France, the coalition of the rich and the poor against foreigners is elusive.
However, we should not underestimate the potential violence of a universalist form of xenophobia. It can easily turn into racism. If a man believes a priori that all men are the same everywhere and finds himself confronted with men who have different customs, he may well conclude that they are not men.
The RN is the product of zero Catholicism, just as the Revolution was the product of zombie Catholicism. That is why it will not give birth to any collective project. I will leave a detailed examination of the RN and its relationship to the future for a future text, neither impressionistic nor expressionistic, which I will devote entirely to the internal logic and dynamics of French chaos.
Psychiatry of the upper middle classes.
I now come to a crucial difference, which should be obvious to everyone and pointed out by political commentators who constantly refer us back to 1930 with their vocabulary. Understanding the religious, or post-religious, dimension of Hitlerism, Trumpism or Le Penism presupposed historical knowledge that cannot be expected of political commentators on television. On the other hand, we can expect them to be able to situate the ideologies of the past and present socially, which they relentlessly lump together under the term “far right”. The difference between the past and the present is very clear here.
Nazism and the pre-war far-right movements found their social epicentre in the middle classes, particularly the upper middle classes, who felt threatened by the labour, social democratic and communist movements. These middle classes were feverish, busy locking up their women and persecuting homosexuals. Today, on the contrary, so-called far-right movements find their epicentre in working-class circles, particularly in an impoverished working world, shaken or destroyed by economic globalisation and threatened by immigration. Today’s middle classes, largely defined by higher education, are less or even slightly affected by the ‘far right’. The upper middle classes, who combine higher education and high incomes, are particularly immune.
This is why I prefer to talk about popular conservatism rather than the far right. Its roots in the dominated group explain the defensive nature of popular conservatism. Its voters cannot imagine conquering Europe or the world if they see their own lives as a matter of survival.
The real intellectual mistake would be to stop there. Let us continue to move forward, even turning the problem of the association between ideology and class on its head. We have compared the ideologies of the present with those of the past; now let us compare the classes of the present with those of the past.
Some European middle classes between the wars went mad. The working class was more reasonable. But are today’s middle classes, particularly the upper middle classes, reasonable? Are they peaceful? What are their dreams?
They are crazy. The construction of a post-national Europe is a delusional project when one considers the diversity of the continent. It has led to the expansion of the European Union, cobbled together and unstable, into the former Soviet space. The EU is now Russophobic and warmongering, with its aggression renewed by its economic defeat at the hands of Russia. The EU is trying to drag the British, French, German and many other peoples into a real war. But what a strange war it would be, in which the Western elites have adopted Hitler’s dream of destroying Russia!
The comparison by social class therefore allows us to make a major intellectual breakthrough. Europeanism, and therefore Macronism, fall, through their external aggressiveness, on the side of nationalism, on the side of the pre-war far right. If we add to this the increasingly massive and systematic violations of freedom of information and popular suffrage within the EU, we come even closer to the notion of the far right. Founded as an association of liberal democracies, Europe is mutating into a far-right space. Yes, the comparison with the 1930s is useful, even indispensable.
In the grandiose Europeanist project, we find a psychopathological dimension already observable in Hitlerism: paranoia. Europeanist paranoia focuses on Russia. Nazi paranoia made the Jewish threat a priority, without however neglecting Russian Bolshevism (known as Judeo-Bolshevism).
Today, as yesterday, we can therefore analyse the psychopathology of Europe’s ruling classes. The bizarre sequence of events that began with Trump’s election, with the unstable president’s desire to talk to Putin, allowed us to follow live as our own leaders lost touch with reality. Let us summarise our delusional process. It began around 2014, before, during and after Maidan, the coup d’état that disintegrated Ukraine, remotely controlled by American and German strategists. The sequel now:
– 2014-2022: Let’s provoke Russia, which had warned that it would not tolerate the annexation of Ukraine by the European Union and NATO.
Done. Putin invaded Ukraine.
– 2022-2025: Let’s lose the economic war that resulted for us.
It’s done. Our societies are imploding.
– 2022-2025: Let’s lose the war strictly speaking, fought on our behalf by the Kiev regime.
It’s underway.
The shift of European governments into a parallel reality begins in 2025.
– Let us draw from our defeat the idea that we can finally impose our will and install our troops in Ukraine, to annex what remains of it to the EU. But how can we not think of Hitler locked in his bunker in 1945, giving orders to armies that no longer exist?
Today in Europe, we are dealing with madmen, or rather with a collective madness that has gripped individuals from the dominant social classes en masse. In France alone, thousands of journalists, politicians, academics, business leaders and senior civil servants are participating in the collective hallucination of a Russia that would want to conquer Europe (paranoia). No individual can be held personally responsible. We are dealing with a collective psychological dynamic.
I am convinced that the shrinkage of the individual born of the zero state of religion explains the emergence of these shoals of Russophobic fish.
As I explained in Les Luttes de classes en France au XXIème siècle (Class Struggles in France in the 21st Century), the disappearance of collective beliefs – religious beliefs and then ideological beliefs of the zombie religious state – has led to a collapse of the human superego. Unlike activists for the liberation of the ego, I do not define the superego as solely or even primarily repressive. The superego, as the ideal of the ego, anchors positive moral and social values in the person. The notions of honour, courage, justice and honesty find their origin and strength in the superego. If it weakens, they weaken. If it disappears, they disappear. In the end, therefore, humanity has not been liberated by the end of religion and ideologies, but rather diminished. It is highly educated men and women, morally and intellectually stunted by the absence of religion, who are, en masse, carriers of Russophobic pathology.
The Nazi anti-Semites had a completely different psychological constitution. The death of God, to quote Nietzsche, had certainly launched them on a quest for a Führer, but they were hardly lacking in superego and remained capable of collective action. The tragic performance of the German army during the Second World War bears witness to this. Who today would dare to imagine our upper middle classes rushing to their deaths, at the head of their peoples, towards Kiev and Kharkov? Our war in Ukraine is a joke, a product of the emancipation of the self, the offspring of personal development. Only Ukrainians and Russians will die.
Unless…
Thermonuclear exchanges can do without heroes.
October 9, 2025
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