MAGA just can't quit embracing Germany's neo-Nazi party
Democrats need to attack an unholy transatlantic alliance that highlights the GOP's shift to the extreme far right
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
About a month into the Trump administration, Vice President JD Vance met with the U.S.’s European allies, and inadvertently opened up a whole new perspective on the basic rottenness of MAGA. He accused mainstream European political parties of being sinister anti-democratic forces, for the sin of opposing far-right parties and movements that hearkened back to the dark days of 20th-century fascism. Vance was particularly noxious in his critiques of Germany, which at the time was on the cusp of an election in which the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) appeared set to at least come in second place (and in fact did so, winning 20.8% of the vote nationwide). He asserted that mainstream political opposition to the AfD constituted a form of anti-democratic censorship; meeting with the head of the AfD but shunning Germany’s then-chancellor, Vance offered a more or less explicit endorsement of a party that most observers view as a descendent of the Nazis. (Soon after Vance’s comments, billionaire and DOGE wrecking ball Elon Musk offered an explicit endorsement of the AfD).
Earlier this month, there was fresh news about the AfD, with Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classifying the party as extremist; according to the New York Times, this “gives domestic intelligence more tools to monitor the AfD” and “opens a legal avenue to have the Constitutional Court ban the party.” The wider context for this decision is that Germany has institutional mechanisms in place to prevent an authoritarian takeover as happened in the 1930s:
[T]he domestic intelligence agency made its determination after thoroughly monitoring the AfD for years, and based its decision on the findings of a 1,100-page report compiled by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The office was specifically created in 1950 to monitor domestic threats to Germany’s democracy and prevent any takeover of the Parliament and government by extremist actors. It was an attempt by modern Germany’s founders to avert the kind of rupture that took place in 1933, when the Nazis seized control of Parliament and the government.
The AfD is pushing back against the classification and the threat of further governmental action, attempting to portray itself as the victim of rival parties challenged by its rise. But it is not hard to see how the intelligence agency made its determination of AfD extremism. Its leaders malign and scapegoat Muslims and downplay the Holocaust; the party argues for an exclusionary, chauvinistic vision of Germany that has dark echoes of the Nazi past; some members have been involved in attempts to literally overthrow the country’s government.
Yet, despite this latest effort by the German polity to defend the state from the threat of right-wing takeover, the forces of MAGA in the United States remain unswayed from their alignment with Germany’s neo-Nazis. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, clearly speaking on behalf of the current administration, issued a condemnatory tweet of the classification stating that “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise,” and condemning Germany’s “deadly open border immigration policies.” Not to be outdone, JD Vance soon issued his own proto-fascist cri de coeur, writing “The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany [sic]. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it. The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt - not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment.”
I said it a few months ago, and I’ll say it again here: there can be no overstating the moral abomination of a U.S. presidential administration giving aid and comfort to the successors of the actual Nazis. It’s a measure of our country’s lack of historical memory, the rise of right-wing extremism on our own shores, and the political flat-footedness of the Democratic Party that this alignment has not yet erupted into a national scandal. Among other things, it provides a reality check on how far right the MAGA-infected Republican Party has turned; this is a party that now sees neo-Nazis as its natural allies.
In the remarks by Rubio and Vance, you can glimpse some of the ideas MAGA sees itself as having in common with the AfD: the idea that a country’s borders can be so open as to be “deadly”; a rejection of the concept that a democracy should defend itself against right-wing threats, since the right supposedly represents majority opinion; the concept of an imaginary anti-democratic “establishment” that is preventing democracy from prevailing. Vance’s comments are especially repugnant — the re-unification of Germany has been one of the great democratic stories of our age, with West Germany absorbing and reviving the eastern part of the country that had suffered 40 years of communism following the fall of the Third Reich. The idea that mainstream German institutions and political parties are to be labeled authoritarian because they themselves are acutely alert to actual authoritarian threats, in a way that few countries are, is genuinely nauseating. Vance has obviously embraced his president’s utter shamelessness.
For more insight into the specifics of the German laws and institutions that underly that country’s lines of defense against extremist movements, I highly recommend historian Thomas Zimmer’s analysis of the ruling. Zimmer’s take is particularly instructive as he’s German himself, but teaches U.S. history here in the United States; as some of you may be aware, he’s also been an important voice in describing and diagnosing the pathologies of the Trump years (both on his blog Democracy Americana and on the essential Is This Democracy? podcast). All of this makes him particularly well suited to convey the moral rot and abomination of MAGA’s embrace of the AfD.
For starters, Zimmer provides deeply disturbing examples of the AfD’s extremism, including the party’s distribution of fake plane tickets in the town of Karslruhe earlier this year stating “Only remigration can still save Germany,”; as Zimmer observes, “This disgusting stunt, which had the support of state party leadership, clearly resembled an infamous Nazi campaign: In 1933, the Nazis distributed fake train tickets to Jewish Germans – “free one-way tickets to Jerusalem, no return.”” He also reminds us that a coalition of far-right parties in the European Parliament (including the execrable National Rally party of France, headed by Marine LePen) threw out the AfD in 2022 as being too extreme — an act that is deeply instructive as to the nature of the AfD.
Zimmer also cuts to the heart of what’s so disorienting and contemptible about MAGA’s embrace of the AfD, writing, “The Trumpist regime isn’t supporting the AfD out of opportunism, its stance isn’t based on raw power politics or a cynical indifference to who or what the AfD is. MAGA is siding with the AfD *because* it is a rightwing extremist party - *because* it is aiming to bring liberal democracy down in Germany. That is the shared goal; liberal democracy is the shared enemy.” This is a gutting observation, but one that at least has the benefit of illuminating for Americans how far right the Trump regime is: so far right that it sees those who take inspiration from the Nazi party as its natural allies. He also highlights how the willingness of today’s GOP to offer aid and comfort to the AfD signals a larger breakdown of our political order, noting that, “The fact that a movement that openly embraces the German Far Right, the party of German Neo-Nazis, was able to first take over the Republican Party and then the American government signals the complete dissolution of something we might call an anti-fascist consensus.” Zimmer contends that this anti-fascist consensus must be resurrected if we are to protect American democracy.
For me, the lack of a vigorous Democratic response to MAGA’s coddling of neo-Nazis is both symbol and substance of the failure of this anti-fascist consensus. At some level, most Democratic politicos must sense that the floor of American politics has given way, with the Republican Party engaging in political strategies and embracing political ends that are accurately described as fascistic in nature; these include demonizing Latino immigrants as an invading enemy force seeking to displace “real,” white Americans, and President Trump seeking to centralize political power in the presidency as the ultimate embodiment of the popular will. It would not be crazy for an elected Democrat to think that they already have their hands full trying to rally the American people in defense of democracy at home — why waste political capital on what might seem like a bank shot against the GOP by training too much rhetorical firepower on MAGA links to the AfD? After all, how much of the public even knows what’s going on in German politics?
But if you are interested in discrediting fascism here at home, you could do worse than highlight what the MAGA-AfD alliance says about the extremism of the contemporary GOP, and how the trail of American extremism can be traced back to fascism’s homeland. After all, you can’t hope to enforce an anti-fascist consensus, to use Zimmerman’s term, without actually trying to enforce it. While on the one hand Zimmerman is correct that this shift towards acceptance of extreme far-right politics has been long in coming, the emergence of flagrant anti-democratic, dehumanizing politics on the part of the GOP is also an evolution (or devolution) that is substantively different than what came before. Whereas 20 years ago you might still have glimpsed possibilities for the GOP to self-correct into a party moving back into alignment with democratic norms, such a possibility is now quite remote, if not outright inconceivable. But it is still not too late to begin treating the open authoritarianism of the GOP as not only shocking but also completely outside the bounds of what Americans should accept in a political party.
Calling out the GOP’s alliance with admirers of Nazism in a sustained fashion could function as necessary shock therapy in the interest of helping re-set America’s political boundaries. If Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate in 2012 had defended the right of neo-Nazis to be free from the repression of the German government and argued that they deserve to lead Germany, I would guess that the Democrats would have been far more aggressive in highlighting such an outlandish statement. It would not have been seen as a foreign policy issue that Americans didn’t care about; rather, it would have rightly been seen as political dynamite with which to blow the living shit out of the Romney campaign.
Given the range of harms Donald Trump and MAGA have already inflicted on the republic, and the multiple fronts on which Democrats are currently engaged to mitigate the damage, I won’t say it would be easy to raise the salience of the Trump-AfD alliance, as in my hypothetical Romney implosion. Yet Democrats should see Rubio, Vance, and Hegseth’s pro-AfD outspokenness as both a political opportunity and a moral necessity. Our politics may be in a state of peril and flux, but I would bet that most Americans still agree that Nazis are evil pieces of shit and the opposite of godly Americans. It is abhorrent that the GOP sees Nazism’s descendants as its natural allies; the Democrats need to amplify this dark embrace, and leverage the history of Nazism to help impugn the nature of MAGA in the eyes of Americans. The demonization of immigrants and foreigners as an existential threat to the nation; the celebration of certain people as the true citizenry; the hatred of democracy in favor of a system that prioritizes a mythical popular will: Americans know where these things led when the Germans fell for such politics decades ago. There are no magic bullets to cure what ails American politics, but aggressively confronting the Republican Party about making common cause with neo-Nazis seems like a shot worth taking.