The dirt under the carpet of freedom – On the inner connection between liberal democracy and new right-wing extremism
by Robert Kurz
[This article posted on 3/3/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.exit-online.org/der-schmutz-unter-dem-teppich-der-freiheit-ueber-den-inneren-zusammenhang-von-liberaler-demokratie-und-neuem-rechtsextremismus/.]
When you listen to the patent democrats, you are reminded a little of the Manichaean religion: there is a good principle and an evil principle in the world. Democracy, together with the associated market economy, is good in itself; evil, however, appears in the form of dictatorship, totalitarianism, fascism, racism, etc. Right-wing extremist sentiments and atrocities cannot have anything to do with democracy. They must have come from “outside,” from the pre-civilized primordial source of the “beast that is man” or possibly from a bad upbringing. This naive democratic thinking ignores the fact that democracy and totalitarianism have historically had no external relationship with each other. The more or less totalitarian modernizing dictatorships of various kinds, from Cromwell to Hitler, were not mere aberrations from the “good” principle of democracy, but rather a kind of larval stage of democracy itself. Western democracy after World War II cannot be separated from the history that led to its present state, and that history is written everywhere in blood.
It may seem strange to view modern dictatorships not as the opposite of democracy, but as the historical and genetic forms of democracy itself. But we must not forget that democracy, by its very name, is also a form of rule, and perhaps one of the most terrible forms: namely, the self-rule of human beings in the name of abstract principles, the self-subjugation to the laws of the total market. It was the modernizing dictatorships that (under various ideological names) socially implemented this core element of democracy: submission to abstract time norms, to factory and office discipline, to the necessity of alienated “employment” for money. Nowhere did people voluntarily submit to these impositions. Democracy in today’s sense means above all the internalization of these constraints, so that people, who have become abstract monads of labor and money, strive for all this of their own accord and do to themselves what they used to be forced to do. Totalitarianism, the logic of total commodity production that has become widespread, is no longer an external force, but is inherent in individuals themselves, and this essentially exhausts the difference between (open) totalitarian dictatorship and (internalized) totalitarian democracy in modernity.
As Ralf Dahrendorf has noted, National Socialism also had many features of a modernizing revolution: not only through the new forms of industrial mass consumption (Volkswagen, the autobahn), which were commercialized after 1945 and were the drivers of the “economic miracle,” but also through the melting down of the old social milieus, which were brought into line. The uniformed, abstract “Volksgenosse” (member of the national community) was, so to speak, analogous to the Volkswagen, the prototype of today’s highly individualized and commercialized single, as described by Ulrich Beck in his “Risk Society.” There is therefore a complex internal connection between National Socialism and post-war democracy, which has been suppressed by the patent democrats because they do not want to acknowledge the totalitarian element in democracy itself. The Nazi provocations, swastika graffiti, and barbaric acts of today’s violent youths cynically reveal what has been suppressed. In its wayward children, the democracy that pretends to be innocent sees only its own reflection, in which the otherwise hidden ugly scars of its own history of assertion reappear.
However, it is not only the scars of the past that become visible, but also the equally ugly consequences of the democratic present. The freedom of liberal democracy is identical to its core principle of rule, because this freedom is always only the “economic freedom” of buying and selling, the freedom of those who can pay. No other freedom is provided for. The form of activity of this freedom is competition, which by its very nature wants to become total: “Everyone for themselves and God against all.” And isn’t competition in market economy democracy highly praised as a superior principle that alone can guarantee “efficiency”? Democracy is a pure meritocracy in which no handicap is welcome and which (in principle) does not tolerate any human emotion that cannot be subjected to the criterion of “profitability.”
In this sense, right-wing extremists are actually just speaking plainly about the innermost principle of democracy itself when they renounce all human solidarity and attack refugees, minorities, the disabled, and the homeless, who are seen only as annoying “cost factors.” In this respect, democrats should not be surprised or angered that the new right-wing extremists see themselves as democrats and want to be recognized as a legitimate part of democracy. This is particularly true of those new forms of right-wing extremism represented by billionaire Ross Perot and Republican star Newt Gingrich in the US, the Berlusconi group and the Lega Nord in Italy, and the Haider party (significantly called the Freedom Party) in Austria. What we are confronted with here is the foul odor of a thoroughly Western-universalist social Darwinism that preaches an antisocial individualism of the “strong,” wants to get rid of people who are “unproductive” in the market economy, and merely wants to administer poverty through a police state.
The democratic world, in which people are sorted according to market economy winners and losers, is nurturing this social Darwinism itself according to its own criteria. Populist demagogues are even finding support among the losers, who are promised membership in the group of the “strong” and a fantastical position as winners, from which they can kick those who are even weaker in the name of competition. And even the arsonists, bombers, and murderers of the right-wing extremist underground: What are they doing other than “continuing the competition by other means”? If democracy has elevated the ability to assert oneself in a totally performance-oriented society to an idol, it should not be surprised that this mentality, which it has bred itself, is spreading beyond all the boundaries of the legally codified “rules of the game.”
Ultimately, market economy democracy has no morality of its own that arises from within itself and does not have to be imposed from outside according to artificial criteria that are actually foreign to its mechanism. The much-vaunted welfare state, which is supposed to repair the structural social deficits of market democracy, has always been nothing more than a luxury product of the very few global winner countries of the OECD. As long as it was possible to pretend that these “social networks” were a goal achievable for all countries, the ugly side of democracy was temporarily obscured. But the floodgates of “evil” had to burst open once the economic “operating system” of democracy, namely the social machine that transforms abstract “work” into money, began to seize up. It was precisely the results of the much-vaunted competition and “efficiency” themselves that have produced structural mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale since the 1980s: according to studies by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, this already affects more than 30 percent of the global workforce.
The rationalization and automation made possible by the microelectronic revolution, the thinning out of organizational lines (“lean production”), and the globalization of financial and commodity markets, as well as the international fragmentation of production processes, are making a growing mass of people economically “superfluous” even in the core countries of Western democracy. Public finances are hitting hard limits, the welfare state is being cut back and losing credibility, and even culture is seeing the democratic state withdraw. Democracy itself is beginning to abandon the achievements of civilization because it is suffocating under its own criterion of “financial viability.” Even before any ideological interpretation of the phenomenon, the objectified system mechanism of market democracy automatically begins to exclude more and more people.
The democratic parties, including the Social Democrats and the Greens, and the democratic state bureaucracy are becoming the political vehicles of this exclusion, even if they wash their hands of it and try to “make socially acceptable” the atrocities using vocabulary from the devil’s dictionary. This hypocrisy is so unbearable that it actually fuels open right-wing extremist social Darwinism; and the rapidly increasing insecurity of existence is creating such a potential for social anxiety that every poor wretch desperately wants to cheat his way into the “elite” and the notorious “high earners,” even at the price of irrational outbreaks of violence against real or perceived social competitors. The nasty suspicion arises that the right-wing street and bomb terror is not entirely inconvenient for the good democrats, because they can use it as a smokescreen under pious slogans of “outrage at inhumanity” to allow themselves to be carried away by right-wing extremist sentiment and implement measures in asylum and social legislation that are entirely in line with the “evil” and have constitutional legitimacy, which they now even declare to be a kind of homeopathic “defense against the right-wing danger.” Thus, the right-wing extremist hand washes the democratic one. The resurgence of anti-Semitism also stems from the same social potential for fear that democracy itself generates. Hatred of weak people who are racially labeled as inferior corresponds to hatred of the phantom of a delusional, malevolent superintelligence that is supposed to lurk behind the incomprehensible powers of money, which have sprung from society’s own fetishistic form. The crisis of the market system and its profitability criteria manifests itself not only as a crisis of the labor market, but ultimately also as a crisis of the financial markets: under pressure to rationalize, more and more money capital that could no longer be invested in expansion and jobs migrated to the derivative speculation sectors. In the 1980s, financial yuppies were still being cheered on, and the casino capitalist atmosphere allowed a democratic simulation youth to flourish. Now that the party is over, hangover symptoms are setting in, and the inevitable bursting of the global financial and speculative bubble is heralded by bank failures (Barings), financial scandals, and currency crises, the democratic public is looking for scapegoats instead of acknowledging the limits of the market-based industrial system: “The speculators,” the press hypocritically proclaims, are destroying “our beautiful market economy.” This zealous witch hunt by democrats suddenly pretending to be economically serious differs only slightly from the agitation of the anti-Semitic mob, which (itself greedy for money to the tips of its fingers) suspects a “Jewish world conspiracy” behind the financial crash.
It can no longer be denied that it is the social and civilizational process of decay within market democracy itself that gives rise to, feeds, and allows the extreme right-wing “evil” to grow. That is why it is absurd to want to defend democracy—as it is—against the “right.” If democracy is not capable of radical self-criticism and of abolishing its economic machine, there will never be inner peace again. Either the rules of the game are fundamentally changed, or democracy itself will turn into barbarism, and right-wing extremism will then be nothing more than a component of its own evolution.
Never before has fundamental social criticism been so bitterly needed as it is today. But the left, which had always seen itself as the bearer of radical, emancipatory criticism, has fallen embarrassingly silent. The collapse of Stalinist state socialism, which was never more than a dictatorship of “belated modernization” with bureaucratically “planned markets,” was all too easily misunderstood as a refutation of any fundamental criticism of the market economy. The crisis is now filling the ideological vacuum left behind by the democratically discredited left with a hissing tide of thoroughly unemancipatory fundamentalism and right-wing extremism. The mixture of radical pseudo-criticism of modernity and the simultaneous brutal prolongation of modern performance and competition criteria, which has always characterized demagogic right-wing populism, is taking effect unchecked. If we do not succeed in developing forms of social security beyond the market and the (national) state through a new emancipatory critique of society, in taking resources out of the idle market mechanism, and in radicalizing the socio-ecological transformation instead of retreating further and further from the dictates of the global market, then democracy will become its own gravedigger.