Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold

“In Britain and America the masses were…faced with little alternative to the existing , well-established political parties. Nor,with a few exceptions, did they look for any. In Germany , “political space” was opened up for the Nazi breakthrough by the prior fragmentation of support for the parties of centre and right. In Germany, therefore, the economic crisis ushered in … a fundamental crisis of the state. The battleground …was the state itself.” Ian Kershaw

The above is quoted from Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler which describes the collapse of the Weimar governments run by traditional parties and the filling of the space by Hitler and the National Socialists. At the time Britain and America didn’t succumb to such a large swing to the Right. But today the US (under Trump) is well along the very hard Right path. And here in Britain we are also turning to the extremes in particular the Reform Party which like the Nazis in the 1930s has a simple, unsophisticated anti-establishment and populist appeal.

At the risk of being accused of following Godwin’s Law the referencing of the growth of Hitler replacing establishment politicians seems legitimate to me. Founding new Parties of the Right, in Germany, Italy and Spain was a direct cause of the Second World War. And in Germany it led directly to the Holocaust. Hitler had learned from his botched coup attempts in the 1920s that only a democratic route to power would succeed.

In modern day Britain UKIP, the “Leave” campaign and now Reform have positioned themselves well to the Right of the traditional parties. In Germany in the Weimar period as the economic crisis deepened many industrialists and conservative elites became fearful of communism and labour unrest. Some began supporting the Nazis as a bulwark against the political left. Whilst this hasn’t happened to any great extent yet in today’s UK the Right (and increasingly Reform) has significant support and funding from business.

The link connecting big business and the underclass that brought Hitler to power we see increasingly in Britain – and it has its modern origins in Trump’s America. Before the 2016 US Election Jeremy Paxman visited Detroit to find impoverished voters saying that they were going for Trump. Their choice was driven by despair. The irony is that Trump was funded by fat cats who, with some justification, saw him as more likely to fund their wealth and privilege. And yet the very poor and the unemployed still overwhelmingly voted for him.

Here the typical Reform voter is a “cultural traditionalist” who is economically anxious, distrusts big business as much as big government, and feels that the current economic system rewards the “wrong” people. Despite that the Party bigwigs include millionaires, an the supporters include rich industrialists like Bamford.

It simplistic to call the 6.4m voters ( 18%) who chose the Nazis in 1930 as just a “protest” vote. Similarly the 2.5m (25%) Reform voters in 2024 were doing more than making an anti establishment protest , though many were certainly doing that.

The line from Hitler to Trump and “Reform” is contentious to describe, for obvious reasons. But the voters in 1930 did perceive that the Nazis represented an alternative to the “established” centre parties , as Ian Kershaw put it. In Britain if not (yet?) in America Reform is an alternative (like it or not). WB Yeats forecast it in 1919: