E063. The Arithmetic of the Many

Contempt for the Masses, the Two Axes of Extremism, and Europe's Third Shock

I. The Error of Position

The oldest complaint in political thought is that things are getting worse. It is also, on most measurable dimensions, the least reliable. That the complaint persists anyway is not a puzzle about the world but about the observer, and the observer turns out to be built for it.

Some of the machinery is universal. Losses weigh more heavily than equivalent gains (Kahneman and Tversky). Bad news arrives as events and good news as trends, so the first is seen and the second is not. More insidiously, the standard by which harm is judged rises as harm declines. In a now-famous experiment, participants asked to identify blue dots began, as blue dots grew rarer, to classify purple dots as blue; asked to identify threatening faces, they began, as such faces became scarce, to find threat in neutral ones (Levari et al.). The concept expands to fill the space the phenomenon vacates (Haslam). Tocqueville saw the political version of this a century and a half earlier: the French Revolution broke out not where conditions were worst but where they were improving fastest, because amelioration raises expectations more quickly than it satisfies them (Tocqueville). Improvement, in other words, produces the perception of decline. Whether the world appears good or bad depends less on the world than on the baseline chosen to measure it. Against history, most things have improved; against expectation, most things fall short; against an ideal, everything is fallen.

This universal tendency becomes something more deliberate among those who have reason to need the world to be bad. When a prophecy fails, the committed rarely abandon it; they reinterpret the failure and redouble their conviction, and the more they have staked, the less they can afford to do otherwise (Festinger et al.). Orthodox Marxism faced precisely this in the 1890s, when the promised immiseration of the European working class conspicuously failed to arrive. Bernstein proposed revising the theory. The orthodox, who had given their lives to it, could not. Their solution was to declare the improvement counterfeit. Lenin's theory of the labour aristocracy, written in 1916, is the cleanest statement of the move: the better-off workers of the imperial powers had been bribed with the crumbs of colonial super-profit, and their comfort was therefore evidence of their corruption (Lenin, Imperialism). The workers' gains became proof of the workers' fall.

The interpreters had a further stake. An intellectual's standing rests on the claim to see what others cannot; a public content without interpretation leaves the interpreter idle. Theories of false consciousness and cultural decadence solve this problem by making the interpreter indispensable. Schumpeter noted that capitalism breeds a class whose livelihood is its own critique, and Hayek called intellectuals professional second-hand dealers in ideas (Schumpeter; Hayek). Raymond Aron, closest to the matter, argued that Marxism appealed to the intellectuals of his generation because it assigned them a historical role and endowed their discontent with cosmic meaning (Aron). Organisations follow the same logic: a revolutionary party whose constituency prospers loses its reason to exist, and survival becomes its purpose (Michels).

There is a third mechanism, and it is the most important because it is not entirely an illusion. "Society is doing well" is a statement about averages. Every period of general improvement produces groups whose relative position declines: artisans displaced by industry, notables displaced by mass politics, majorities whose former precedence erodes as others are admitted to equality. For these groups the world really has become worse. But "my position has fallen" is a private grievance, while "society has decayed" is a universal moral claim. The conversion of the first into the second is the elementary operation of reactionary thought. It takes a truth of position and promotes it into a truth without position.

Two further currents carry the operation forward. When secularisation withdrew the transcendent frame from European life, political movements inherited its structure: an original innocence, a fall, a redemption to come. Salvation presupposes perdition; a world that is fine offers no role to its redeemers (Voegelin, Political Religions). And beneath both left and right runs what Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre called romantic anticapitalism: a shared revulsion at calculation, efficiency, commerce, and comfort, experienced as the death of the soul (Löwy and Sayre). To this sensibility, contentment itself is the symptom.

These strands converge on a single structure: a worldview that cannot be falsified, joined to an observer who exempts himself from it. If people are unhappy, the system is bad; if they are happy, their happiness is false consciousness or decadence, and the system is bad. Every observation confirms the theory. And the theorist who diagnoses false consciousness never suffers from it. The contempt for the masses that runs from Le Bon through Ortega, and from Lenin through the Frankfurt School, is the social expression of this structure. Ortega's contribution was to make it airtight. He insisted that the mass was not a class but a disposition; that a duchess could belong to it and a labourer escape it; that the specialist scientist, ignorant outside his field and confident everywhere, was its very prototype (Ortega y Gasset). The definition is, on its face, generous. In practice it is the opposite, for a disposition cannot be observed, and so the question of who belongs to the mass is settled entirely by whoever is asking it. The one asking always places himself among the few.

II. Nietzsche's Blind Spot

No figure illustrates this structure more completely than the one who described it most memorably.

Nietzsche's reputation rests on the proposition that God is dead, and on the prediction that Europe, having ceased to believe while continuing to live off belief's moral capital, would descend into nihilism. Neither the phrase nor the diagnosis was his. Jean Paul had staged a dead Christ announcing the absence of God in 1796; Hegel wrote of the feeling that God himself is dead in 1802; Heine, in 1834, invited his readers to kneel as the sacraments were carried to a dying God (Heine). Strauss dissolved the Gospels into myth, Feuerbach dissolved God into the projected essence of man, and Kierkegaard, from within faith, declared official Christendom to be no Christianity at all (Kierkegaard). As for the consequences, others saw them more concretely. Heine warned that the forces German philosophy had loosed would one day make the French Revolution look like an idyll. Dostoevsky's Demons depicted a revolutionary cell bound together by murder, whose theorist begins from unlimited freedom and arrives at unlimited despotism (Dostoevsky). Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche's own colleague at Basel, foresaw the "terrible simplifiers" who would govern mass societies like barracks. Even Nietzsche's most distinctive claim, that the secular successors to Christianity were Christianity in disguise, had been made in 1844 by Max Stirner, who accused Feuerbach of merely installing Man on God's vacated throne (Stirner). The nineteenth-century genealogy of the death of God was mapped long ago by Karl Löwith, and Nietzsche appears in it as a culmination rather than an origin (Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche).

His diagnosis of belief was also narrower than it appeared. A classical philologist, Nietzsche read Christianity through its texts, which is to say as doctrine. Social history reads it through practice, and there it looks different. The medieval laity was, as Jean Delumeau argued, only superficially Christianised; genuine Christianisation arrived with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (Delumeau). Peasants venerated a greyhound as a saint (Schmitt, Le Saint Lévrier), mixed prayer with magic (Thomas), doubted the resurrection before inquisitors (Le Roy Ladurie), and improvised cosmologies of their own (Ginzburg). Eamon Duffy's counter-argument, that late medieval piety was vigorous and sincere, is persuasive in its own terms (Duffy). But the dispute between "sincere" and "nominal" belief itself imposes a Protestant model of faith as inner assent onto a world in which faith was calendar, sacrament, and community. Charles Taylor offers the better formulation: what changed between 1500 and 2000 was not the sincerity of belief but its status, from an unchallenged default in which unbelief was nearly unthinkable to one option among others (Taylor). Stated this way, the death of God is a sound observation, and an ordinary one.

The method was weaker still. The engine of the Genealogy of Morals is the inference that a value born of base motives is thereby discredited. This is the genetic fallacy, and Nietzsche knew it: five years earlier he had written that the value of a moral command is independent of the errors from which it grew (Nietzsche, Gay Science sec. 345). His attribution of hidden motives, in which every act of kindness conceals a will to power and every act of pity conceals resentment, cannot be refuted by any possible counter-example, since each counter-example can be absorbed as a subtler instance of the same drive. Epistemically, this is indistinguishable from Lenin's false consciousness; only the political sign is reversed. His history of the "slave revolt in morality" is speculation without evidence, and his etymological arguments are poor philology by a philologist. His perspectivism, holding that there are no facts but only interpretations, coexists with the most universal of metaphysical claims, that the essence of all life is will to power. His physiological language of decadence and breeding was bad science in its own time and furnished a vocabulary to worse. And his celebrated self-awareness, the claim to be both a decadent and its opposite, to know sickness because he had suffered it, is on inspection a device for converting bias into credential. It is the vanguard's self-exemption rendered in the first person.

His fame, finally, owes more to his reception than to his originality. Georg Brandes lectured on his "aristocratic radicalism" in 1888 (Brandes); the collapse in Turin a few months later supplied the legend of the prophet driven mad by truth; his sister founded an archive in 1894 and edited his notebooks into a book he never wrote; Richard Strauss set Zarathustra to music in 1896. All this preceded the Nazis by three decades, and the Nazi appropriation, whatever it did for him before 1945, disgraced him afterwards until Walter Kaufmann rehabilitated him in 1950 and the French revived him in the 1960s (Kaufmann; Aschheim). The ease of that appropriation was not an accident. Aphorism, contradiction, and a refusal of systematic argument make a text available to every purpose. A work that asserts no clear propositions can be enlisted for any.

What is most instructive, though, is Nietzsche's own relation to the mass. He praised aristocracy and defended slavery as a condition of high culture (Nietzsche, "The Greek State"; Beyond Good and Evil sec. 257). Yet he was a pastor's son who invented for himself a descent from Polish nobility (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo); he lived his productive decade on a pension paid by the university and city of Basel; the public he disdained declined to buy his books, and the fourth part of Zarathustra appeared privately in some forty copies; and it was mass enthusiasm that later made him canonical. By his own definition, ressentiment is the revenge of the powerless, who, unable to strike the strong, revalue their values, calling strength evil and weakness good. An author without readers who declares popularity vulgar is performing exactly this operation. The theorist of ressentiment is its clearest case.

III. The Arithmetic of the Many

The contempt Nietzsche exemplifies rests on a mathematical confusion.

There are two ways to describe what a population holds in common. The greatest common divisor is the largest factor shared by every member; it is smaller than any of them. The least common multiple is the smallest quantity that contains every member as a factor; it is larger than any of them. Elitism treats the mass as the first: the thin residue everyone happens to share, the "lowest common denominator." But the idiom betrays itself, for the lowest common denominator of a set of fractions is precisely the least common multiple of their denominators, the smallest structure capacious enough to accommodate them all. Understood this way, the mass is not the meagre overlap of individuals but the minimal whole that excludes none of them, and it is greater than any single one.

This is not a conceit. Reaching everyone is harder than reaching the already persuaded; Shakespeare wrote for the pit, Dickens for serial readers, Homer for the square, and what was popular entertainment then is canon now. The most intricate systems humanity possesses, among them language, customary law, cuisine, and markets, were designed by no one and refined by millions, and they exceed in subtlety any scheme a single mind has produced (Hayek). When Francis Galton examined roughly eight hundred guesses at the weight of an ox at a country fair, most individuals were wrong and the median was nearly exact (Galton). In modern war, the sum of individually modest contributions became the decisive variable. The levée en masse of 1793 reorganised Europe, and, as Barry Posen argued, those who imitated the mass army were obliged to imitate the nationalism that animated it (Posen). And every political community rests on a thin layer that all share, a common language, a common memory, a common sense of what is reasonable, without which no refined thought would have anywhere to travel (Anderson).

The mass appears weak only when measured by the wrong unit. Elitism measures per capita: the depth, refinement, and originality of each person. The strength of the many is aggregate: breadth, robustness, persistence, and decisive weight. Nor is ignorance outside one's field a defect of character. Where knowledge is divided, it is rational to know little about most things (Downs). Everyone is part of the mass in nearly every domain but one, including those who disdain it.

There is, however, one real condition under which the mass fails, and it is the phenomenon Le Bon mistook for the mass's nature. Galton's fairgoers were accurate because they guessed independently. When individuals begin to copy one another, errors cease to cancel and begin to compound, and the wisdom of crowds becomes their madness. What weakens the many is therefore not their number but the destruction of their independence: agitation, the monopoly of information, and enforced uniformity.

The institution that protects that independence is the distinction between public and private. The public sphere is the thin common requirement: pay taxes, obey the law. The private sphere is everything else: love, taste, art, conviction, faith. This distinction was not a philosophical discovery; it was a peace settlement. In the wars of religion, faith was a public matter, and faith cannot be split. There is no halfway point between Catholic and Protestant truth. The settlement of Westphalia and Locke's argument for toleration resolved the conflict by removing the indivisible from the public table and leaving there only what could be bargained over (Locke). In the language of war termination, liberalism was a device for keeping non-negotiable stakes out of negotiation.

Extremism, of either direction, consists in placing the indivisible back on the table. Mussolini's formula, everything within the state and nothing outside it, is the programme stated plainly; the Nazi Gleichschaltung and the 1937 exhibition of "degenerate art," Soviet socialist realism and Lysenko's biology, and the Cultural Revolution's recruitment of children against their parents are its execution. The arithmetic of this project is instructive. The least common multiple of two, three, five, and seven is two hundred and ten; force every element to equal two and it is two. Uniformity does not enlarge the whole but shrinks it to the size of its smallest part, and the only way to make a seven into a two is to cut away its other factors. That is what a purge is. Benjamin Constant diagnosed the error in 1819: the Jacobins had tried to impose the liberty of the ancients, total participation purchased by total subjection of private life, upon a modern nation, and the result was the Terror (Constant). The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century repeated the attempt at industrial scale, and Hannah Arendt observed that in abolishing private life they abolished genuine public life as well, leaving only isolated individuals facing the state (Arendt).

The boundary does move, and should. Domestic violence was once a private matter and rightly became a public one. The criterion that licenses such movement is harm to others (Mill). The extremist criterion is different: not harm but correctness. Wrong belief, decadent taste, false consciousness, none of which injures anyone, are raised into the public domain for correction. The inefficiency of totalitarian systems and their abolition of private life are therefore not two facts but one. By destroying the independence of its parts, such a system blinds its own instruments. An ideology that despises the mass and builds institutions that make the mass stupid has produced its own confirming evidence.

IV. Two Directions of Enmity

If the extremes share a structure, why do they appear as two?

The spatial origin is literal: in 1789 the deputies of the National Assembly who supported the royal veto sat to the president's right, and its opponents to his left. The content came from what Eric Hobsbawm called the dual revolution, political and industrial (Hobsbawm). The first produced the questions of nation and sovereignty; the second, those of class and labour. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan showed how European party systems crystallised around the cleavages these two revolutions opened and then froze in place (Lipset and Rokkan). The far right radicalises the product of the first revolution, the nation; the far left radicalises the product of the second, class. Modernity began with two revolutions, and so it has two extremes.

Norberto Bobbio clarified the geometry. What divides left from right, he argued, is the attitude toward equality: the left regards inequalities as social and removable, the right as natural or ineliminable. Liberty and authority form a separate axis, and it is this axis that separates moderates from extremists (Bobbio). On a single line, the far left and far right sit at opposite ends and appear maximally distant. On Bobbio's plane they sit side by side at the authoritarian pole, separated only by their view of equality. The resemblance that surprises observers is simply the distance a one-dimensional picture conceals.

Carl Schmitt supplies the sharper distinction. The political, he held, is constituted by the distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt, Begriff). Both extremes require an enemy; what differs is the direction in which the line is drawn. There are, fundamentally, only two ways to divide a population. One can cut it horizontally, by membership, asking who belongs and who is outside; or vertically, by rank, asking who is above and who is below. The far right draws the line horizontally: its enemy is outside. The far left draws it vertically: its enemy is above. One draws a membrane; the other draws strata.

They also face opposite directions in time. Both begin from a fallen present, the shared Gnostic structure Voegelin identified (Voegelin, New Science), and both project a redemption. For the right it lies behind, in a lost national wholeness to be reborn; Roger Griffin made this myth of palingenesis the core of his definition of fascism (Griffin). For the left it lies ahead, in a society not yet achieved. Karl Löwith traced the secular philosophies of history, progressive and reactionary alike, back to the Christian eschatology they claimed to supersede (Löwith, Meaning in History).

Cas Mudde's definition of populism shows how a shared core acquires a direction. Populism, he argues, is a "thin" ideology, a Manichaean opposition between a pure people and a corrupt elite, too slight to stand alone and therefore attached to a thicker host: nationalism or socialism (Mudde). The core is common; the host determines the branch.

That the division is shallower than it appears is shown by those who crossed it. Mussolini edited the Socialist Party's newspaper before founding fascism. Jacques Doriot left the French Communist Party's political bureau to found the fascist Parti Populaire Français; Marcel Déat passed from socialism to collaboration; Georges Sorel travelled from revolutionary syndicalism to the nationalist right, and Mussolini read him. Germany produced a "National Bolshevism," and post-Soviet Russia a National Bolshevik Party. Jean-Pierre Faye, who gave the "horseshoe" its name, found in the languages of the two extremes a convergence beneath the opposition (Faye). For such figures, moving from one pole to the other changed the address of the enemy, not the way of seeing the world.

This is also the limit of the left–right frame. It compresses a space of at least two dimensions, and by Lipset and Rokkan's reckoning four, into one, and in doing so hides the proximity that matters most. The more useful description is that extremism is defined by position on the authoritarian axis, by acceptance of a narrative of decline, and by an unfalsifiable worldview; whether it faces left or right is a secondary property, determined by where it draws its enemy.

V. Two Shocks, One Enemy

Where it draws its enemy depends, I think, on what kind of standing has been lost. Societies suffer two kinds of shock. A membership shock, such as defeat in war, loss of territory, mass immigration, or abandonment by an ally, disturbs the question of who belongs, and invites a horizontal line. A hierarchy shock, such as financial collapse, deindustrialisation, or a sudden widening of inequality, disturbs the question of who stands where, and invites a vertical one. Recent work on populism has divided over whether its roots are cultural or economic (Norris and Inglehart; Autor et al.); the more illuminating answer is that both operate through the perceived loss of social status, and that the kind of status lost shapes the grievance (Gidron and Hall).

When both shocks strike at once, the two lines are drawn together, and the enemies they define are fused into one. Weimar Germany is the canonical case. It suffered defeat in 1918 without occupation, which bred the legend of a stab in the back; it lost territory under a treaty whose war-guilt clause wrote humiliation into international law. Robert Art's observation that coercion fails when it demands visible submission (Art 10) was here enshrined as settlement. It then suffered hyperinflation in 1923, which erased the savings of the middle classes, and the Depression after 1929, which put some six million out of work. By July 1932, the National Socialists and the Communists together held a majority of the vote, a negative majority capable of blocking any government and supporting none. In November of that year, in the Berlin transport strike, the two parties briefly acted in concert.

The fusion was accomplished through antisemitism. In Nazi propaganda the Jew was simultaneously outside the nation, above it as international finance, and beneath it as Bolshevik subversion, at once capitalist, communist, and alien. The combination is incoherent, but conspiracy does not require coherence; it requires a single target for every grievance. German Social Democrats had long called antisemitism the socialism of fools, a device for diverting class anger onto a false object. Once in power, the regime discarded its vertical rhetoric: Gregor Strasser, leader of its anticapitalist wing, was murdered in 1934, and Hitler made his arrangements with industry and the army. What replaced class conflict was the Volksgemeinschaft, a national community within which workers and owners were comrades. The anger did not disappear; it was exported beyond the nation's borders. This is the essential technique of fascism: to convert vertical resentment into horizontal enmity. Lipset's analysis of the Nazi vote shows the mechanism at work, for the party's core was the declining middle class, shopkeepers, and the Protestant countryside, the people who had lost their savings, while the unemployed workers went to the Communists (Lipset). The kind of standing lost determined the line drawn.

Fusion is the most dangerous outcome for two reasons. It draws support from both constituencies at once. And it makes the enemy total. A horizontal enemy can in principle be expelled; a vertical enemy can be neutralised by redistribution. An enemy who is at once outside and above can be handled by neither. There is no form in which such an enemy can surrender, no settlement that could recognise it, and so the logic of fusion tends toward elimination. In the terms of strategic studies, fusion abolishes the precondition of war termination: a form in which the other side can be acknowledged.

Dual shock does not determine its outcome. Russia in 1917 suffered defeat and economic collapse together and went left, because the Bolsheviks were organised first and the old army had dissolved. But post-Soviet Russia reproduced the Weimar configuration almost exactly: the loss of empire left some twenty-five million Russians abroad overnight, while hyperinflation and insider privatisation created a new hierarchy of oligarchs. Scholars spoke of "Weimar Russia" (Hanson). In 1993 Eduard Limonov and Alexander Dugin founded a party that named the formula outright, National Bolshevism, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's nationalists won nearly a quarter of the party-list vote. The regime that followed completed the fusion at the level of the state: Soviet nostalgia along the vertical axis, Orthodox nationalism along the horizontal, and an enemy, "the West," that is both a foreign power and a global elite.

VI. Europe's Inheritance

Europe's history can be read as the repeated construction and collapse of the thin public layer on which its pluralism depends.

It began, as noted, with the privatisation of faith after the wars of religion. It acquired its modern axes with the dual revolution. It generated its most potent anti-bourgeois sensibility in the decades before 1914, when Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Dostoevsky diagnosed decadence, and when Sorel's revisionist Marxism, stripped of its materialism, met an insurgent nationalism. Zeev Sternhell argued that fascist ideology was born from exactly this meeting, and born in France before it triumphed in Italy and Germany: its ingredients were a Marxism that had abandoned economics for myth, a nationalism that had turned against liberal democracy, and a shared revulsion against bourgeois materialism (Sternhell). Neither right nor left, in his phrase, and both.

The interwar period brought the fusion to power. What followed was the most successful reconstruction of the public layer in European history. Social democracy, Christian democracy, and the European Community rebuilt a thin common floor, the mixed economy, and a politics of negotiable interests, and it prevailed not because it was correct in every particular but because it was revisable. Its elections forced periodic correction; the pure programmes on either side could not correct themselves and failed. Two conditions underwrote this success. The first was American power, supplied through the Marshall Plan and NATO. The second, less often acknowledged, was the Soviet Union: the existence of a pure alternative on the left strengthened the bargaining position of the mixed one. After 1989, that leverage disappeared.

VII. Europe's Present

What replaced it was an arrangement Robert Kagan described with unkind precision: Europe had entered a Kantian paradise of law and negotiation, sustainable only because the United States remained in a Hobbesian world and did the fighting (Kagan). Its terms can be stated as a triangle. Energy came from Russia; in 2021 more than half of Germany's gas imports were Russian, justified by the doctrine of change through trade. Markets were in China, the principal outlet for German cars and machinery. Security came from the United States. On this foundation Europe exercised a distinctive kind of influence: first described as "civilian power" (Duchêne), then as "normative power" (Manners), most recently as the "Brussels effect," the capacity to make European regulation the global standard (Bradford).

It is tempting to call this a pipe dream. It was, rather, a thirty-year arbitrage. From 1990 to 2020 it worked and made Germany rich. Its weakness was that it depended simultaneously on three external conditions, and between 2022 and 2026 all three failed together: Russian gas was cut, China turned from customer to competitor, and the United States turned its tariffs on allies and put its security commitments in question. Robert Art had anticipated the structure in 1980. American military power, he argued, was "the cement of economic interdependence," and states that chose to field forces far smaller than their economies could bear "will pay the price" (Art 29, 27). Europe was complex interdependence made flesh (Keohane and Nye); Art's point was that it stood on an American blade.

The failure of the arrangement has delivered Europe its third dual shock. Along the horizontal axis: a hostile Russia on its borders, an ally that might leave, and continuing migration. Along the vertical: deindustrialisation, energy costs, and a squeezed middle.

The target of anti-bourgeois resentment has shifted accordingly. In the nineteenth century it was the factory owner and the banker. Today it is the credentialed moralist. Thomas Piketty has documented the transformation: parties of the left have become parties of the highly educated, a "Brahmin left," while parties of the right remain those of the wealthy, a "merchant right," leaving the less educated and less affluent without representation and available to nativist populism (Piketty). The American writer David Brooks named the new class the "bourgeois bohemians" (Brooks); in French, bobohas become an epithet. This is the class that, in the eyes of its critics, lectures the rest while others bear the cost of its principles. Both extremes despise it. The far left calls it hypocritical liberalism; the far right calls it the globalist elite. They are describing the same people.

Place the three elements together: the migrant, who is outside; the Brussels and Berlin technocrat, who is above; and the moralising bourgeoisie, who preaches. The result is already in circulation. Renaud Camus's theory of the "Great Replacement" holds that elites are deliberately importing foreigners to replace native populations (Camus). Its structure is the one that animated Weimar's fusion: an elite above using an alien to strike at the people. The parties that combine the axes are no longer hypothetical. Germany's Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, founded in 2024 by a former leader of the Left Party, joins left economics to restriction of immigration, a return to Russian gas, and opposition to NATO. France's Rassemblement National has moved its economic programme leftward. The Alternative für Deutschland is strongest in the former East, where the hierarchy shock struck hardest. And these forces share a geopolitical orientation: they wish to return to the Russian corner of the collapsed triangle. Domestic fusion politics has become a variable in the alliance structure.

The ingredients Sternhell identified at the origin of fascism, vertical resentment, horizontal enmity, and anti-bourgeois revulsion, have been reassembled. That the ingredients are present is not the same as the dish. Fascism requires the cult of violence, the leader principle, and the repudiation of parliament, and most of these parties compete in elections and abide by their results. But the reassembly is itself a signal, and it would be negligent not to read it.

VIII. Europe's Future

Three variables will decide what follows.

The first is whether Europe can keep its public layer thin: whether it can hold the indivisible questions of identity, faith, and taste off the public table against pressure from both directions. Every attempt to make correct belief a public obligation, whether in the idiom of national virtue or of progressive virtue, reopens the wars of religion in a secular key.

The second is whether it can offer those who have lost standing a form of recognition. Domestically, this means representing the constituency Piketty describes as abandoned, rather than lecturing it. Externally, it means deciding what to do with Russia after the present regime. That Russia will be poor for its size, with a nominal economy comparable to Italy's or South Korea's and nearly three times South Korea's population; a commodity exporter with world-class nuclear engineering but little capacity to build the machines that build machines; demographically shrinking; and armed with the largest nuclear arsenal on earth. Geoffrey Hosking's distinction captures its predicament: Britain had an empire, but Russia was one (Hosking). Subtract the empire and there is no settled account of what remains. Such a Russia will face its own dual shock, the final collapse of imperial identity and the fiscal cliff of a demobilised war economy. History offers four templates. Versailles imposed humiliation and bred revanche. Germany in 1945 was defeated totally and then given a new identity, but occupation was the precondition, and a nuclear state cannot be occupied. Russia in the 1990s was left to its humiliation and produced Putin. Turkey after 1923 renounced its empire and redefined itself as a nation, and succeeded. The question is not how weak post-imperial Russia will be, but whether it will be offered a form in which it can yield and survive. Dean Acheson said in 1962 that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role (Acheson). It was still looking sixty years later, and it had a far easier task.

The third is whether Europe will place a blade beneath its normative power once again. The commitment made at The Hague in 2025 to spend five per cent of national output on defence and related purposes by 2035 is the test (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Norms without force persuade only those already inclined to agree; Art's closing lesson was that the mere presence of a credible military option is what disciplines diplomacy (Art 35).

If the first two conditions fail, the fusion narrative has an electorate; if the third fails, it also has an argument, because a Europe unable to defend its settlement will be told, plausibly, that the settlement was never real.

Coda

The many are not weak. They are the least common multiple of a society, larger than any of their members, strong in aggregate and robust so long as they remain independent. Contempt for them is an error of position: the conversion of one's own fall into a verdict on the world, with oneself exempted. The extremes share that error and differ only in the direction of their enmity. When a society is struck along both axes at once, the directions converge on a single enemy who is both above and outside, and against such an enemy no peace is possible. Europe has seen this twice. It is seeing the ingredients a third time. What it built after the second, a thin common floor, negotiable interests, and a guarded private sphere, is the only arrangement that has ever answered it. It was not a dream. It was a settlement, and settlements must be defended.

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