A jaded Hegelian might grump that human society is always in more-or-less such a state. But the particular context in which she makes the observation is the current situation in various Western democracies in which traditionally conservative parties and political factions are embracing policies and methods previously distinctive to the far right. She takes as her two prime examples Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the US and Sebastian Kurz, head of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and current Austrian Chancellor.
On the contrary, Kurz is a stiff. His style is much more reminiscent of another US President, Richard Nixon. Although Nixon lacked the baby-faced charm that allowed “Basti” to appear to older conservative voters as the ideal son-in-law. As Kurz’ first biographers Nina Horaczek and Barbara Tóth wrote in 2017, "If there is a single word that Sebastian Kurz describes, it is this: control. In short is the personified self-control. When it occurs, nothing is left to chance.“ (Sebastian Kurz: Osterreichs neues Wunderkind? 2017)
(Since Trump is a far more familiar figure for most of the world than Kurz, I give a quick sketch of Kurz’ career at the end of this post describing how he became a model European Trumpista.)
Strobl analyzes the contemporary Trump-Kurz type politics from the background of the classic examples of the Weimar Republic and the “Austrofascist” dictatorship of 1933-38, headed first by Engelbert Dollfuss and then by Kurt Schuschnigg. In light of the now-widespread attempts to distinguish authentic democratic conservatism and rightwing authoritarianism/fascism, she stresses the important point that in both Germany and Austria, the victory of the far right took place with the cooperation of the conservative parties. Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933 because conservative leaders like Franz von Papen, Kurt von Schleicher, and President Paul von Hindenburg willingley brought him into the government. As Strobl notes, Hindenburg „proceeded from the assumption of a controllable fascism and believed that the NSDAP [Nazi Party] was containable and that once in power, it would develop into a normal party.“
She also provides a useful sketch of the intellectual New Right/Alt-Right of recent years as well as its predecessor in the “Conservative Revolution” thinkers of Europe in the 1920s. The latter featured characters like Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the latter having the dubious distinction of popularizing the concept of a German “Third Reich” which the Nazis adopted. She discusses six key features of radicalized conservatism
Conscious breaching of previously observed rules of political life, both formal and informal
We see examples every day with the Trumpified Republican Party. One prominent example would be the Senate filibuster rule, a fairly obscure problem to people outside the US. (It is a US Senate rule that effectively requires 60 of the 100 Senators to approve legislation, though the Constitution itself requires only a majority.) Whatever the alleged benefit of such a rule, there is a radical difference between using it once every few years on major pieces of legislation and using it routinely to require a 60-vote majority in the 100-member Senate on a wide range of issues all the time. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein “wrote the book” on how such breaking of established norms works in the US back in 2012 with It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. And the Republicans’ approach has become constantly more radical in the subsequent years.
In Austria, Sebastian Kurz has taken a similar approach in areas like government subsidies to preferred media outlets and, most seriously, in attempts to resist and restrict the ability of the independent justice system and the Parliament to investigate potential legal wrongdoing that could be embarrassing for his government. Strobl cites a particularly flagrant case in 2021 of Finance Minister Gerhard Blümel delaying response to a court order for production of documents so long that the Austrian Constitutional Court sent an unprecedented request to President Alexander Van Der Bellen (the head of state) to insure that Kurz’ government complied with the legal court order. But it took the real possibility of the President overruling Kurz’ government and ordering the police or the military to secure the documents for Kurz and his political “family” to back down. Kurz pushed matters right up the brink of a serious constitutional crisis, in other words.
Us-against-Them polarization
The similarities here between the Trump and Kurz examples are pretty clear, especially with their reliance on xenophobic agitation. “Radicalized conservatism has taken over its treatment of opponents directly from the playbook of traditional right-wing extremism,” Strobl writes. Foreigners, minorities, the left, the “deep state”, left-leaning activists and protesters, all fit into this package.
Here the details and the hard edges matter. Politics is about conflict and differences and prioritization. What we have seen in recent decades in the US and Europe is asymmetric polarization, with the conservatives coalescing with the radical right to promote racial and ethnic and various other divisions over rightwing “culture war” themes, notably including abortion and gun proliferation in the US. While left and center-left parties are playing catch-up in establishing clear political identities around issues like worker representation, women’s and minority rights, concentration of wealth and income, and solving the climate crisis.
And while mainstream media may prefer a superficial value-free pretense of Both Sides Do It reporting, in the real world there is a radical difference between, for instance, advocating for legal and responsible police conduct and advocating to continue allowing cops to murder black people for no good reason with impunity. “Polarization” is never bad or good in itself. It always matters what the polarization is about and how the polarization takes place.
The Leader
All organizations require leadership. Some organizations have more effective and/or democratic ways of selecting leadership than others. But as Strobl reminds us, rightwing authoritarian movements require a strong degree of adoration of a leader, as with Mussolini and Hitler. The Republican Party demonstrates this currently with a cult-like reverence for Donald Trump as their leader and even as the legitimate US President. The Republican National Convention in 2020 didn’t even bother to enact a standard party platform; instead they passed a resolution asserting their support of Leader Trump.
Strobl calls attention to Kurz’ stance after he was removed from the Chancellorship in 2019 by a parliamentary no-confidence vote, forcing a new election. (See below for more details.) He adopted the slogan: „Das Parlament hat bestimmt, aber das Volk wird entscheiden!“ („Parliament has voted, but the people will decide!“)
As she explains, “He presented his supporters with the choice: ‘Me or the parliament’ and presented himself as a leader directly elected by the people, who did not need the scheming parliament.” (The Austrian President [head of state] is directly elected, but the Chancellor [head of government] is not.)
Kurz since becoming ÖVP leader in 2017 has particularly stressed his role as his role as the leader of the party and puts particular emphasis on loyalty to himself. He is surrounded by a tight-knit group of very conservative, rightwing Catholic advisers, who even refer to themselves Mafia-style as the “family.” His tight inner circle includes characters like: his cabinet head Bernhard Bonelli, graduate of an Opus Dei-run business university in Barcelona who regularly visits the Vienna Catholic Church of Saint Elizabeth during the week, currently the seat of the Grand Master of the "Teutonic Order", and, his chief political strategist Stefan Steiner, whose main political maxim is said to be “Law and Border.” His main PR spin doctor Gerald Fleischmann forms an exception to the conservative Catholic background, but this longest-standing among Kurz’ inner circle “agierte vor allem bei klassischen Kurz-Themen wie Migration und Sicherheit scharf und mit ideologischer Inbrunst.” (Klaus Knittelfelder, Inside Türkis: Die neuen Netwerke der Macht, 2020)
It is always a risk for senior managers or leading politician to be very heavily dependent on a restricted and homogenous group who are expected to display sycophantic loyalty to him. Both Trump and Kurz do seem to suffer from this problem, although Trump seems to be too erratic to keep as cohesive a group of close advisers as Kurz does. Kurz’ inner circle also strikes me as a similarity to Nixon that puts him at risk of not hearing important but unpleasant information on a timely basis.
Undermining democratic institutions from within
In both the US and Austria, the independence of the judicial institutions is a key worry. But the drastic examples Strobl references of Trump’s practice of evading Congressional authority on the leadership of even Cabinet-level departments is one that reaches much further. Trump’s deliberate sabotage of the US Postal Service in 2021 was one of the most blatant example of crassly sabotaging an important public institution with the obvious and anti-democratic goal of reducing the access of voters to mail-in voting in 2020.
Permanent campaigning
This is an important point, though it’s not one easy to define in precise terms. Of course, elected officials have an obligation to take the public duties seriously. And many of them do so, despite popular cynicism about their motivations – a cynicism for which some elected officials provide some reason. But it’s also obvious that they will think about the electoral implications of their official actions.
At the same time, if politics is conducted as a non-stop campaign, not only governance but faith in the political system suffers. Ideally, there should be some clear distinction between a governing phase and a campaigning phase. As Strobl explains:
Representatives of radicalized conservatism like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Sebastian Kurz are now working in a focused way to blur the differences between these phases and pursue politics in permanent election campaign mode. They are always keen to gain one or two percentage points in the short-term polls with spectacular actions or sensational promises. Solving actual problems recedes into the background. The opposition is also drawn into the constant skirmishes on Twitter or Facebook, the media coverage follows the latest attacks, replies and provocations, [and] the public discourse increasingly degenerates into a single mud fight.Beyond reality
In this category falls the now all-too-familiar proliferation of “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories, which have blossomed like toxic flowers during the COVID pandemic. The latter may have pushed this problem into a Hegelian transformation of "quantity into quality" and given us some grimly new phenomenon. Vaccine skepticism isn’t new, but the current level of hysteria is arguably unprecedented.
I mean, a few centuries ago European peasants may have imagined that outbreaks of the plague were due to black magic or poisoned wells. But at least they knew that the plague itself was the problem. Today’s rightwing obsession, “We have to stop the people who are conspiring to save us from being killed by the plague!” is a pretty bizarre development.
Strobl also discusses a factor at work in the US, Austria, and other countries, i.e., urban/rural differences that conservatives successfully exploit. That element is discussed at length in US politics though too rarely in depth. Instead, we tend to get the hackneyed and cringe-worthy articles in which reporters for major metropolitan news outlets go out to some small town to talk to white people in a diner to hear them complain that they don’t feel like politicians in power listen to them enough. In Austria, there is the particular feature that Vienna has for over a century been a particular stronghold of Social Democracy – so much so that it still routinely referred to in political reporting as “Red Vienna”, a term in which Austrian Social Democrats still take pride.
Additional Background on the Political Career of Sebastian (“Basti”) Kurz
Even some major Austrian commentators who admire Sebastian Kurz’ undoubtedly successful political salesmanship will state bluntly that he has no actual political principles. If he relies on demagogic rightwing themes, it’s more because he judges them to be useful for his pursuit of power than because of ideological fanaticism as such. But Kurz is not a dumb man, he understands the real-world consequences of what he advocates.
Kurz is unusual among leading Austrian politicians in that he never finished university. But that was not because he was just a regular working stiff. He was active in the ÖVP’s youth group at a time when both of the two leading Austrian parties, the ÖVP and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), were suffering from a weak and conventional leadership and from a lack of clear political distinctions. And that opened some spectacular early opportunities for him.
Kurz became State Secretary for Integration (i.e., assimilation of immigrants) when he was 24 and Foreign Minister at 27. He became head of the ÖVP at 31 in 2017 but declined to take the role as Vice Chancellor in the SPÖ-ÖVP governing coalition his predecessor held, choosing instead to take the ÖVP out of the coalition government, forcing new elections that year.
As Nina Horaczek and Barbara Tóth wrote of him in 2017, “Kurz is masterful at knowing how to stage and sell himself and his current preferred narrative."
The issue he rode to the Chancellorship in 2017 was the 2015-6 European refugee crisis adopting crassly xenophobic and nationalistic themes that had previously been the specialty of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), which he included as a junior partner in new coalition government in late 2017 which made him Chancellor at 32.
Kurz’ Wunderwuzzi image was quickly tarnished by the antics of his coalition partner, though. Various FPÖ figures were found to be saying things that bordered so closely on the Austrian laws banning Nazi propaganda that the FPÖ’s excuse for each that it was an isolated incident, gave the phrase “isolated incident” the ironic meaning of “common as dirt.” After less than 17 months in office, Kurz was reluctantly forced to dump his tainted coalition partner after his Vice Chancellor and FPÖ head H.C. Strache was caught on film in a sting operation that may have been intended for blackmail on the popular Spanish vacation island of Ibiza negotiating shady deals with an actress he believed to be the daughter of a Russian oligarch. “Ibiza” is now a synonym for scandal and corruption in Austrian politics. (See: Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, Die Ibiza Affäre: Innenansichten eines Skandals, 2019; Florian Klenk, „Ibiza für Einsteiger“ Falter 25:2020 17.06.2020)
He became the first Chancellor to be removed by a no-confidence vote of the Parliament under the current Austrian constitution. President Van Der Bellen appointed a caretaker government – with Austria’s first female Chancellor, Brigitte Bierlein – that served for six months (2019-20) while a new national election was held, the outcome being Kurz’ return as Chancellor and head of an ÖVP-Green coalition.
Since then, COVID has dominated his political agenda. As Strobl describes, he likes to pose as Austria’s Savior, so he periodically brags about how he is saving Austria from the pandemic – now in its “fourth wave” in Austria – as well as from excessive inconveniences of lockdowns. He also continues to agitate against various of his favorite targets: immigrants, asylum seekers, Afghans, environmentalists who want to take us back to the Stone Age, the unemployed, and “political Islam.”
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