In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected to the White House, Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf fell into the public domain, sparking a wave of new translations all around the world. What are we to make of this convergence of two very distinct phenomena, one editorial and the other political? How can we interpret this coincidence between the worldwide distribution of Hitler’s accursed book and the revival of extreme right-wing ideologies globally (eugenics, supremacism, racism)? Is it a random concurrence of circumstances unworthy of further attention, or does it signal an ideological shift, the inaugural event in a new political cycle that has continued to expand its empire since 2016: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Matteo Salvini and Beppe Grillo in Italy, Jimmy Morales in Guatemala, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Javier Milei in Argentina…?

The term ‘populist’ is often used to describe this slew of leaders, at the risk of trivialising a historical-political concept that goes back a long way, from the Russian Narodniks of the late 19th century to major Latin American leaders like Argentina’s Juan Perón and Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas. There are profound ideological differences between these new political figures, some of whom could be described as neo-fascists, like Bolsonaro and Salvini, while others, such as Boris Johnson or Viktor Orbán, fall into the category of authoritarian liberalism or nationalism tinged with xenophobia. The latter claims to be ‘illiberal’, a neologism that has been applied to several other Central European regimes (Poland and Slovakia), as well as to Narendra Modi’s India and Recep Erdogan’s Turkey. Javier Milei, who came to power in 2023, is a libertarian who inspires numerous leading figures in the United States and Europe, among them the American billionaire Elon Musk, who has joined the new Trump administration and has just given his support to the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), the German far-right party. Are all these leaders fascists? Can their millions of voters be compared to the Nazi hordes that accompanied the rise of National Socialism in the 1920s?

What does it mean to be a fascist today? It is a question well worth asking. The issue resurfaced during the final days of the US election campaign in 2024, with comments made by John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, who described the ideology of his former boss as a ‘movement characterised by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy’. The media picked up on Trump’s statements accusing migrants of importing ‘bad genes’ and ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, rhetoric that echoes the long history of eugenics in the United States.

In an article published in 2019 in The New York Review of Books entitled ‘American Immigration: A Century of Racism’, the American academic Sarah Churchwell conducted a forensic examination of this American eugenics phenomenon. Fears that the white race might disappear inspired not only 20th-century European fascism, but also white supremacism in the United States prior to that. Traces of this can even be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Cinema has lavished lush imagery on this novel, forgetting that it painted a tragic picture of a world on the brink of collapse. All the ingredients for the 1929 crisis can be seen in it. Money as king. Fast fortunes. Free-flowing champagne at the billionaire Gatsby’s parties, where rich, purposeless New Yorkers indulge their excesses. To recap the plot: one summer evening, Nick, the narrator, drives to Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s house. Daisy, the wife, is his first cousin, and Tom is a former classmate. Over dinner, Tom explodes into a rage for no apparent reason:

Sarah Churchwell reminds us that Tom Buchanan’s arguments were inspired by two First World War bestsellers: The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant (1916), published by the same publisher as Fitzgerald’s novel, and The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, by Lothrop Stoddard (1920). These eugenicist ideas had become widespread in the 1920s, largely thanks to the legitimacy bestowed on them by cultural institutions, notably publishers, popular magazines and university professors. Fitzgerald had discovered these ‘stale ideas’ while a student at Princeton, where he attended a few lectures on eugenics. The term ‘eugenics’ (from the Greek for ‘well-born’) was coined in 1883 by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who applied Darwin’s theories of natural selection to human beings. ‘Positive eugenics’, as it was called, boasted progressive ideals that would see human existence improved by selecting the best. Its implementation, however, was generally rooted in ‘negative eugenics’, with those not selected being subjected to violent repression. This included forced sterilisation in more than 30 American states, with black citizens being disproportionately targeted.

Grant and Stoddard were merely dressing up old ‘eugenicist’ ideas in new biologist clothing, but their voices struck a chord in the devastated world of the 1920s and both their works were hugely successful. Indeed, they inspired the Immigration Act of 1924, which assigned immigration quotas to various countries in Europe (and the world) and contributed to a more than 90% reduction in immigration. The law would remain in force for 40 years until it was eventually repealed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. In 2015, Senator Jeff Sessions, who was US Attorney General in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2018, claimed that the 1924 Act had succeeded in slowing immigration ‘significantly’.

Madison Grant’s book was translated into German and the notion of racial hygiene in Germany was inspired by his theories. Hence, its influence on Nazi ideology is undeniable. In The Nazi Connection (1994), Stefan Kühl showed that the Nazis drew their eugenicist ideas from American theories, just as they used American race laws to legitimise the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Hitler even wrote a letter to Madison Grant to congratulate him, commenting that The Passing of the Great Race had become his ‘bible’! He penned his own book Mein Kampf in prison in 1924/1925, eight years after Madison Grant’s book was published. At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis’ lawyers went so far as to cite The Passing of the Great Race as a source of inspiration for the Nazis, thereby demonstrating that the United States had committed the very same crimes for which the Nazis were now being prosecuted.

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