Fascist playbook: Use democracy’s liberties against itself.

Posted on: June 8, 2025 at 12:17:22 CT

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise.

Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

It is often noted, rightly, that fascism elevates the irrational over the rational, fanatical emotion over the intellect. It is less often remarked upon, however, that fascism performs this elevation indirectly, that is to say, propagandistically. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ ” is a 1939 essay by the American literary theorist Kenneth Burke. In it, Burke describes how Hitler, in Mein Kampf, repeatedly describes his struggle to embrace National Socialist ideals, such as the realization that life is a battle for power between groups in which reason and objectivity have no role, his realization that humans are beasts, and his rejection of the Enlightenment, as driven by reason. Burke writes, “those who attack Hitlerism as a cult of the irrational should emend their statements to this extent: irrational it is, but it is carried on under the slogan of ‘Reason.’ ” Fascists reject Enlightenment ideals while proclaiming that they are forced to do so by a stark confrontation with reality, by the natural law. As Burke notes, Hitler describes his transition into a “fanatical anti-Semite” as “a struggle of ‘reason’ and ‘reality’ against his ‘heart.’ ” The fascist claims to have been driven by scientific reason to the view that life is a merciless struggle for dominance, in which the very force that has allegedly brought him to this—the enlightenment ideal of universal reason—must be abandoned.