The tired dance of the demagogue

All this sickness and hate for a tax cut and health care rollback?

For a class on political ideologies in college, we were assigned excerpts of Mein Kampf in which Hitler talks about his deep admiration for Vienna’s pre-WWI mayor, Karl Lueger.

Lueger was an interesting character at an interesting moment in European politics.

The Habsburg Empire was by no means democratic, but it came to have electoral institutions with an increasingly broad franchise. And in that context, Lueger was what I suppose you would call a quintessential “anti-establishment” political figure. He took on the emperor and the imperial bureaucracy, but he was also an anti-socialist. He was deeply Catholic, but also committed to the interests of Vienna’s German-speaking native inhabitants against those of people coming in from the empire’s poorer hinterlands.

He was by almost all accounts an effective mayor. He built Vienna’s streetcar system, pursued municipal control of the gas and water system, and annexed many of Vienna’s suburbs. He built parks, hospitals, schools, and gardens. Lueger was, in short, very much the promise of democratic self-government in a context where democracy was new. He made sure the imperial capital was governed with the interests of its citizens in mind, rather than allowing them to live in squalor in the shadows of grand palaces.

He was also an avowed proponent of anti-semitic politics and, like many anti-semites throughout history, something of a troll.

Lueger liked to poke fun at the Hungarian capital by calling it “Judapest,” wouldn’t allow Jews to serve in municipal administration, and made plenty of hay out of the fact that the leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party was Jewish. Hitler called him “the most terrific German mayor of all time,” and he routinely trafficked in anti-semitic tropes, referring to Jews as “specialists in vile profits” and “expropriators of the native population,” as well as the “people who murdered God.” As this great little essay explains, Lueger freely melded a kind of traditional Christian anti-semitism with anti-semitism as anti-capitalism, while also dabbling in some of the racial anti-semitism of the later Nazis.

Crucially, part of the reason he was so freewheeling with his anti-semitism is that his investment in this was almost entirely instrumental. He’s famously said to have said, “I decide who is a Jew,” emphasizing that the point of the anti-semitism was to build Karl Lueger’s political power. He wasn’t interested in serving some abstract anti-Jewish cause — anti-Jewish feeling was mobilized to fight a three-front war against socialism, liberalism, and the dynastic establishment, all of which were in different ways associated with Jews.

In his “History of Anti-Semitism,” Léon Poliakov reports that “the enthusiastic tribute that Hitler paid him in Mein Kampf does not seem justified, for the Jews did not suffer under his administration.”

And by most accounts, he was indeed a good and effective mayor — except for the fact that four years after he died, a war began that ended the empire and set in motion a series of events that would lead a young Lueger fan to became Fuhrer and plunge the world into an even deadlier war, motivated in large part by the anti-semitic views espoused by Leuger, views that were taken extremely seriously and were not at all a troll to win elections.

It’s more a Shelbyville idea

I was thinking of Lueger because of recent events in Springfield, Ohio, where schools and hospitals have received bomb threats, windows have been smashed, and other acts and words of terror have been directed at the Haitian immigrant community. The rumor-mongering that led to this violence started locally, but gasoline was poured on the flames by J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, Christopher Rufo, and other luminaries of the conservative movement.

I’ve been a bit reluctant to engage with the specifics of this controversy, because the purpose of raising it is so obviously instrumental.