HITLER, it seems, is back centre stage amid the rapidly progressing collapse of bourgeois centrist politics.

Those who follow US politics will have noticed that the country’s numerous and powerful right-wing is riven on the Nazi question.

The feud began when Tucker Carlson, the country’s most influential conservative broadcaster, interviewed an unprepossessing character called Nick Fuentes, an open anti-semite and Hitler admirer.

This was too much for some on the right, who denounced Carlson for providing oxygen to views best starved of it. But not for everyone.

The head honcho at the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of conservative think-tankery, rallied to Carlson’s support.

In the escalating furore, the hard-right senator Lindsey Graham, both a Trump sycophant and an aggressive imperialist, pronounced himself as on the “‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican party.”

Anyone regarding that as good news should ponder the clear implication — that there is another wing of the US ruling party, one that thinks that Hitler was broadly on the money.

Still in the US, the Coastguard has revised its rules on what those serving may display by way of symbols. The swastika has been downgraded from a no-no to offensive depending on context.

This side of the Atlantic, the man who polling predicts will be the next Prime Minister allegedly spent his school days asserting “Hitler was right.” Nigel Farage denies the charge, albeit not entirely robustly, leaning heavily into the lapse of time since the alleged offence.

However, newly intensified scrutiny of Farage’s various pronouncements in his more mature years have also revealed a pattern of thought — conspiracism, racism, anti-semitism — which the Nazi leader would have at least recognised.

And Tory chairman Kevin Hollinrake has caused a stir by comparing some Faragean initiative involving gold badges with a similar move by the Nazis back in the day. It is a small relief to see a Tory attempting a bit of brand differentiation from Reform — it very much goes against the current.

That does not make Farage a fascist dictator in waiting. Hitler did skip on a few available vices, and self-indulgence seems to have been one of them, unless one counts the deranged monologues to captive audiences.

He did not overbother the barman at any rate. Being a Fuhrer demanded focus, and that is not Farage’s strongest suit.

Nor is the Reform leader set on marching on Moscow, the initiative that more than any other undid the Nazi regime. Were he to do so, doubtless he would earn the approbation of Keir Starmer who, for a year, could find nothing worse to say about the Reform boss than that he was a “friend of Putin.”

It was a silly jibe, more serving to underline the Prime Minister’s own commitment to continuing the war in Ukraine at whatever cost in British treasure and Ukrainian blood.

It would be much more accurate to say that Farage was “a friend of Trump.” But Starmer could hardly use that as an insult, since he has spent much of 2025 trying to convince the mercurial US president that his real British bestie can be found at No 10 Downing Street, not the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck or wherever Reform’s owner conducts his business.

Trumpian America shares some characteristics with Hitler’s regime, albeit not yet the very worst, but like Farage he does not wish to invade Russia. Will his reluctance to prolong the Ukraine war — a policy surely driven by the fact that its continuation impedes the looting of the Ukraine economy by the US oligarchy Trump serves — cause a rupture with Starmer?

Most likely not — if you grovel at Trump’s feet, as Starmer literally does, you’ve got to put up with whatever is dropped on you, including unwelcome peace.

So you can see something Hitlerian all over the place now, but the full package nowhere. The bigger racists, the more unbridled authoritarians dominating the US and menacing much of Europe, seem more inclined to avoid a great power war right now, although that was Hitler’s public pitch in 1933 and for some time thereafter.

On the other hand, the extension of international conflict is the cause of the Von der Leyens, the Macrons, the Merzs and the Starmers. To the extent that they are racists and authoritarians — and admittedly that extent is growing by the by — they are still mere dabblers as against the Trumps, Farages and Le Pens.

So when we speak of Hitler, what are we referring to? He has become a sort of omnibus compendium of wrongdoing, a universal measure of wickedness in government, which is why he is leaned on so unwisely by those in search of analogy.

It is conventional to describe him as “evil,” but he was a specific sort of bad — his crimes were a concentration of the general sufferings imperialism inflicts on the world, with a dash of added medievalism. 
Hitler was, in short, a manic bourgeois politician at a time of social disintegration — that is the setting in which his malignant stone glistened.

So today. Whatever you may look for when scouring the horizon for a new Hitler — genocidal anti-semite, brutal anti-working-class dictator, broad-brush racial supremacist, cultural nihilist or an imperialist who played the main part in the worst conflict the world has yet known — you can find something or other, even if in embryo or with different specific targets. Just not all in the one personality.
You can also find the social conditions required largely in place, with intensified global capitalist competition the main one.

As Hitler discovered, the more conventional bourgeois is quite willing to hold their nose and embrace you if the alternative seems more menacing to the things they love the best — social hierarchy, private property, profit.

Again, so today. Take Reform’s new “chief adviser on global affairs,” Alan Mendoza, who left the Tories to sign up with Farage last week.

Mendoza’s day job is as head of the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank saturated not just in Islamophobia, but in advocacy for the most aggressive imperialist world policy possible. It seems improbable that Farage’s “friendship” for Russia will survive Mendoza’s advice.

Just as German big business eventually wrapped its arms around a vulgar demagogue in the 1930s, so today the ducks are being got in a row for a new, more authoritarian, political option, with Muslims rather than Jews its main target for discrimination and harassment.

The 1930s were not today in many respects. The most obvious commonalities are the consequences of prolonged economic slump and the general sense of the dissolution of the main props of bourgeois society which, class power being as it is, really means society point blank.

The largest difference is the absence of the Soviet Union which proved an insurmountable problem for fascist and democratic imperialists alike.

Different too is the spread of nuclear weaponry which, even before artificial intelligence gets a hold of it, is a continuing complication for war-making.

Of course even if the new Hitlers do get a war on — and all history shows that is the most likely endpoint of the present contradictions — they will not be able to dragoon the rest of the world in behind them as in 1939, when the word of a viceroy was enough to commit the hundreds of millions of India to the slaughter.

Nor will they necessarily mobilise their own peoples so easily.  Anti-war sentiment, anti-imperialist sentiment even, is now widespread to an extent that would seemed inconceivable when this century started.

So while those who fought against Hitler, and those who cursed him from ghettoes, dungeons and blitzed cities, have now nearly all passed away, they have combative heirs. The “Hitler sucks” tendency may be fighting for space in the US Republican Party, but it is far more assertive on the global scale.

That is as well, for the task of burying Hitlerism will fall to each generation anew as long as the conditions that bred him recur, maturing anew in the sewers and salons of class society.

If Farage seeks to cripple trade unionism, privatise the NHS, clamp down on dissent and send goons across our cities hunting down migrant workers, will the state have the power to overcome the mass resistance such a programme would engender? I wouldn’t bet on it, although it is certainly better not to have to find out.