David Hugh-Jones: Who is an enemy of the people?

(From an argument with old friends on Facebook.)

In political debate today, a common way of arguing is to attack one’s opponent’s language by comparing it with the language used by other bad people. This is a form of guilt by association. You said such-and-such. X also said such-and-such. X is bad. So you are bad.

For example, the Daily Mail printed this headline in November 2016:

This caused outrage in high places. Some people claimed that the Mail was using Nazi language to attack its political opponents. Was it?

Well, yes. The Nazis used “enemy of the people” – Volksfeind – to describe Communists and Social Democrats, in a 1933 law which expropriated those parties (Gesetz über die Einziehung volks- und staatsfeindlichen Vermögens). Later, they used the same word for gays.

But there is more to the history of the phrase. The people who really used it were the Soviets. Lenin coined it (Враг народа, Vrag Naroda) in 1917 as a replacement for the more common “class enemy”. It was used to condemn the Cadet party, one of the Bolshevik’s rivals, whose leaders were arrested and shot. It came into its own under Stalin, where “enemy of the people” covered a wide variety of cases, including kulaks, and a denunciation as an enemy of the people was enough to get someone deported or killed. The phrase made it into the 1936 constitution: “Persons committing offences against public, socialist property are enemies of the people.” The Communists seem to have used it much more than the Nazis. Volksfeind appears only once in Mein Kampf, for example. In power, the Nazis preferred Staatsfeind – enemy of the state.

This hardly exonerates the Mail. Communism under Lenin and Stalin was about as evil as Nazism. Still, it is a bit harder to accuse the Mail of communism than of fascism.

Let’s go further back.

In every form of government in which the possessors of the supreme operative power have not the great body of the people for their constituents, the situation of every possessor of a share in the supreme operative power is that of an enemy of the people.

In an absolute monarchy, the situation of the monarch is at all times that of an enemy to the people.

In a limited monarchy, limited by representatives of the people, spurious or genuine, the situation of the monarch is at all times that of an enemy to the people.

In a limited monarchy, limited by a representation of the people, spurious or genuine, the situation of a representative of the people is that of an enemy to the people.

In a limited monarchy, limited by two bodies, one composed of the representatives of the people, spurious or genuine, the other of a set of men succeeding to one another upon the principle of genealogical succession, (rendered thereby a perpetually existing aristocratical body,) the situation of every member of that body is at all times that of an enemy to the people.

A people governed in any one of all these ways, is a people governed by its enemies.

This is Jeremy Bentham, the philosophic radical and founder of utilitarianism.

In fact, the phrase was most used in the 19^th century by radicals and Chartists. William Cobbett, the journalist, wrote “let anyone say what he will, if he be not for Reform, he is the enemy of the people: and, as such ought to be considered and treated.” Leigh Hunt, in a Parliamentary speech on education, said: “he who would… resist every attempt to improve the moral and intellectual capacities of the many, is not the friend but the enemy of the people.” William Hone and Francis Place used it in the Reformist’s Register. So did the anonymous author of The Rights of Nations, a Chartist tract.

These phrases must have frightened the establishment. But their users were hardly authoritarians. They were fighting to extend the right to vote.

The phrase originated, as far as we know, in the Roman republic (hostis publicus – public enemy). Its first modern use in the context of authoritarian terror was in the French revolution. A 1794 law gave ennemis du peuple the death penalty. This has the hallmarks of the classic authoritarian usage: targeting a broad, loose category of people and an ill-defined set of offences.

Here's an interesting sidelight: the phrase gained currency when Ibsen used it as the title of a play. A heroic doctor publicly denounces the town spa for being unclean, and is attacked by the townspeople for telling the truth. This sounds like another clash between liberalism and populism. Indeed, after World War II, Arthur Miller wrote an adaptation along these lines.

The truth is more complex. Miller’s rewrite concealed that the noble Doctor Stockmann was a eugenicist:

The masses are nothing but the raw material that must be fashioned into the people. Is it not so with all other living creatures on earth? How great the difference between a cultivated and an uncultivated breed of animals!... Don't you believe that the brain of a poodle has developed quite differently from that of a mongrel? ... we are animals... there is a terrible difference between men-poodles and men-mongrels.

In fact, a version of Ein Volksfeind was filmed under the Nazis. It got a happy ending: the doctor is saved from the democratic mob by the intervention of a minister from the central government – the new, Nazi central government.

So, the truth is more complicated than the Mail’s opponents have noticed. “Enemy of the people” was used by authoritarians to target their opponents, but also by democrats struggling for the suffrage. And the Nazis themselves made a propaganda film… about the dangers of unchecked populism.

Isn’t there an obvious way to separate the good and bad uses of this phrase? The good uses are in the context of a people’s struggle for democratic representation against those in power. History shows these struggles really do exist. The bad uses are by an authoritarian state, targeting ill-defined categories of people, with a broad, catch-all crime. That happens, too.

There is a lesson here about the idea of populism. This word is usually used by its opponents. Most current definitions say something like: “populism pits the people against the elites, and claims that some politicians truly represent the people.”

This definition is too broad to be useful. Basically, all democratic political parties claim to represent the people. (Pop quiz: which party described itself, in its manifesto, as “the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole”? Answer: New Labour in 1997.) In fact, this notion is hard to distinguish from the very idea of democracy, which also features politicians who supposedly represent the people.

Coming back to the Mail headline, is it in the Nazi tradition? Here it is in full:

Enemies of the people: Fury over ‘out of touch’ judges who have ‘declared war on democracy’ by defying 17.4m Brexit voters and who could trigger constitutional crisis

Whether this is right or wrong – and its 2016 warning of constitutional crisis is not looking too shoddy – it clearly is not the authoritarian usage. It is targeted against a well-defined set of powerful individuals, who (it says) are opposing democracy, not a broad minority for vaguely defined crimes. It is much more like the Chartist usage.

Maybe the headline is overblown or wrong. But comparisons to the Nazis don’t make sense. What we have in the UK is a dangerous constitutional crisis. We do not have an authoritarian state murdering its enemies.

The Mail was condemned by important people like Lords, bishops and MPs. The accusation of Nazi language “did the rounds”. It was widely reported. Nobody seems to have checked up on it. It was easy to check up on, thanks to Wikipedia and Google Books. People dislike being attacked in public, and are very likely to feel persecuted – especially when they think of themselves as high-minded, politically neutral public servants. That don’t mean it is so.

In short, this accusation is itself an example of the hysteria of crowds.

There is some language that genuinely should not be used. Words can become a public signals targeting others for attack.

But in general, we should also be wary of these arguments. They themselves involve guilt by association: you said such-and-such; X said such-and-such; so you are like X. This can be a lazy way to avoid the real issues.

The real issue raised by the Mail article, and by the recent High Court decision, is: do we now have a conflict between democracy and the elite? Nothing here has addressed that serious question. Dire and facile historical comparisons don’t help.

Update

Hey, Google ngrams is useful for this sort of thing.

Volksfeind