Carol Schaeffer

A party piñata for the far-right

Hello everyone and welcome to another interview with someone from somewhere on the left. What a turbulent week. When I last emailed, the fires in Los Angeles were just beginning to really pick up. All climate catastrophes both terrify me and break my heart, but this is the first one endangering a lot of people I know. They’re all fine, as I hope your friends and family are too, but already, the number of displaced and homeless people is devastating. I keep finding myself wondering what the tipping point will be. If you haven’t read Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry for the Future’, I’d really recommend it. I typically hate sci-fi and ‘cli-fi’ because I read fiction at night to relax, but I pushed through and learned so much from this novel. Also, I’m going to try and book some guests about climate change soon, so please let me know if there is anyone you’d like to hear from. And in the meantime, please keep safe.

Anyway, enough about climate change! Let’s dig into a far more relaxing issue, the rise of the far-right!!

My guest this week is Carol Schaeffer, an American journalist based in Berlin. Carol was a 2019–20 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin reporting on the far-right and has written for Smithsonian Magazine, ProPublica, The Atlantic, and other publications. She covers the global rise of the far-right as well as European politics and affairs. Carol is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and a policy fellow with the Jain Family Institute. We met in New York having both dated the same guy, which somehow turned out to be no barrier to friendship at all. Listen, if you thought I was done rattling through my contacts to get interviews, you were very, very wrong…

Hi Carol, so my first question to all guests is where you would put yourself on a political spectrum if 0 was the centre, +100 was totally radical left and -100 was totally fascist right.

In Germany, I find myself being much more centrist compared to what I would be in the US because the floor is so much higher here. Germany is a much more democratically socialist country than the United States could ever dream of.

That surprises me because when we met, you had been doing so much with Occupy Wall Street and at one point even living in a squat. I thought of you as very far-left then and so it’s fascinating to now hear you say ‘No, no for Germany, I'm comparatively centrist.’

My views fluctuate and move around all the time, varying from topic to topic and specificity to specificity. I don't think I ever get totally to zero because I think ascribing to total centrism gives up hope of progressivism. But I've moved away from being totally 100 now. Maybe that's after four years of Trump and with another four years on the horizon. And also with the rise of the AfD here and of the right across Europe, there's something in me saying, ‘Okay, I have my ideals, but somehow they need to be compromised.’ Because what's going to happen is so terrible and so terrifying.

I truly hate to ask this question, but could you say more about the ‘terrible’ and the ‘terrifying’?

I think under Trump and the rise of the far-right in Europe, more and more people are going to be disenfranchised, more and more social services are going to be cut and climate change is going to be pushed to the sidelines even more than it already is. All of these things are very scary and I do ascribe to some sort of political realism to some degree. So maybe on your spectrum, I’m sometimes at 25, sometimes at 75, maybe sometimes at 50, but I don't think I'm ever at 0 or 100 anymore.

As we’re already talking about the far-right, let’s jump straight into it. What made you want to write about them in Europe?

I'm interested in Central and Eastern Europe because it's a region of transition trying to figure out where it falls after socialism and in the new world system of capitalism. And what's happening is that a lot of places in the East and former socialist countries are turning very far right. I find that fascinating and I think it speaks to a lot of the failures of promises of liberalism.

How so?

The promise was that liberalism and free market capitalism and economies would deliver prosperity and freedom for all. But a lot of post-socialist places are still comparatively poor. They're places that are generally exploited for labourers, they're industrial. They don't have the prosperity that they were hoping for in the early 1990s and they're now frustrated and taking it out in some unfortunate ways.

So how did you first get into writing about all this?

I started out writing about a far-right publishing house that was run by an American and a Swedish guy. They started first in India and then moved to Hungary to capitalize on a growing far-right social scene and political environment. I thought that was really bizarre. This attempt at creating a kind of far-right social intellectualism: Paris of the 1920s but in Budapest in the 2010s and 2020s. Then from there, I began researching the global connections between the far-right. They say that they're isolationist but they’re also attempting to build a cross-border far-right movement that's aligned with certain nationalistic and traditionalist ideals.

Can you tell me about infiltrating this group in Hungary and what that was like?

So in Hungary, I managed to get invited to a birthday party. They were a genuinely cruel bunch of people and I think what helped me get in with them was that they saw an opportunity to basically have me as a party piñata, a fun party tool to humiliate. They made all these comments about me being Jewish.

How did they know? Did you tell them?

It's something that they're constantly obsessing about. I think they probably assumed that I was Jewish because I was living in New York and I'm leftist. But I don't know for sure, they might also call anybody a Jew. They told me that they could tell I had a ‘Jewish face and nose.’

I can't believe you're laughing. I need the readers to know that you’re laughing quite wildly throughout this horrible story.

They're just so ghoulish! They're such a character caricature of total monsters. At one point, one of them put their hand into my hair, along my scalp and said something like, ‘You have a bump on your skull which means you're a Jew’. They're doing unaltered Nazi-era phrenology. They’re monsters who delight in people's humiliation.

They were also saying incredibly racist things, the most racist things you could ever imagine, not at all hidden or altered in any way. Stuff about black people being genetically inferior, that kind of stuff. Nothing was sweetened at all, it was all just out there.

That sounds terrifying.

It was definitely scary. But at the same time, I thought that the chances of them actually hurting me were very low. People knew where I was and I’m sure they didn't want the police to come looking for me. So I thought — maybe foolishly — that I would overall be okay. And I did come away with a pretty insane story in the end. So the joke was on them because I wrote a big article about them which made them really mad. And making them mad made me really happy.

I can’t believe how brave you were to go there. Brave and maybe a bit nuts? Did they contact you after your article came out?

Oh, definitely. One of them threatened to sue me, though that never happened. They also talked about me on their podcast and blogs. They called me a ‘red diaper baby.’

What’s a ‘red diaper baby’?

Implying that I'm an idiot child and also a communist.

That’s so stupid that I think I love it?

Yeah. And the funny thing is, these guys are just fucking losers. I should be clear that these neo-Nazis are in the grand scheme of things, pretty irrelevant. They probably have some connections to Steve Bannon, but even Steve Bannon is pretty irrelevant now, right?

For now, but hopefully forever.

Exactly.

So what differentiates these chumps from the people at the top?

Those that rise to the tippy top of the far-right are often people are more like Trump: rich, spoiled, entitled, affected pissants.

Wow, my first time hearing the word “pissants” in a good while.

A lot of people who lead the far-right, even when they try and play themselves off as heroes for the working class, often come from very privileged backgrounds. Like Trump, Stephen Miller, Richard Spencer etc. The Swedish guy who ran this publishing house came from an upper-middle-class family in Gothenburg and went to university. He had gotten involved in far-right skinhead activity, but he wanted to play himself off as a businessman: to wear a suit and tie and have a nice haircut. And I think this privilege shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed. Because their messaging is appealing to people who are really struggling. People who want agency and who deserve it.

But they're clinging to leaders who are just awful.

Right, and these privileged leaders say, ‘I might be bad, I might be the scum of the earth, but guess what? I'm gonna be bad for you, I’m going to be bad on your side.’ It's a kind of gangster mentality. Trump does that and I think a lot of far-right leaders do.

You’re reminding me of a hope I have which is that the terrible personalities of far-right leaders mean that they cannot help but fight and undermine themselves and each other, ultimately dooming their own projects. I’m hoping for this as I’m watching chaos build in Trump's government before it's even started. What do you think?

I think at least in the United States it's going to be real chaos, yes, but that worries me because chaos at that level is really dangerous. It leaves a vacuum for the most self-serving and craven people to get to the very top and do what they see fit. Pete Hegseth for example is going to be incompetent, but his incompetence won’t prevent him from getting things done, it’ll just make him a sort of a dictator. I think it will lead to the mass exiting of anyone who can hold all of this together and provide checks and balances.

So then what do you think the Republican Party will look like in 2028, post-Trump? Is MAGA a monarchy or a sustainable ideology?

I hope they’re weak after Trump, but at the same time, the left has been so weakened and currently doesn't have a strong message itself. I'm certainly not the first person to say this, but Biden was the most pro-union president in many, many years and unions and union leaders by and large voted for Trump. What's going on there? It's a baffling question that I'm not sure will have a clear answer until much later in the Trump presidency. But it's hard to see how the left at this point can gain the working class's trust. And it needs to do that. It needs to become the party of the working class again.

By 2028, If Vance manages to remain unscathed under Trump, I think he'll be groomed to take over the MAGA mantle.

Some sort of MAGA successor.

Right. They didn’t build it during his first term for lots of reasons including that Mike Pence wasn’t going to be able to carry on. But now they have another four years to build it and I think there's going to be a more unleashed version of MAGA to create a kind of spectacle that will be useful to breed a successor.

I totally see that, but I also saw Trump working the crowd at rallies a good few times and he really did have the magic touch. It's not just enough to find an inheritor with the same ideology, they also need to be someone who can communicate like that to low-information, low-propensity voters again.

But that's exactly why they picked J.D. Vance. Look, Vance is a freaky little weirdo and he’s totally alienating in a lot of ways. But he also wrote a bestseller which was turned into a movie starring Amy Adams that was successful worldwide. Olaf Schultz, the Social Democrat Chancellor of Germany, said in Der Spiegel that it made him cry. It was a powerful book that reached a lot of people and it shows that he can craft a message and story.

That's something I would ask the Democrats right now: what's the story? What is the narrative? There has to be one.

They definitely haven't figured that out yet.

They’ve lost the plot.

So do you feel optimistic at all about the future?

This is a little cringe, but I do think there’s always hope in people. I believe people are good. I believe we want dignity and to be free from suffering, and that we want that for other people too. In terms of the immediate political situation, no, I am not super hopeful. But long-term for humanity? Yeah, I'm hopeful.

A variety pack answer there, I'll take it. Carol, can you name a politician that you admire?

I'm probably different from a lot of my peers here, but I still really respect AOC. She's definitely had to make a lot of compromises that come with governance and with being in her position. I still respect her and her story and the fact that she was able to get elected on that story.

I hear mutterings online about her selling out. But I suspect that the far-left in the US does not know how to be in power. They sometimes focus on maintaining a kind of political purity and are very loud in opposition, but these things are only helpful to an extent — they’re in no way as helpful as actually winning. AOC wants to win, which I like.

I think that's definitely right. There's always going to be a necessity for an oppositional left that's pushing us further and further left, but at the same time, we shouldn't be afraid of actually getting power and making real change. The left can be like a dog chasing a car, they don't know what to do once they catch it. I think AOC wants to catch the car and do something with it.

Like go for a drive. Though hopefully not while panting with the window down and her tongue hanging out.

Ha, yes. She’s pretty close to having a vision that I think would be good for the country and I think it would be good for people.

Okay, so let me rattle through my last questions quickly. Have you ever dated or slept with a conservative?

I have, yeah. No comments.

Moving on immediately then. Do you have any recommendations for lefty reading for us to sink our teeth into?

I would really recommend Sarah Leonard's wonderful magazine, Lux. It’s beautiful and glossy and about the left and feminism. It’s a great resource.

Thank you. Our second recommendation for Lux so far, so let’s all check it out. Lastly, what's some action that you can recommend to people?

Build your communities and invest in the people around you, your neighbours, your friends. It’s that cliche, ‘Think global, act local’. If you can get to know each other, build resiliency in your communities and focus on mutual solidarity, you can fight a lot of the worst aspects of the far-right.

Well, thank you so much Carol!

Thanks for reading everyone. We didn’t get on to it this time, but Carol’s also spent a lot of time in Ukraine since the start of the war. She’s extremely intrepid and her writing is always worth reading. You can find her on Twitter/X (for now) and Bluesky, plus some of her pieces here, here and here.