The new mass movements

By this time, you've already heard of the Greek extremist party the "Golden Dawn" [GD]. On May 6th, they took 7% of the Greek vote, winning 21 seats in parliament and leaving the world bewildered. The party has a bizarre platform of Hitler-ish measures, that are so detached from reality, so fantastical, it is difficult to take them seriously.

In an election centered on austerity, GD ran on anti-immigration policy, as if the world's tired and poor were begging to get in to Greece (immigrants make up about 9% of the Greek population, compared to about 19% of Canada's). Really, calling their platform "policy" is flattery.  It is insanity. They demanded land mines at the borders.

Who supports the party? Reuters reports that the people who voted for GD were "men aged 25-34, unemployed and without higher education."

In other words, they were people who weren't generally interested in politics. The isolated masses. The demographic that traditional political parties wrote off as chronically disengaged, too fickle to bring them to power.

The fact that these people are voting is remarkable. It goes against everything we know. Education and wealth are supposed to be the most accurate indicator of whether a person will cast a ballot. Parties cater to them. They hold the power. But they could lose that power to a fresh batch of mass movements.

This Le Monde article sees the success of the GD as indication of a larger shift away from politics-as-usual. Citing movements from across Europe of all political stripes, they note that they "have nothing in common" except "the potential to upset traditional political parties."

The press was quick to draw parallels between the GD and the Nazis, but I'll add another. In tough times, fiction is so much more compelling than reality. Don't get hung up on trying to make sense of the rhetoric, because the power of these movements is in their absurdity. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her Origins of Totalitarianism, mass movements provide a "lying world of consistency" that is "more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself."

Though the GD didn't run on monetary policy, it was the current economic turmoil that compelled these otherwise apolitical people to join their movement. When people worry, an unnatural certainty is the most potent political opiate.