The tone grows sharper, the terms grow larger. What was once an analytical category now often serves as a moral signal. The political language of the cultural sphere has noticeably accelerated.
Historical Extremes as Routine
When the American writer Siri Hustvedt compares the current state of the United States to fascism and speaks of an “underground” of resistance, she follows a rhetoric that has increasingly become habitual within the Western cultural sphere. The historical extreme term serves less as a precise diagnosis than as a moral amplifier. Fascism denotes a political system with abolished free elections, neutralized opposition, and controlled media. These criteria are not met in the United States despite polarization and severe conflicts. The comparison therefore appears less analytical than affective.
The Moral Theater of the Present
Notably, such statements are rarely made within political institutions but rather at European cultural events, festivals, and panel discussions. There they circulate as part of a transatlantic discourse that translates political developments into dramatic narratives. The cultural sphere functions as a resonance chamber of moral condensation. Complex processes are transformed into emotionally accessible images: authoritarianism, resistance, underground. These terms possess high symbolic energy but low precision. What emerges is a language that inscribes rather than describes.
The Pathos of Resistance
The term “resistance” carries strong moral weight within European memory. Its transfer to present-day conflicts generates pathos intended to mobilize, yet it also exaggerates. An underground presupposes a state that systematically criminalizes opposition. The United States remains far removed from such a condition. Nevertheless, the notion exerts an effect because it activates historical experiences and suggests urgency. The cultural sphere thus produces scenarios that oscillate between analysis and projection.
America as Projection Surface
The American conflict offers the European feuilleton an ideal projection surface. It is distant enough to be interpreted morally and close enough to allow cultural identification. The diagnosis of an impending authoritarianism simultaneously stabilizes Europe’s self-image as an enlightened counterspace. American conflicts thus become symbolic material within a transatlantic cultural drama. Statements by individual intellectuals function less as analysis than as narrative components.
The Loss of Measure
The inflationary use of historical extreme comparisons carries a price. The more frequently terms such as “fascism” or “underground” are employed, the faster they lose precision. What is intended as a warning becomes routine. The discourse shifts away from differentiated description toward morally charged total interpretations. A political language emerges that increasingly thinks in scenarios and thereby undermines its own standards. Precisely therein lies its actual effect—and its risk.
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