Godwin’s Law does not apply in dangerous times. If you want to hear echoes of today’s threats against liberal democracy, turn to Nazi Germany. It denounced everyone, from Germans who sympathised with Jews to the “clique of criminals” in the army who failed to assassinate Hitler, as Volksverräter. In the Soviet Union, from Lenin via Stalin to the fall of communism, the same sentiment found a different expression. The millions who failed to please the glorious socialist motherland were vrag naroda, who deserved exile and death in Siberia for the sabotaging the workers’ paradise.

The English translation of Volksverräter and vrag naroda is “enemies of the people”, which was how the Daily Mail described three judges, who decided that the law required the prime minister to seek the approval of parliament before triggering Brexit. “The most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that parliament is sovereign,” they said. It was hardly a controversial argument. Britain had fought civil wars in the 17th century to make the point clear, after all.

For this assertion of a fundamental conservative principle, the Mail said the judges were the enemies of the people, the Telegraph said they were frustrating the will of the people and the Sun said they were a “loaded foreign elite” defying the will of “Brit voters”.

It is true but still not accurate enough to say the British right is on the rampage for the first time since Margaret Thatcher’s day. (Those too young to remember Thatcher will soon learn why you should must never allow the right out of its cage.) But the analogy does not hold. The Thatcher generation of conservatives subscribed to a comforting story about Britain that was not wholly a lie. Unlike the continentals, it ran, the sensible British did not have the guillotines of the French Revolution or the terrors of Nazi Germany and communist Russia. We believed in gradual change, the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary and the sovereignty of parliament, not totalitarian theories with genocidal consequences.

You cannot say the same about the new demagogic right now in power. When checks and balances stand in its way, it wants to smash them in the name of “the people”. To escape the Europe of the present, it is reviving the language of the Europe of the past.

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If the judges had tried to overturn the referendum result, or parliament was threatening to keep us in the EU, you could at least excuse them.

But the court merely said Theresa May had no power to implement one of the most complicated tasks modern Britain has attempted without the authority of the sovereign legislature.

You might object that I am building a grand theory on a few press cuttings. But the Tory leadership was as keen on denying the rule of law as the Tory tabloids. May and her justice secretary had to be forced to defend the judges even when the yobs of Ukip demanded their dismissal. Stephen Phillips, one of May’s own MPs, who supported Britain leaving the EU, incidentally, could nevertheless smell the faint but sharp stink of Putinism coming from Downing Street. He resigned, saying that May and her ministers think they “can do what the hell they like without asking parliament”.

Look around the world and everywhere you see the name of the “people” being used to insulate over-mighty states from dissent. Putin’s mobbish henchman in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has called for a revival of the communist-era denunciation of vrag naroda. For him, the people’s enemies were Russia’s handful of independent politicians. He wanted them put on trial “with maximum severity, for sabotage”.

In Poland, the authoritarians in the Catholic nationalist Law and Justice government dismiss those who protest at their attacks on constitutional freedoms as traitors, German stooges and “gorszy sort Polaka” – the worst type of Pole. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is so convinced the people will vote for him that he has said in advance that his defeat at the polls could only be the result of fraud by the people’s enemies.

You can now read thousands of analyses of how the new right is sweeping western democracies. Journalists, political scientists, sociologists and economists have written with care about the pessimism and xenophobia of the left behind and the power lusts of the leaders of the radical-right middle class. Welcome, though their thoughts are, they habitually fail to offer any idea of how to fight back. Like the analyses of the crisis of the left, or the crisis of social democracy that preceded them, discussions of the crisis of liberalism are long on description and short on prescription.

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I accept that in Britain, where the Labour party has perpetrated the most irresponsible act in its history by throwing itself into sectarian irrelevance, the task of organising resistance appears impossible. A start can be made, however, by twisting your knife into the cracks between the “elite” and “the people”.

By definition, the elite is composed of the men and women in power. May proves her elitism by thinking that she can govern like a monarch – Queen Theresa I. And yet she, her ministers and the Tory press think they can pose as the people’s friends. As with Putin, trying to squeeze funds for his wars from Russia’s arthritic economy, or Trump, preferring wild lies to the truth that he may be a loser, Tory authoritarianism conceals insecurity. Even a prime minister as unprepared as May knows Brexit will be horrendously difficult.

She and her supporters are turning on anyone who might point out the difficulties: the governor of the Bank of England, the chancellor, the judges and a phantom “liberal elite” that is so far from being an elite it is out of power. Their punishment beatings are warnings to MPs and peers of what will happen to them if they ask hard question. Their cries of victimhood are the beginnings of the new right’s stab-in-the-back myth that one day will blame all the problems of Brexit on everyone but them.

Tony Blair has not always had the closest of relations with the truth, but he was fair and accurate when he said of the right’s opponents, “we are the insurgents now”. At the referendum, the Brexiters were not the “voice of the people” but the voice of 52% of the people. As that small majority vanishes, as the costs mount and the complexities drag on year after year until the country becomes sick of hearing about them, be ready to ask the oldest question in politics: in whose name are you doing this to us? Not the people’s, surely?

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