A Storm is a Storm is a Storm

Goebbels’s storm speech condensed the fascist grammar into a form both poetic and violent.

It leaned heavily on interwar thinkers:

• Carl Schmitt had declared that “the concept of the political” was defined by the friend/enemy distinction; liberal compromise was decadence.
• Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West (1918–22), had portrayed civilizations as organic bodies doomed to cycles of rise and decay.
• Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, in The Third Reich (1923), supplied a myth of unity beyond parliamentary division.
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain and other racial theorists gave pseudo-scientific grounding for the Volksgemeinschaft.

Goebbels distilled these sources into a set of rhetorical moves:

• Crisis:
  • “Germany today is collapsing… the Weimar system is in ruins.”
  • The crisis is existential, not technical.
• Community:
  • “The German people must rise as one.”
  • The Volk is pure, organic, set apart from corrupt parties.
• Enemy:
  • “Parasites, profiteers, traitors.”
  • The enemy is not a rival but a sterile, corrupting force.
• Sacrifice:
  • Humiliation at Versailles and years of shame will be redeemed through struggle.
• Destiny:
  • “The German people has not been defeated.”
  • History itself guarantees rebirth.
• Inevitability:
  • “The storm will come and sweep away the old order.”

This grammar made despair into proof of destiny. Suffering itself was transformed into a sign of the community’s chosen status.

After 1945, open citation of Goebbels, Schmitt, or Spengler became politically toxic. Yet the grammar did not vanish. It survived through strategic forgetting: the laundering of fascist categories into post-war conservative discourse.

Spenglerian decline reemerged as Cold War declinism. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review warned of Western cultural collapse; Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987) reprised Spengler’s fears in the language of academia.

Schmitt’s friend/enemy logic returned as Cold War “moral clarity.” Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech (1983) framed politics as existential antagonism.

Moeller’s yearning for unity reappeared as “Western heritage” education, canon wars, and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996).

Producerism resurfaced as Reaganomics’ “makers versus takers.”

Humiliation was replaced by betrayal and martyrdom: Vietnam’s “stab in the back” myth, the canonization of fallen culture-war figures.

These shifts represent a transformation in the names of fascist philosophy, but the functions and beliefs remained the same. The Volk became “Western civilization.” Humiliation became martyrdom. Schmitt’s friend/enemy was baptized into evangelical moral dualism.

This laundering prepared the ground for postliberalism, and the language of Miller's speech.

When thinkers like Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed, 2018), Adrian Vermeule (“common good constitutionalism”), and Sohrab Ahmari (The Unbroken Thread, 2021) argue that liberal neutrality must be replaced by civilizational inheritance, they rarely cite Schmitt or Goebbels. But their categories, civilization over nation, moral truth over procedure, sacrifice over compromise, belong to the same family tree.

In The Storm Is Coming, Goebbels told his audience:

“The German people must rise as one… We demand the formation of a true Volksgemeinschaft, a people’s community beyond class and party.”

This was the center of fascist grammar: the Volk as a sacred, organic unit. The Volk is not just a nation in the administrative sense, but a living body whose survival and destiny matter more than individual freedom or parliamentary procedure.

Stephen Miller, repeats the postliberal idiom:

“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello.”

Where Goebbels named the Volk, Miller names “the West.” The form is the same: a purified community, imagined as the source of civilization. But the vocabulary has been laundered. In the wake of fascism’s defeat, explicit Volkish rhetoric was discredited. Yet the idea that peoples are organic wholes with civilizational destinies was too powerful to vanish. It re-emerged in the 20th century through Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–22), which provided a morphology of cultures rising and decaying. Post-war conservative thought carried this forward, especially through Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996). Huntington never cited Goebbels or Spengler directly, but the resemblance is clear: civilizations, not liberal institutions, are the decisive actors of history.

Postliberalism today inherits this category wholesale. Patrick Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), argued that “liberalism has failed not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself,” and called for a return to “the cultures that gave us life.” Adrian Vermeule insists that constitutional interpretation must serve “the common good of a political community” rooted in civilizational continuity. Miller’s speech shows how this plays in popular rhetoric: Athens and Rome stand in for a lineage of Western civilization, imagined as a single organic whole. The Volk has become “the West.” The grammar is unchanged.

Goebbels in 1932 declared:

“We have suffered shame and humiliation at the hands of foreign powers and their collaborators here at home.”

Humiliation was the Nazi movement’s fuel: Versailles, inflation, the sense of national disgrace. Shame was not simply pain but a prelude to redemption. The fascist grammar was clear: suffering proved the people’s chosen status.

Miller give the same structure in a different key:

“You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal. And now millions will carry on his legacy.”

The grammar is identical: injury transfigured into immortality. But the signifier has shifted. In place of national humiliation, Miller offers martyrdom: the personal death of a culture-war figure as emblem of collective injury. This is a postliberal move: the privatization of grievance into individual sacrificial figures.

Sohrab Ahmari describes this dynamic in The Unbroken Thread (2021), where he valorizes Christian willingness to suffer against liberal permissiveness. For Ahmari, it is precisely resistance, even persecution, that proves the truth of the cause. Miller’s rhetorical elevation of Kirk is this logic at scale: martyrdom as political sacrament.

The continuity is direct: where Goebbels used humilation for the basis of destiny, Miller uses martyrdom. Both use fascist logic: being attacked is not failure but evidence of righteousness.

Carl Schmitt’s famous line, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (The Concept of the Political, 1932), became the beating heart of fascist grammar. Goebbels’s storm speech followed Schmitt’s logic, declaring:

“We stand at the border between light and darkness, renewal and ruin.”

Miller echoes this directly:

“The light will defeat the dark… We are on the side of God.”

The Schmittian antagonism is intact, but reframed in postliberal language. Instead of a political enemy, it is wickedness itself. Instead of national destiny, it is divine mandate. Post-war conservatives carried this through the Cold War, where Reagan declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Postliberals today take the same line against liberal proceduralism itself. Vermeule, for instance, argues that liberalism’s attempt to remain neutral among competing goods is a fraud; politics must affirm substantive goods grounded in the Catholic natural law tradition.

Miller’s rhetoric mirrors this insistence. There is no neutral ground, no liberal compromise, no legitimate opposition. There is only God’s side and wickedness. Fascist grammar survives in the dualism of postliberal politics.

Goebbels:

“We are the ones who work and build. They are the ones who profit from the labor of others.”

The fascist grammar of producerism framed the true people as productive, creative, life-giving, while enemies were parasites and profiteers. This echoed Ernst Jünger’s exaltation of the Worker as the archetype of modern life.

Miller echoed it plainly:

“We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.”

The continuity could not be clearer. Only the civilizational unit is generative; the enemy is sterile, barren, destructive.

In the U.S., this producerist grammar was absorbed into neoliberal rhetoric. Reagan and Paul Ryan spoke of “makers versus takers.” Postliberals today reframe it as defense of rooted, productive communities against rootless cosmopolitan elites. Deneen laments the way liberal capitalism uproots communities; Ahmari contrasts family builders with culture-war decadents.

Miller’s words are a direct descendant: the creative power of the community set against enemies who are nothing but negation.

One of the most consistent tropes of fascist rhetoric is its appeal to the child. Goebbels, in 1932, promised:

“We fight so that our children may live in a proud and free Germany.”

The grammar here is straightforward: politics is justified not by present compromises but by the sanctity of future generations. Fascism insists that the true horizon of political life is reproduction: the continuation of the community into the indefinite future.

Miller amplifies the same move almost to parody:

“Our children are strong. And our grandchildren will be strong. And our children’s children’s children will be strong.”

The multiplication of descendants (“children’s children’s children”) dramatizes the depth of time at stake. It is not just about winning the present. It is about securing an unbroken lineage stretching centuries ahead. This is what queer theorist Lee Edelman critiqued as “reproductive futurism”: the political fantasy that the figure of the Child is the ultimate justification for every, and any, sacrifice.

Postliberal rhetoric leans heavily on this theme. Writers like Rod Dreher (The Benedict Option, 2017) frame Christian withdrawal from liberal society in terms of protecting children from decadence. Deneen laments that liberalism leaves families barren and communities infertile. Ahmari champions pro-natal policies as a mark of civilizational renewal. All these arguments elevate the family and the child into sacred objects of politics, repeating the fascist grammar of reproductive futurism in postliberal guise.

In Miller’s speech, this grammar is amplified in its simplest form: the survival of the West depends on multiplying descendants. Liberal pluralism is irrelevant; the politics of the future is reduced to the politics of lineage.

The final element of fascist grammar is inevitability. Goebbels promised that collapse was not the end but the prelude to rebirth:

“The storm will come and sweep away the old order.”

Inevitability converts despair into hope. If history itself guarantees victory, then suffering is not defeat but proof of destiny. This is why fascist movements thrive on setbacks: every humiliation confirms that triumph is near.

Miller’s speech repeats this logic, but with a twist:

“You cannot defeat us. You cannot slow us. You cannot stop us. You cannot deter us. We are the storm.”

Where Goebbels forecasted the storm as something approaching, Miller collapses time and identifies the movement itself as the storm. The inevitability is no longer in history’s horizon but embodied in the people themselves. This reflects a key postliberal maneuver: liberalism’s decline is not something to be awaited but something already accomplished. Postliberals describe liberalism as exhausted, hollow, already over. The only task is to recognize its end and step into civilizational destiny.

Vermeule makes this point explicitly in his call for “common good constitutionalism.” Liberal constitutionalism is not to be reformed but superseded, he argues, because it is already empty. Patrick Deneen insists that liberalism failed not by betraying itself but by fulfilling itself to exhaustion. In Miller’s idiom, this exhaustion is expressed as militant inevitability: “We are the storm.”

What links Joseph Goebbels in 1932 and Stephen Miller in 2025 is not identical ideology but a shared grammar of political being: crisis, pure community, corrupt enemy, sacrifice as redemption, destiny as certainty. Goebbels arranged these moves around the Volk and the humiliation of Versailles. Miller arranges them around the West and the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. The words differ; the grammar endures.

Postliberalism is the bridge that makes this continuity possible. After 1945, explicit fascist sources became unspeakable. Yet their categories survived through strategic forgetting. Spengler’s civilizational cycles became Huntington’s clash of civilizations. Schmitt’s friend/enemy logic became Reagan’s moral clarity. The Volk became “the West.” Humiliation became martyrdom. Producerism became “makers vs. takers.” Reproductive futurism became the culture war over family.

Postliberal thinkers like Deneen, Vermeule, Ahmari, and Dreher inherit this grammar, sidestepping its recent formations to reach toward its roots. They argue that liberalism is exhausted, that politics must be refounded on shared truth, family, and civilization. They insist on inevitability: liberal order is already collapsing, and a postliberal order must be embraced. Miller’s speech shows how these ideas sound in mass rhetoric. They are not academic quibbles. They are the living afterlife of fascist grammar.

If postliberalism is one descendant of interwar theory, liberalism is another. Both inherit the fascist grammar, but liberalism does so through a dialectical countering: every fascist move is met with its inversion. The result is not escape but entanglement.

When fascism declares crisis, liberalism adopts the language of progressive stability. Thinkers like John Dewey, writing against both reaction and authoritarianism, reframed political emergencies as solvable through education and deliberation. In Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Dewey admitted that liberalism must face “the crisis of our time,” but insisted it could be met by refining liberal means. Crisis was conceded as frame, but defused by managerial optimism.

When fascism exalts organic community, liberalism responds with universal citizenship. Hans Kelsen, defending Weimar constitutionalism against Schmitt, argued in Pure Theory of Law (1934) that legitimacy lies in procedure, not identity. The Volk was countered by the Rechtsstaat. Yet this too remained within fascist grammar: both accepted that politics required grounding in a singular body: one biological, one procedural.

When fascism names the enemy, liberalism answers with toleration. Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) took Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and inverted it: the enemy is dogmatism, the friend is openness. But the structure of thought remained antagonistic: enemies defined the grammar even if rebranded.

When fascism glorifies sacrifice, liberalism valorizes compromise. Progressive theorists like John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), shifted the site of sacrifice into the “veil of ignorance”: rational individuals willingly accept limits to their own gain for the sake of fairness. Sacrifice was softened into reasonableness, but still coded as the ground of legitimacy.

When fascism promises destiny, liberalism replies with progress. From Dewey’s faith in social learning to Rawls’s incremental justice, liberal theorists made history itself the guarantor of betterment. Where Goebbels insisted rebirth was assured, liberals insisted improvement was inevitable. Walter Benjamin’s critique of social democracy targeted exactly this saying that the faith that history already leaned toward justice was a mirror image of fascism’s fatalism.

When fascism asserts inevitability, liberalism defends procedure. Isaiah Berlin’s “value pluralism” and defense of negative liberty rested on the claim that liberal institutions can indefinitely contain conflict. Fascism proclaims the storm; liberalism replies that the constitutional order will weather it. Both frame politics as storms to be endured or ridden out.

Critical theory has long shown how this counter-grammar sustains the fascist one. Hannah Arendt famously pointed to liberal proceduralism as generating the isolation and abstraction that fascism exploited in its day-to-day operations. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw how liberal optimism, by aestheticizing progress, prepared subjects for authoritarian aesthetics. Benjamin argued that the “faith in progress” was itself fascist in form.

Thus liberalism, even in its resistance, remains bound. By countering crisis with progress, community with universality, enemy with toleration, sacrifice with compromise, destiny with progress, inevitability with procedure, liberalism preserves the very grammar it seeks to negate. It is not fascism’s opposite but its dialectical twin.

Fascist grammar begins by declaring crisis: existential collapse demanding salvation. But as Benjamin observed in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, catastrophe is not the justification for a retaliatory storm, but the condition of living with fascism itself: “the storm we call progress.” Where fascism turns crisis into a stage for authoritarian redemption, anarchist grammar recognizes it as a condition induced by the ongoing violence of capitalism, empire, and the state.

Here, Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is instructive. For populations exposed to premature death (enslaved, colonized, racialized) “crisis” is not an emergency but the normal operation of power. Anarchist practice takes this as starting point, not spectacle. It asks: how do we live and care in conditions where abandonment is ordinary?

Goebbels exalted the Volk; Miller invokes “the West.” Fascist grammar demands a purified community. Anarchist grammar proposes the commons instead: not an organic body but shared, negotiated relations.

Hannah Arendt helps us here. Against Schmitt’s annihilating friend/enemy distinction, she insists politics arises from plurality: the fragile space where differences appear to one another. The commons is Arendtian plurality grounded in material practice. And Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid shows how cooperation is not an exception but a law of life. Where fascism posits unity through exclusion, anarchist grammar finds community in the generativity of commons: gardens, networks, assemblages that exist only through care and negotiation.

Fascism requires an enemy: parasites, degenerates, “nothing.” This is Schmitt’s friend/enemy logic in its most violent form. Anarchist grammar resists this totalization. Judith Butler’s work on grievability is key: enemies are not “nothings” but lives rendered ungrievable. To insist on their grievability is to break the sacrificial economy.

Anarchist practice historically refuses to reify enemies as absolute. Struggles are real (bosses, colonizers, police) but anarchists frame them as relations of domination, not metaphysical forces. Relations can shift; solidarities can emerge. In Butler’s grammar, this refusal of dehumanization is not self-destructive weakness but creative strength: it keeps politics open rather than foreclosed.

Goebbels sanctified humiliation; Miller canonized Charlie Kirk. Fascist grammar glorifies sacrifice as proof of destiny. Anarchist grammar replaces sacrifice with solidarity. Emma Goldman put it plainly: “I demand freedom for myself and others, the right to self-expression, and everyone’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Sacrifice may occur, but solidarity, the refusal to abandon one another, is the principle.

Here Mbembe again matters. Necropolitics names how power distributes death. Anarchist solidarity refuses to let death be monopolized as fascist martyrdom. It insists on sustaining life together in the face of abandonment, turning another part of what fascism calls weakness into another site of strength.

Fascist grammar projects destiny: history moves inexorably toward the Volk or the West. Anarchist grammar answers with desire. Lauren Berlant’s critique of “cruel optimism” helps here: fascism binds people to fantasies of revival that keep them tethered to suffering. Anarchist desire is different. It is not destiny but aspiration: the small, generative acts that build other worlds. Desire is why anarchist spaces cultivate joy, art, and celebration as much as resistance.

Benjamin glimpsed this too. Against the storm of destiny, he offered the “weak messianic power” lodged in every present. Desire is that power: not a storm to come, but a practice in the now.

Finally, fascist grammar insists on inevitability: the storm will come, or “we are the storm.” Anarchist grammar insists on immanence: nothing is guaranteed. Everything depends on what we do here and now.

This is the principle of prefiguration: living as if the world we want already exists. It is not destiny deferred but life enacted. Arendt would call this natality: the fact that every action begins something new. Benjamin would call it seizing the “now-time.” For anarchists, it is immanence: politics as the present, not the storm.

This anarchist grammar is not simply defensive. It is generative. Fascism glorifies builders but builds nothing. It feeds parasitically on the life of the commons, on solidarity and care, on the very practices it denounces as weakness. Anarchist grammar, by contrast, actually produces futures. It makes worlds. It is an invisibilized force beneath many fascist fantasies: the sublated labor of those who cook, heal, teach, strike, care, and commune.

This is why fascist grammar always returns to crisis: without the generativity of anarchist life, fascism would collapse into the nothingness it projects onto others. The storm survives only by consuming the worlds that anarchism and its kin generate. To recognize this is to see that anarchism is not antifascist by design, but as an emergent consequence of its foundations.