Ninety years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, fascism is not remotely on the rise in any real sense today. There are no militarised groups of brown-shirted men fighting street battles with Communists. And there are certainly no totalitarian dictators on the brink of storming the chanceries of Europe.

Yet, at the same time, the spectre of Nazism looms larger than ever in the imagination of today’s elites. They see analogies with the 1930s in every populist, democratic challenge to the status quo. Anti-Nazism has effectively become the prism through which they express their anti-democratic prejudices.

Demonising the people in this way is a familiar tactic. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, conservatives like Edmund Burke painted those in Britain demanding the same rights as their French counterparts as the ‘swinish multitude’. Likewise, today’s establishment ideologues present any democratic challenge to the political order as a proto-fascist multitude.

The myth of this ever-present fascist threat is especially important to the European Union. Indeed, the EU is premised on the idea that untrammelled public politics leads to Nazism and war. It assumes that popular passions, unleashed by national electorates, lead to the rise of totalitarianism or aggressive state nationalism unless they are subject to some kind of supranational political restraint. This is where the EU and other international institutions come in – they exist to calm and restrain the political passions of the European populace.