The Rise of the Far-right

The current era of "populism" dates to the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent turn to austerity. Though some historian have tried to trace it back to 9/11, Islamophobia was already well-established in the late twentieth century and the pushback against "radical Islam" was pioneered by the centre-right (and not a few on the centre-left), even as it provided ammunition for the far-right. The root of the trouble in the socio-economic travails of neoliberalism led to a centrist vogue for claiming that populism was to be found equally on the left as on the right, which provided useful cover for the hysterical rejection of mild social democracy pursued by parliamentary means, just as the charge of antisemitism was wielded against those who questioned US hegemony and suggested that the Western powers were not being even-handed in their treatment of Israel and Palestine. In recent years the populist lens has switched exclusively to "the rise of the far-right", with the advances of the PVV in The Netherlands and the election of Javier Milei to the presidency in Argentina being held up as recent evidence. But the PVV is intent on a conservative coalition and Milei is just a manic retread of Southern Cone neoliberalism, so in what sense is this categorically different? One way of answering this question is to look at the role of youth.

Corbynism, like other leftist eruptions, was distinguished by two challenges to centrist orthodoxy: that there is an alternative to neoliberalism; and that the young matter politically. It's worth noting that the latter is not something instinctively resisted by conservatives. They are more than happy to present themselves as the youthful, vigorous option if faced with a tired and ageing government, as happened in the UK both in 1979 and 2010. At Margaret Thatcher's first general election victory, the Tories even won a narrow majority among 18-24 year-olds and wouldn't lose that lead till 1987. While liberals pay lip-service to youth as the motor of progressive history, the reality is that they rarely want to hear from them unless they are prepared to fully endorse the ruling, middle-aged orthodoxy. Consider the reception accorded President Macron's appointment of the youthful Gabriel Attal as France's Prime Minister: "Sylvain Maillard, head of Macron’s Renaissance party in parliament, said Attal could be relied on to “faithfully” carry Macron’s project for the country".

This marginalisation of youth on the left isn't surprising, and nor is the tendency of centre-left parties to drift to the right in search of more mature voters who are assumed to hold conservative views on both economics and welfare. What has attracted less attention among academics and the media is the way that youth has also been marginalised on the right, specifically the far-right or "national populists" beyond the traditional conservative parties. For all the panics over torch-lit marches and crowds giving Fascist salutes, the reality is that the political far-right is tame. There are no squadristi and few street fighting men. As the far-right has become electorally respectable so the skinheads have retreated into the shadows. The contemporary far-right looks notably bourgeois, and thus indistinguishable from the conservatives. And in its current incarnation it is actually haute bourgeois, if not oligarchic. The lower middle class ressentiment seen in the 1930s, which was directed against the larger capitals as much as organised labour and found fertile soil among youth denied opportunities by the Great Depression, is barely audible behind the blustering of rich men like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage.

In Europe today, the political far-right not only accommodates itself to centre-right orthodoxy (truculently pro-EU, "fiscally responsible" etc) but positively pleads with the centre-right to adopt its policies, for example on immigration, rather than simply insisting that the established parties are incapable of delivering the goods and must be swept away. The strategy has been one of absorption rather than displacement, and that absorption has been bi-directional. For example, Fidesz in Hungary, which started out as a conventional liberal party (founded under the name Alliance of Young Democrats), steadily moved rightwards to consolidate its electoral position and now promotes what it describes as "Christian illiberal democracy". What's important here is not just the historic shift to the right but the evolution from an urban student party to one dependent on older voters and rural values. In contrast, both the Rassemblement National (RN) and the Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) have moved inwards from the right, pursuing strategies of "de-demonisation" and republican respectability to attract centre-right voters. These moves have involved distancing from more radical, and more youthful, groups on the right, such as Generation Identitaire.

One obvious difference between old-style Fascism and today's far-right is the role of the party. For all the centrality of Das Führerprinzip, the Nazi revolution was effected through the NSDAP which provided a parallel "state" infrastructure before it came to power. This was not only in the sense of its corporatist rhetoric and performative welfare (e.g. soup kitchens) but in its deliberate policy of entryism into employer, farm and whitecollar organisations after 1928. It was this that provided the foundation for its seizure of power in 1933 and the subsequent process of Gleichshaltung (the coordination of society). With the exception of the RN in France, which retains signficant organisational heft in local government and the police, the present parties of the far-right are relatively weak socially, dependent on passive "respectable" supporters rather than the activist young and required to make common cause with conservatives when they achieve office. In Eastern Europe, parties of the far-right are largely indistinguishable from traditional conservatives, their capture of the state and civil organisations being essentially clientelistic. To find a social infrastructure comparable to the 1930s today, in which the party hegemonises the state, you'd have to look to the BJP in India or the AKP in Turkey.

One reason for this difference in Europe and America is the greater dependence of politics on the media as traditional routes to social engagement, such trade unions and universities, have been politically disempowered or disciplined by the market. This has boosted the far-right electorally. Ironically, this is not just down to rightwing media owners preference for the authoritarian and intolerant, it also appears in part to have been helped by liberals sanitising the far-right by using the term "populist", which most voters don't blanch at. But this media-dependence has also led to its organisational weakness, not least because the discourse is dominated by independent media personalities (think Nigel Farage or Éric Zemmour) rather than party apparatchiks, few of whom are able to convert their positions, dependent on media owners, into political power (think Tucker Carlson). The translation from articulated resentment to coherent policy has proven difficult not only for conservative parties attempting to absorb the far-right's demands (e.g. the Tories troubles with immigration) but for far-right parties when they achieve office (e.g. the Brothers of Italy's wholesale adoption of conservative orthodoxy). But the impetus for absorption remains strong. For all the worries about the electoral rise of the AfD in Germany and its "rightwing extremism" the reality is that its strategy is to eventually form a coalition with the CDU or FDP.

In short, the rise of the far-right will remain merely an artefact of centrist media coverage until such time as the insurgent parties prioritise youth over entry into the establishment. If they don't, and there are strong reasons why they won't, then youth will increasingly be sacrificed to secure middle-aged and elderly conservative voters. Those reasons include demography (an ageing population means the young will be electorally less decisive), the leftwards bent of younger cohorts on both social and economic issues (which makes them less likely to succumb to the far-right), and the tendency towards disengagement caused by the professional and managerial turn of political culture. As the far-right competes with the centre-right it will attract some younger voters, but these are the ones who would always have voted right: every polity has it young conservatives. Though there are genuine Fascists and even Nazis out there, the truth is that most of what we call the far-right today are simply the proudly illiberal end of the conservative spectrum. That is not to downplay the dangers. It was, after all, such conservatives that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power. But the far-right today cannot boast such single-minded megalomaniacs, let alone a committed revolutionary vanguard. Far-right politicians are careerists. A bit more American Psycho than the political norm, but still cut from much the same cloth.