Waiting for the Barbarians

According to Jon Henley, the Guardian's Europe Correspondent, centre-right parties across the continent are being cannibalised by the far-right, in particular over the issue of immigration: "For decades, mainstream European parties on the right and left united behind a barrier – the Brandmauer (firewall) in Germany, the cordon sanitaire in France – against accommodating far-right ideas or cooperating with far-right parties. More recently, however, centre-right parties in particular have increasingly adopted far-right policies and, in several countries, formed coalitions with far-right parties. Despite evidence showing this only boosts the radical right, the process is accelerating." This makes it sound like centre-right parties are simply stupid: repeatedly pursuing an electoral strategy that demonstrably does not work. But they are clearly doing this with their eyes wide open. In fact, the normalisation of rightwing policies is less a push from the fringe and more of a pull from the centre, reflecting that it is the nominal middle that is choosing to shift rightwards. It isn't being dragged there against its will. 

Henley's suggestion that the centre-right are making a tactical error by trying to accommodate the far-right's policies on immigration ignores that the policies in question have long been promoted by the centre-right. In the UK, the Tories have been openly hostile to immigration since Margaret Thatcher's "swamped" remarks and regularly accused Labour of overseeing an intolerable rise in both net migration and asylum-seeking during the Blair and Brown years. That they subsequently proved incapable of delivering the promised reductions in net flows reflects the contradictions of their politics: support for capital's appetite for cheap labour and the tacit indulgence of the bigotry and xenophobia of their electoral base. In reporting the prediction that "Europe’s centre-right parties could be subsumed by the far right within 10 to 15 years", Henley misidentifies the dynamic: it is absorption, not subsumption. We've already seen this in the UK with the inroads that first UKIP and then the Brexit Party made into Tory support, its evaporation in 2019 as these voters "returned home", and now its re-emergence as Reform. This electoral promiscuity obscures the steady march to the right by the parties of the centre.

The European and American far-right remain ideologically chaotic and organisationally incompetent. The parallels with the 1930s are misleading because these groups do not in the main aspire to reorder society. As we are witnessing in real-time in the US, in power these people are focused on vandalising the state, not reinforcing it as a tool of totalitarian repression. Some voices on the far-right are programmatic reactionaries, or even sincere Fascists, but most are just pro-capital conservatives who want to deregulate markets and lower taxes on the rich. It's worth emphasising that the party leaders who have come to prominence on the far-right in Europe - Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Alice Weidel - are electoral pragmatists, concerned with relative positioning and alliance-building, rather than visionaries set on revolution. They face towards the centre and are unsurprisingly cut from the same bourgeois cloth as the cartel party leaders. That latter group includes the nominal centre-left as much as the centre-right. For example, the UK Labour government has shown its centre-right nature in office by consciously pursuing policies that it thinks will find favour with Reform voters as much as with Conservative ones, and you can't simply blame this on panicked MPs in marginal seats.

The far-right's strength is down to its promotion by the media. Long before Steve Bannon talked of "flooding the zone with shit" (ironically his claimed tactic for subverting mainstream media), rightwing newspapers were churning out propaganda that placed the locus of politics significantly to the right of centre. The rightwing policy entrpreneur Joseph Lehman claimed that "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it." That claim itself was false, not only in its supposition that changes in policy preferences were purely organic but in its implication that political parties ("lawmakers") simply responded to public opinion rather than seeking to craft it. The relationship between press barons and politicians is often presented as asymmetric, the latter obliged to pay homage to the former (think of Tony Blair's relations with Rupert Murdoch), but they are actually symbiotic. Just as the EU was regularly blamed for policies that originated in Whitehall, so the press (presented as a reflection of popular opinion) can be blamed for a party shifting its policy rightwards.

This shift is often justified by reference to a minority of voters whose concerns and interests are given outsized importance on the grounds that they have hitherto been ignored by the political establishment. This is usually little more than puppetry. The political cartel has been convinced since the 1970s of the rightness (sic) of the neoliberal analysis: the primacy of private property, the need to marketise public services and the priority of tax cuts. To this end, the parties have worked with pollsters and the media to construct a number of character types seen to embody the same preferences and associated virtues (independence, hard-work etc), from Basildon Man through Worcester Woman. Initially these were presented as new formations in society, representing the zeitgeist, and were characterised by a transactional attitude towards both the state and each other. As neoliberalism has curdled, a new character group has come to the fore: the left behind. In contrast to the progressive and pragmatic types of the 1980s and 90s, these voters are conservative and nostalgic, motivated by "values" that have been supposedly undermined by globalisation and "identity politics" .

The psephology of the second half of the twentieth century centred on the construct of the median voter who was not only to be found in the middle of the political spectrum but also at the midpoint of other demographic dimensions such as age, education and income. In contrast, the politics of the era that commenced with the bankruptcy of neoliberalism in 2008 - what liberal commentators have taken to referring to as "populism" - have been characterised by the idea of the neglected conservative: older, less educated and poorer. In reality, far-right voters tend to be richer than the median and predominantly middle-aged. If far-right parties are gaining greater support, that will be down to what were once described as median voters. In other words, the median voter has been recast as more conservative than the demographic reality, and thus they have acquired the traditional characteristics associated with conservatism. The one dimension of the populist cliché that does appear to be true is educational attainment: voters for far-right parties tend to be less educated than the median, however that appears to be largely a product of the relatively recent expansion of higher education, i.e. it correlates with age, and is therefore likely to dissipate over time.

This "left behind" character is deemed by political scientists to combine a more leftwing view of economics (e.g. pro-nationalisation) with a social conservatism, and thus to be potentially attracted to the policies of the far-right, or at least to the faux nostalgia of a mythical hybrid such as Blue Labour. This ignores that actual far-right parties are typically economically liberal: in favour of rolling back the state and cutting taxes. It also ignores that in the character's political articulation in the media the leftwing economics are barely mentioned, just as they are equally marginal among MPs trying to revive Blue Labourism. And that's the clue that this is a character constructed in the interests of the cartel to justify a rightwards shift in social policy without jeopardising neoliberal hegemony. This is why "anti-green" and "anti-woke" impulses features so prominently. Genuine Fascists tend to be pro-environmental, to the point of blood-and-soil mysticism, and obsessive about identity and group rights. The push against net-zero and DEI in the US clearly serves the interests of particular fractions of capital, not neo-Nazis. 

The biggest shifts in policy on the right in recent years across Europe have been on the far-right and have invariably seen a move towards the centre. This has coincided with the nominal centre-left moving to the right, so squeezing the traditional parties of the centre-right. Thus the Rassemblement National in France has dropped its plan to quit the EU while Marine Le Pen continues her strategy of de-demonisation and seeks de facto alliances with the centre-right now represented by Emmanuel Macron. The Brothers of Italy have toned down their support for protectionism and shifted towards Atlanticism as they have joined the centre-right in a government coalition. The AfD in Germany is split between a centripetal Alternative Mitte and a more radical-right Der Flügel, with the former clearly in the ascendancy and keen to ally with the CDU/CSU. Across Europe, the far-right is being house-trained by the cartel as part of a process that seeks to embed neoliberal economics and governance within a "populist" framework of social reaction. All that has changed since 2008 is the abandoment of the progressive narrative of the centre-left.