How to tell your right from your far right
And your far right from your fascist
What do you think about when you think about the far right? For sure whenever you use the expression on mainstream or social media someone will accuse you of label abuse. Quite often someone who you think the label might plausibly apply to.
But they have a point, these someones. In the last few years a range of new political ideologies have been evolving and a variety of terms of art have taken on new meanings. For example, the term “racist” has far broader connotations now than fifty years ago, when it usually meant unashamed and overt discrimination against people of a different skin colour or ethnicity. Today we might understand entirely unconscious behaviour as being “racist”. The famous International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance or IHRA definition of antisemitism, for example, extends well beyond what was commonly meant by the term in the immediate post-war period. The term “Islamophobia” is a very recent construct, which (in addition to its lazy use to describe anyone who is critical of religious fundamentalism) has come to describe negative characterisation of a religious minority in a majority non-Muslim society – which clearly happens.
All terms are subject to change. A “liberal” can mean a variety of different things in different places and contexts, likewise a “progressive” (if Jamaal Bowman is one, for example, is Keir Starmer?).
In the last two decades a broad movement spanning continents has become obviously more powerful and possibly the most discussed political tendency in the democratic world. It is the product of the aftermaths of the end of the Cold War and the Crash of 2008, of the onset of the era of hypermobility and hyper-communications, of the development of realised equal educational and employment rights for women – in short of profound change in a short period of time.
So, by “far right” I mean a discrete political ideology which consists of common histories, policies, outlooks and associations. It is as distinct as any ideology though, of course will overlap at some points with adjacent political thinking, will differ on some points from country to country, and will evolve over time. It is not a party and some people will move into and out of the movement. But it most definitely IS a “thing”. And this is the thing it is.
Starting with what it isn’t
The far right is NOT synonymous with neo-fascist or neo-nazi. It is self-avowedly not anti-democratic or contemptuous of all political parties or democratic institutions per se. It does not advocate state seizure by force (there are some obvious caveats here which I will come to). It does not express an overt racial ideology nor does it valorise fascist leaders of the past. The flags it uses are modified versions of the national (or regional) flags, unlike the specially constructed symbols typical of fascist movements. This is largely because the orientation of the new far right is as much towards the relatively recent past as towards a totally new future.
It's not the old Right either. The far Right is not conservative even if it is often reactionary. Old fashioned pre-war and post-war conservatism, as represented by the British Conservative Party, the French Gaullists, the CDU and other Christian Democrat traditions and the pre Trump mainstream Republican party is pro-business, oligarchical, wedded to key institutions in their existing form, rule abiding and resistant to change.
The characteristics of the Far Right
Majority grievance
By far the most important feature of the far Right is the manufacture or exploitation of majority grievance. The critical claim is almost universally that the rights (and sometimes the very existence) of the majority – often defined in ethnic terms or terms which can be understood to suggest ethnicity - are threatened by minorities. Consequently the majority are entitled to feel a sense of anger that their demographic world has been changed around them.