Extract from The Guardian
Far-right movements have been successful globally by politicising
hostility to immigrants and cultivating a resurgent ethnonationalism.
The left can – and should – fight back
When Donald Trump won the US presidential election, it was as if a
great gear whirred and clanked into place, and the whole global machine
was suddenly moving at a different velocity.
It was just the latest victory for rightwing nationalist populism in a liberal democracy. In places from Poland to India such actors are in government. In Sweden and Germany, they are on the march, and they drove the Brexit vote in the UK. In France, Marine Le Pen just might be elected president next year.
In every case, their path to power has been in the development of a politicised hostility to immigrants and refugees, and the cultivation of a resurgent ethnonationalism.
Though he capitalised on the decadence and ineptitude of the Democratic party apparatus, Trump followed the same pattern. Make America Great Again. Take Back Control.
The ethnonationalist right has presented newcomers as scapegoats at a time when the Syrian war, among other catastrophes, is displacing millions of people, when the global economy has settled into a pattern of low growth, and when neoliberal orthodoxy has become discredited in the eyes of liberal-democratic electorates.
They’re also acting at a time when climate change is really starting to bite.
But the election result two weeks ago gave a global empire over to these forces. One in which drone assassinations, mass surveillance, and endless war have been legitimised, even normalised, by administrations of both stripes.
And people close to the president-elect have explicitly stated their desire to promote and extend a kind of far right international. In a speech published by Buzzfeed, former Breitbart CEO and newly appointed white house director of strategy, Steve Bannon, described the far right’s recent victories as
“a global revolt. I think you’re going to see it in Latin America, I think you’re going to see it in Asia, I think you’ve already seen it in India. Modi’s great victory was very much based on these Reaganesque principles, so I think this is a global revolt”.
Bannon’s feeling of kinship for other nationalist groups is mirrored by the international online circulation of far-right ideology. In a country like Australia, whose political class is mostly in thrall to its imperial sponsor, all of this was bound to have an effect.
The surest sign of that was not Peter Dutton’s decision to single out a settled, generally peaceable migrant community – Lebanese-Australians – as a terrorist threat. It was Malcolm Turnbull’s refusal to gainsay or sack him for it.
Turnbull – who at one time many people fondly imagined to be a crypto-progressive – clearly thinks that he has to make an accommodation with the global wave of xenophobia. Local contingencies – like a finely balanced Senate and the need to accommodate the extremists in his own party room – cannot explain his decision to tweet out border protection porn like he did last week.
Clearly he believes that paranoid nationalism has won the field. The noises coming from Labor this month suggest that they may have the same suspicion.
It might seem redundant to worry about a Trumpian pull on Australian politics, given everything we have done ourselves. Trump has promised to build a wall, but Australia has been fine-tuning its own version – an archipelago of refugee prisons – for a generation. The nation has made no meaningful restitution to those whose dispossession it was built on. Muslims are the subject of rolling, politicised fear campaigns, and we enthusiastically participate in a US-led global surveillance effort. We are also unrepentant contributors to accelerating climate change.
But things could always get worse.
To prevent that from happening, we need to create a political alternative which transcends both neoliberalism and quasi-fascism.
There are some small hopeful signs in electoral politics, like the Sanders campaign, and the survival (so far) of Jeremy Corbyn.
But in their response to these developments, centre-left parties have shown how allergic they are to even mild forms of social-democratic politics. In Labor, such ideas don’t really get a look in when it comes to framing serious commitments.
We need to go beyond the parties and elections, and look to the social movements that might shift them.
Black Lives Matter and even Occupy have shifted the discourse in the US. The current confrontation at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota promises to do the same thing with indigenous rights and fossil fuel dependence.
And the career of those movements shows how, even though the left’s infrastructure is dispersed – and it can appear small, weak, and divided – it is possible to build solidarity across borders.
More top-down initiatives and campaigns like Yanis Varoufakis’s Diem25, which seeks to resurrect cross-national connections along democratic lines, can complement these social movements, and harness the involvement of citizens who feel disillusioned by the political system, but horrified by the way its collapse is benefiting the far right.
BLM and Standing Rock also show that success now must come not only from a capacity to organise, but a strategic willingness to be organised, which means following where those most affected by revanchist, white nationalist politics lead.
But we must recognise that the scope of this danger is now global, and that we must find ways to match the far right’s global vision.
It was just the latest victory for rightwing nationalist populism in a liberal democracy. In places from Poland to India such actors are in government. In Sweden and Germany, they are on the march, and they drove the Brexit vote in the UK. In France, Marine Le Pen just might be elected president next year.
In every case, their path to power has been in the development of a politicised hostility to immigrants and refugees, and the cultivation of a resurgent ethnonationalism.
Though he capitalised on the decadence and ineptitude of the Democratic party apparatus, Trump followed the same pattern. Make America Great Again. Take Back Control.
The ethnonationalist right has presented newcomers as scapegoats at a time when the Syrian war, among other catastrophes, is displacing millions of people, when the global economy has settled into a pattern of low growth, and when neoliberal orthodoxy has become discredited in the eyes of liberal-democratic electorates.
They’re also acting at a time when climate change is really starting to bite.
But the election result two weeks ago gave a global empire over to these forces. One in which drone assassinations, mass surveillance, and endless war have been legitimised, even normalised, by administrations of both stripes.
And people close to the president-elect have explicitly stated their desire to promote and extend a kind of far right international. In a speech published by Buzzfeed, former Breitbart CEO and newly appointed white house director of strategy, Steve Bannon, described the far right’s recent victories as
“a global revolt. I think you’re going to see it in Latin America, I think you’re going to see it in Asia, I think you’ve already seen it in India. Modi’s great victory was very much based on these Reaganesque principles, so I think this is a global revolt”.
Bannon’s feeling of kinship for other nationalist groups is mirrored by the international online circulation of far-right ideology. In a country like Australia, whose political class is mostly in thrall to its imperial sponsor, all of this was bound to have an effect.
The surest sign of that was not Peter Dutton’s decision to single out a settled, generally peaceable migrant community – Lebanese-Australians – as a terrorist threat. It was Malcolm Turnbull’s refusal to gainsay or sack him for it.
Turnbull – who at one time many people fondly imagined to be a crypto-progressive – clearly thinks that he has to make an accommodation with the global wave of xenophobia. Local contingencies – like a finely balanced Senate and the need to accommodate the extremists in his own party room – cannot explain his decision to tweet out border protection porn like he did last week.
Clearly he believes that paranoid nationalism has won the field. The noises coming from Labor this month suggest that they may have the same suspicion.
It might seem redundant to worry about a Trumpian pull on Australian politics, given everything we have done ourselves. Trump has promised to build a wall, but Australia has been fine-tuning its own version – an archipelago of refugee prisons – for a generation. The nation has made no meaningful restitution to those whose dispossession it was built on. Muslims are the subject of rolling, politicised fear campaigns, and we enthusiastically participate in a US-led global surveillance effort. We are also unrepentant contributors to accelerating climate change.
But things could always get worse.
To prevent that from happening, we need to create a political alternative which transcends both neoliberalism and quasi-fascism.
There are some small hopeful signs in electoral politics, like the Sanders campaign, and the survival (so far) of Jeremy Corbyn.
But in their response to these developments, centre-left parties have shown how allergic they are to even mild forms of social-democratic politics. In Labor, such ideas don’t really get a look in when it comes to framing serious commitments.
We need to go beyond the parties and elections, and look to the social movements that might shift them.
Black Lives Matter and even Occupy have shifted the discourse in the US. The current confrontation at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota promises to do the same thing with indigenous rights and fossil fuel dependence.
And the career of those movements shows how, even though the left’s infrastructure is dispersed – and it can appear small, weak, and divided – it is possible to build solidarity across borders.
More top-down initiatives and campaigns like Yanis Varoufakis’s Diem25, which seeks to resurrect cross-national connections along democratic lines, can complement these social movements, and harness the involvement of citizens who feel disillusioned by the political system, but horrified by the way its collapse is benefiting the far right.
BLM and Standing Rock also show that success now must come not only from a capacity to organise, but a strategic willingness to be organised, which means following where those most affected by revanchist, white nationalist politics lead.
But we must recognise that the scope of this danger is now global, and that we must find ways to match the far right’s global vision.
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