In the light of the results of the recent U.S. election, it seems appropriate to publish an extract from a recent edition of Studies, Spring 2024.
The extract below is taken from “The Rise of the Far Right: From Condemnation to Understanding”, the first of two articles by Dr Peadar Kirby in which he asks what it is that those who vote for far-right figures are looking for; what needs they think autocratic leaders can meet; and why they feel they should choose authoritarian governance over the consultative processes of democracy.
In addressing the potent detrimental effects neoliberal policies have had in disempowering populations in favour of “facilitating the excesses of big business”, Kirby has sought a deeper understanding of how the popular vote has moved over the last decade to support far-right politicians such as Donald Trump, and how important gaining an understanding of far-right supporters is to developing a global politics that empowers for the common good.
Dr Peadar Kirby is Professor Emeritus of International Politics and Public Policy, University of Limerick. His most recent book is Karl Polanyi and the Contemporary Political Crisis: Transforming Market Society in the Era of Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Parts 1 and 2 of this article can be accessed from the Studies website here and here. Alternatively the article extracted here can be accessed from Project MUSE at the link below.
Peader Kirby, ‘The Rise of the Far-Right: From Condemnation to Understanding’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 113, No. 449 (Spring, 2024), 105-114. Project MUSE link: https://doi.org/10.1353/stu.2024.a922772
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Can the West regain its optimism? If the answer is no – and most of the portents are skewing the wrong way – liberal democracy will follow. If the next few years resemble the last, it is questionable whether Western democracy can take the strain. People have lost faith that their systems can deliver. More and more are looking backwards to a golden age that can never be regained.
There is much evidence to support this way of framing the threat to the dominant socio-economic order. However, there are also major limitations both to the diagnosis and, even more so, to the prescriptions offered. It is relatively easy to dismiss the worldview and discourse of those right-wing forces attacking the liberal order as being conspiratorial, lacking nuance or clarity, playing on emotions rather than on a rational examination of issues, and on offering simplistic solutions in place of solid and credible ones. Yet, in many ways this is a self-defeating stance as it fails to appreciate that the discourse so easily dismissed is, in fact, having a very significant appeal among growing numbers of electors in a wide range of countries in Europe, North America and beyond. Instead of dismissing it and offering a staunch and determined defence of the liberal order as the way forward, a greater effort needs to be made both to recognise the limitations of liberalism and to offer responses that can address the reasons that people are attracted by the proponents of what is sometimes called ‘illiberal democracy’.
Up to recently, the principles underpinning liberalism were widely accepted, certainly by the vast majority of Europeans and North Americans. They include individual liberty, the rule of law, a fair, tolerant, inclusive and impartial political system, an independent and diverse media, and personal security. Severely tested in the first half of the twentieth century, liberalism emerged strengthened firstly in western Europe by mid-century and, for a brief period towards the end of that century, seemed to put down roots in eastern Europe, throughout much of Latin America and in parts of Asia and Africa. However, the tide has truly turned as influential books with titles like How Democracies Die and The Strange Death of Europe attest to a serious concern that this liberal order is now struggling to survive.
These values were associated in the past with a social market economy that saw the need to intervene on behalf of less privileged social groups. However, in recent times, liberal values have come to be associated more and more with neoliberalism, the retreat from efforts to modify the inequalities and elitism of capitalism and, in fact, the imposition of a technocratic, deeply divisive and socially corrosive system with deep implications for political power. As Stern puts it:
The global economic order created by neoliberals has not merely dethroned democratic politics; it has established a new kind of political power. As governments turned from containing to facilitating the excesses of big business, the lines between national government and private banks and corporations have blurred. Our technocracy involves the alignment of private and public bureaucracies, facilitated by revolving doors between them.
And, as he adds, ‘polarization and democratic incompetence are the consequence of material disempowerment’.
The focus on the threat to our liberal values tends to overlook this other aspect of liberalism, and therefore fails to understand the conditions creating a profound sense of disempowerment, which is proving to be easily weaponised, aided and abetted by mass social media, into a destructive rage at elites. Jan Zielonka, Professor of European Politics at Oxford, writes: ‘By privatizing and deregulating the economic sector liberals have effectively prevented the electorate from changing the course of economic policies. Liberals have also spread, some would say “imposed”, their atomistic model of society.’
Liberals themselves, both politicians and intellectuals, intentionally present oversimplified accounts of complex economic and social issues, and spread fears to undermine opponents’ claims, he goes on, and asks whether the liberal vision can ‘sufficiently account for people’s fears and passions, collective bonds and traditions, trust, love and bigotries’. This is echoed by Spanish sociologist and former government minister Manuel Castells, when he writes:
The less control people have over the market and over their state the more do they fall back on a core identity that cannot be dissolved in the vertigo of global flows. They find refuge in nation, territory, God. While the triumphal elites of globalisation proclaim themselves world citizens, broad sections of society entrench themselves in the cultural spaces where they find recognition and in which their value depends on their community and not on their bank account.
Rather than lamenting the threat to the individualist values of the liberal order, therefore, far more attention needs to be paid to the profound reconfiguration of power occasioned by the neoliberal turn in political economy (what is often referred to as Reaganism and Thatcherism). This offers a more substantial way to understand the reasons for the rise of the far-right as well as prescriptions to address it. Political scientists Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin break down the appeal of the far-right to the four Ds: distrust of established political and economic elites, a sense of deprivation based on falling behind other social groups, a potent fear of the destruction of their way of life (linked to perceptions of immigrant groups being favoured by elites), and a process of de-alignment as the old bonds between the people and traditional parties have begun to break down.
David Goodhart, writing about Britain, profiles two ‘tribes’ that constitute ‘the central divide in British society’: the Anywheres and the Somewheres. These groupings cannot easily be mapped onto conventional social categories, being looser alignments of sentiment and worldview. The Somewheres, which Goodhart estimates to include about half the population, are those who feel ‘left behind’, economically, educationally and culturally, but also those who feel more ambivalent about wider social trends, being more linked to community and their place of belonging. They are not limited therefore to the economically marginalised. The Anywheres can feel at home anywhere, due to higher levels of education, cultural mobility and a sense of entitlement in the dominant society with an ideology of ‘progressive individualism’. These he estimates constitute between 20% and 25% of the British population.
Defences of liberal rights carry little weight with those who feel disempowered and excluded, and may indeed further threaten such rights if they are identified with a defence of the existing order. And, as Pope Francis puts it in Fratelli Tutti, ‘political propaganda, the media and the shapers of public opinion will continue to promote an individualistic and uncritical culture subservient to unregulated economic interests and societal institutions at the service of those who already enjoy too much power’. What all this exposes are the moral limitations of liberalism itself which can be seen as a means towards living a common social life based on tolerating people who have conflicting ideals and interests. Yet, when those holding power – and in our neoliberalised societies it is economic rather than political power that is far more decisive in configuring outcomes – are seen to look after themselves while the fragile threads holding society together are neglected, then the basis for toleration quickly evaporates. One can point to many examples, from the ways in which Poland’s Law and Justice Party began to colonise state institutions, to Donald Trump triumphantly proclaiming that he would be a dictator only on the first day were he to be re-elected. The weakness of liberalism is therefore that it rests on public values and moral resources that it fails to cultivate, viewing ‘society as merely the sum of coexisting interests’, as Pope Francis puts it.
What is needed, therefore, argues the Pope, is to forge ‘a common project for the human family, now and in the future’:
Global society is suffering from grave structural deficiencies that cannot be resolved by piecemeal solutions or quick fixes. Much needs to change, through fundamental reform and major renewal. Only a healthy politics, involving the most diverse sectors and skills, is capable of overseeing this process. An economy that is an integral part of a political, social, cultural and popular programme directed to the common good could pave the way for ‘different possibilities which do not involve stifling human creativity and its ideals of progress, but rather directing that energy along new channels’.
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Photo: Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-2.0)