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The Rise of the Far Right

A little black humour: trains running on time sort of thing.

Off out now but hopefully my humorous opening gambit won't deter people from commenting.

For the record I think it's bad too.

Question is what can we do about it?
 
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the rise of the far right is a bad thing, a very bad thing.

For the most part, the far right movement has little to do with what conservatives traditionally espouse — e.g., lower taxes, reduced public services, less government regulation — and a helluva lot more to do with truly nasty things — racism, sexism, nationalism, border walls, xenophobia, dehumanization of groups, etc.

It's truly disturbing and I wish those on the sensible right spoke out against it more often.

Joe
 
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I don't differentiate between right and far right. The current Tory administration are responsible for thousands of deaths of sick and disabled people; they've presided over a big rise in homelessness and their policies have brought about an increase in child poverty. Add to that lot food banks in virtually every town and stagnation of wages.

With that record why fear the far right?
 
Joe P said:
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the rise of the far right a bad thing, a very bad thing.

For the most part, the far right movement has little to do with what conservatives traditionally espouse — e.g., lower taxes, reduced public services, less government regulation — and a helluva lot more to do with truly nasty things — racism, sexism, nationalism, border walls, xenophobia, dehumanization of groups, etc.

It's truly disturbing and I wish those on the sensible right spoke out against it more often.

Joe
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Mainstream right wing policies – “lower taxes, reduced public services, less government regulation” – equals economic deprivation and political powerlessness for most people. That’s intolerable without the “racism, sexism, nationalism, border walls, xenophobia, dehumanization of groups, etc.” to sugar the pill. As Harry says there’s little meaningful difference between the right and the far right. 90% of the stuff Trump’s doing was already being done by previous governments, Democrat and Republican. The main difference is he’s capering and showing it all off all the time while most of his predecessors at least had the good grace keep it covered up until they needed the dog whistle, and to look solemn and regretful while they blew it.
 
Joe P said:
It's truly disturbing and I wish those on the sensible right spoke out against it more often.

Joe
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Is the reason that the sensible right speak out so little, because the sensible right is so vanishingly small?
 
Dudes,

Just to it's clear, I'm left of centre and think that cutting essential services and benefits is a terrible thing and causes much hardship for the poor and disabled. But what's even worse is coupling that economic policy with what's popping up here and there in Europe and the United States.

Joe
 
Joe P said:
For the most part, the far right movement has little to do with what conservatives traditionally espouse — e.g., lower taxes, reduced public services, less government regulation — and a helluva lot more to do with truly nasty things — racism, sexism, nationalism, border walls, xenophobia, dehumanization of groups, etc.
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Kudos to recent tory govts in successfully achieving both then.
 
What about the alt-right and new-right. They seem much more dangerous to me as less obvious and much more credible.
 
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Seanm said:
Mainstream right wing policies – “lower taxes, reduced public services, less government regulation” – equals economic deprivation and political powerlessness for most people. That’s intolerable without the “racism, sexism, nationalism, border walls, xenophobia, dehumanization of groups, etc.” to sugar the pill. As Harry says there’s little meaningful difference between the right and the far right. 90% of the stuff Trump’s doing was already being done by previous governments, Democrat and Republican. The main difference is he’s capering and showing it all off all the time while most of his predecessors at least had the good grace keep it covered up until they needed the dog whistle, and to look solemn and regretful while they blew it.
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But capering has consequences. It intensifies scapegoating and hastens the descent into barbarism. I agree with the general point about the unacknowledged and unmourned deaths caused by right wing policies but this is worse.
 
MikeMA said:
What about three alt-right or new-right. They seem much more dangerous to me as less obvious and much more credible.
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Mike, I'm using "far-right" as a catch-all. I try not to use the terms you mention because they tend to obscure what's really going on and make these pernicious attitudes and actions sound kinda cool. For the same reason I refuse to refer to far-right movements as "populist" - it sanitises them.
 
droodzilla said:
But capering has consequences. It intensifies scapegoating and hastens the descent into barbarism. I agree with the general point about the unacknowledged and unmourned deaths caused by right wing policies but this is worse.
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Yes, it is worse, I'm not trivialising it. But it's absolutely not an aberration. Here's something horrible, detailing routine abuse of migrant children from 2009-2014:

Examples of the documented abuses include allegations that CBP officials:

  • Punched a child’s head three times
  • Kicked a child in the ribs
  • Used a stun gun on a boy, causing him to fall to the ground, shaking, with his eyes rolling back in his head
  • Ran over a 17-year-old with a patrol vehicle and then punched him several times
  • Verbally abused detained children, calling them dogs and “other ugly things”
  • Denied detained children permission to stand or move freely for days and threatened children who stood up with transfer to solitary confinement in a small, freezing room
  • Denied a pregnant minor medical attention when she reported pain, which preceded a stillbirth
  • Subjected a 16-year-old girl to a search in which they “forcefully spread her legs and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed”
  • Left a 4-pound premature baby and her minor mother in an overcrowded and dirty cell full of sick people, against medical advice
  • Threw out a child’s birth certificate and threatened him with sexual abuse by an adult male detainee.
The report also shows evidence of CBP holding migrant children in excess of the 72-hour maximum period permitted by law, as well as officials’ efforts to deport children without due process and via coercion.

“It’s terrifying to think that the horrible abuses described in these documents can continue and perhaps worsen under the Trump administration,” said Astrid Dominguez, director of the ACLU Border Rights Center. “It’s unacceptable that there are no mechanisms in place to shed light on CBP’s abuses and ensure accountability.”

The report provides an overview of key trends that converged to create a crisis of migrant child abuse in CBP custody, the largest federal law enforcement agency in the United States. The documents obtained from the government show no evidence that any of the abuses detailed therein were ever meaningfully investigated, much less that the officials responsible were held accountable.
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https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-obta...-widespread-abuse-child-immigrants-us-custody

So the question is, after Trump, what? Because what went before was also fascism, somewhat less intense, somewhat more unevenly distributed. And it also led to Trump as A leads to B. So it's not like going back would do any good, and I don't see any sign that the Democrats are prepared to go forward.

It's different here because there's been a real break in mainstream politics, and there's some hope. But the left are still out there on their own resisting all this: not only the "sensible right" but also the centre and centre left are treating Corbyn's Labour - the only mainstream progressive answer to the rise of the new right - as the Number One threat, and their only desire seems to be to return to the status quo - by way of an annulment of a popular vote, which is guaranteed to feed fascism. I know I always go on about the continuities between the centre and the new right, like I'm dismissing it, but I actually don't think people are taking the far right seriously enough.
 
Mull,

As you can see in the many-page Trump thread, the resident Tories are profoundly disturbed by what’s happening — not.

Joe
 
This resident Tory is highly amused by the collective weeping and wailing of the resident lefties on this forum.
If you are pinning your hopes on a Corbyn-led rescue, you are doomed to disappointment.
Britain's natural political stance is centre right. The electorate take one look at Corbyn, Macdonald and their ilk, and won't touch them with a very long barge pole.
As far as the rise of the hard right is concerned, what rise of the hard right? I do not see an increase in the popularity of the loony right, merely a retrenchment of the centre right. You know, smaller government, lower taxes, less interference by the state into people's everyday lives. And of that I thoroughly approve.

Chris
 
instead of having to type out the less taxes, smaller government cliche so often, the right could learn a trick or two from the gender-identity activists and boil it down to LTSG.
 
There is a world of difference between small government conservatism, which may have serious consequences but which is nonetheless defended in good faith, and using government to implement a much worse agenda based on exclusion.

I'm not sure the left does anyone any favours by confusing that difference - sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

Transatlantic confusion about what 'liberalism' means (leftish in the US where it applies to sociopolitics, as opposed to shorthand for 'neoliberalism' and economics here) doesn't help.
 
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