What We Need to Know About the Far-Right and Stop the Steal
No one should be surprised by the outbreak of violence after this election. Around the world we’re seeing a growing movement of far-right organizations, parties, mobilization, charismatic and authoritarian leaders. Massive amounts of money (see Guardian article about the Koch brothers) have been raised to support these organizations and social movements. We must first understand these as social movements, not as the machinations of madmen: we make this mistake with potentially grave consequences. First, by focusing on the character of leaders instead of the characteristics of social movements, we’ll altogether miss the rightward drift of our own politics and leadership and thereby fail to offer meaningful alternatives. It is in this way that Trump and the many others like him are symptoms (see David Levine’s post here, The Problem of Character in our Current Political Climate). Second, here and abroad, neoliberal economic and political policies and parties have produced around the world the most extreme forms of inequality. And it’s not just far right movements. Listen here (link above) to description of recent events in Nigeria and the police state where they acted swiftly to quell the demands of young people.
We must now attend to fully understanding the steady rightward drift of the CENTER in U.S. politics (and elsewhere) and begin to find ways, alternative ways, to deal with the many problems we now face: massive economic upheaval and inequality, environmental crises, public health failures, healthcare inequalities, the growing threat of nuclear annihilation, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia…
And for many the desire is for a return to a past, a fantasized past, where we lived in harmony, without the OTHER intruding. And in fantasy it is a desire to return to more “traditional” politics, gender and family relations, racial homogeneity and religion, and social organization. Others can imagine no alternatives to our current political and economic worlds, that is: neoliberal economics and politics (see neocon David Brooks, New York Times, editorial or the more liberal Thomas Friedman, NY Times). Alain Badiou describes this as a false contradiction: it is either a return to the past or fortification of a failing present. This leaves us without an imagination and with impoverished political discourse. We can only consider how to improve what we have or imagine Making America Great Again. Covid-19 and events of this week in the capital of the United States remind us that we must have alternatives: fundamentally different ways of organizing our lives (see also, the British Medical Journal, Lancet, calling for new ways of caring).