The west devours its children.
Disenchantment with mainstream politics threatens disenchantment with democratic freedom
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For years, some of us have warned that mass disenchantment with the so-called liberal — but in reality, repressive — orthodoxies of mainstream politics was bound to produce a correspondingly extremist reaction on the other side of the cultural divide.
If the public are told for decades they are not entitled to want to inhabit a nation whose historic traditions, values and culture they recognise as their own (and that more recent arrivals will gladly share), they will be easy prey for “populists” and demagogues who will promise a return to those very values.
This is what now seems to be happening.
In the Italian general election four days ago, the Brothers of Italy — a party with fascist roots — gained more than a quarter of the vote and its leader, Giorgia Meloni, is poised to become prime minister.
In Sweden’s general election earlier this month the Sweden Democrats, a significant number of whose founders had ties to Nazi or fascist movements, became the second biggest party in the country’s parliament and stand to wield considerable influence over Sweden’s new government.
Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban boasts of running an “illiberal democracy”. Poland’s governing Law and Justice party has dismantled social-democratic checks and balances. In France, the anti-immigrant Marine le Pen is snapping at President Emmanuel Macron’s heels. America had its populist leader in Donald Trump; in Britain, the role was filled by Nigel Farage, who lit the fuse that ignited Brexit.
All these parties and politicians are described by their most bitter opponents as “far right” or even neo-fascist.
Fascism is an ideology promoting dictatorship, totalitarianism, militarism, violence, the forcible suppression of opposition, centralised autocracy and a cult of the leader.
None of these parties or individuals fits that definition. Italy’s Meloni defines herself as a conservative in the tradition of the late British philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, for whom conservatism bound a nation together through the link between past, present and future. The Sweden Democrats have systematically thrown out members who have expressed racist views, including cutting off its entire youth wing.
Of course, there are understandable suspicions that such parties may merely be sanitising their unsavoury past political links. However, such indiscriminate demonisation by their opponents tells us rather more — and more alarmingly — about the state of the west’s political culture in which these parties are making such gains...
