Populist demagogues are well-known for shifting the agenda away form reality when they are under pressure. They do this by using smears and false equivalences to create a fantasy world.
This causes the boundary to be eroded the civil and the uncivil, resulting in what scholar Ruth Wodak calls the “shameless normalization” of far right discourse and ideas. As Wodak explains, “the boundaries of the ‘sayable’ are … shifted” and “traditional norms and rules of political culture, of negotiation and deliberation, are violated by continuous provocations.”
We are looking forward to change the media conversationAfter a damning report COVID rule-breakingBoris Johnson, Conservative Prime Minster, quickly employed this tactic within his government by making Keir Starmer, Labour Party leader and chief parliamentary accuser, look bad. The slur is centered on the baseless discredited claim that Starmer had protected from prosecution one of Britain’s most notorious pedophile predators, disgraced celebrity Jimmy Savile. This untruth has its own consequences. originsIn the murky, dark world of far right conspiracy theoryIt has been supported by the prime minister, which has encouraged extremists.
Most damning of all has been the condemnation by Savile’s victims, relayed by lawyer Richard Scorer who represented many of them: “I can confirm that these allegations against Sir Keir Starmer are completely unfounded and unjustified,” Scorer states unequivocally, adding that “weaponizing [the victims’] suffering to get out of a political hole is disgraceful.”
Johnson’s attempt to defend the false allegation suggests a level of strategic purpose and political calculation — although he may have miscalculated this time. Still, polling direHowever, support for Johnson among Conservative legislators remains ebbingAs key aides resign.
Johnson is still being questioned, but international events may give him a reprieve. But, Johnson could be forced to resign if his premiership crashes and burns. personalized and localized. The contemptible nature of the smear and Johnson’s attention-grabbing personality encourage the tendency to see the rot only in ThisParticularly bad apple and the danger to democracy only in certain styles of political pantomime or scurrilous speech. These tendencies and social and institutional structures as well as the cohorts and allies of enablers, forerunners and allies, are long-term and go unnoticed.
The United States’ recent political experience can be very instructive. The oxygen-sucking presence and influence of Donald Trump has drew attention to a single figure, which is the root of the threat to democracy in the United States. However, many scholars have pointed out that the trends leading to the present are not as they were in the past. deep-seatedIt is still in operation and the coalitionsInvesting in anti-democratic outcomes is more common than any one current or personality.
The anti-democratic slide, in short, is as much a function “normal” wayThings have been going well for decades, except when there was a crisis, an emergency, or something extraordinary.
While in Britain, BrexitCertainly, it has fueled an antagonistic nativist political system that normalizes extreme-right ideasThis trend did not start there. Key government initiatives have been driven for decades by xenophobic, authoritarian ideas that feed into the worldviews of the radical right.
In 2012, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition launched its “Hostile Environment” policy, a dizzying array of measures explicitly designed to make “life so unbearable for undocumented migrants that they would voluntarily choose to leave.” These policies culminated in the “Windrush scandal,” whereby an estimated 15,000 British citizens of Caribbean descent were wrongly classified as “illegal immigrants,” with devastating consequencesFamilies were divided, people lost jobs and homes, and many were held and threatened with deportation to places they did not know.
The message being sent appears quite clear: Britain’s problems are the result of alien invaders, and those invaders are most likely nonwhite.
And in 2003, the then-Labour government launched the Prevent Strategy, a post-9/11 initiative ostensibly aimed at preempting radicalization and preventing “homegrown” terrorism. Widely perceived as targeting British Muslims as a “suspect community,” the program has been criticized not only as counterproductive but also for creating “the potential for systemic human rights abuses” and an increased “risk of discrimination.”
There is more in the pipeline. Legislation currently being passed by parliament includes a bill to change borders and nationality breaches international law and which arguably creates “a second class, precarious version of citizenship” for those with ties to other countries and unable to claim exclusively British descent.
An elections bill on the GOP model imposes new and unnecessary obstacles to voting, which in the judgment of one of the governing party’s own members of parliament, “risks undermining one of the most fundamental rights we have here in the U.K. — to vote freely without restriction.”
The new crime and policing bill is threatening to severely undermine the system. the right to freedom of assembly and peaceful protest.
The legislation in each case is meant to break down the concept of universal democratic citizenship. This is supposed to be open to all citizens, regardless if they are of the same race, ethnicity or social class. Instead, they privilege a “national” population, the supposedly “real” English people as opposed to “ethnic outsiders” and the cultural elites who are said to despise the nation.
And it is this long-term buildup of a populist, “commonsense” nativism that represents the most fundamental mainstreaming of extreme-right norms and values.
The Vacuum Within Neoliberal Politics
These dynamics are complex and drive this longer-term trend. It is clear that all parties involved in government since the beginning of the millennium are proponents of the Hostile Environment policy. This includes Conservative and Labour, as well as Liberal Democrat and Liberal Democrat. The Hostile Environment Policy’s origins can be seen in the example of the anti-immigrant crackdown2007 under the New Labour administration
This speaks to larger political shifts related to the cementing the neoliberal agreement since the 1980s in Britain, and globally. Neoliberalism — the ideology of privatization, financialization labor precarity — not only generates record levels of income and wealthInequality can also lead to ideological vacuums, as redistribution was once a key component of social democratic politics.
Nancy Fraser is a political philosopher. argued, the easiest way to compensate for this absence is to stress the elements of “recognition” in politics, those culturally defined markers of esteem, status and identity. And because extreme-right ideas focus on the identity of majority demographics — through populist nationalism and resentment at perceived cultural disesteem — Neoliberal politics finds a particular affinity here.
According to Fraser, this affinity has been particularly strengthened in the U.K. and the U.S. because under Tony Blair’s New Labour and Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, neoliberalEconomics was initially associated first with a Progressive model of recognition — the discourses of multiculturalism and gender equality that are now pilloried as “politically correct” or “woke.”
The center-left was successful at the time but left a legacy that many considers to be the worst of both the best and worst. While they presided over the collapse in secure employment, these administrations were seen as mocking the cultural norms of the working class and blue-collar middle classes. Despite the fact that governments of all stripes have implemented neoliberalism in some form, the center-left is seen as being a supporter of the elites and a traitor to ordinary people.
After 9/11, New Labour in Britain abandoned its commitment to multiculturalism, cultural cosmopolitanism and embraced a nativist rhetoric, which even the Conservatives condemned. borrowing from the extreme right. But without a different model of economic distribution — a real shift away from neoliberalism and a return to a revivified social democracy — all that has been achieved is an even deeper normalization of extreme-right discourse. This is the tendency that Conservative-led governments have followed with great pleasure.
Boris Johnson, like Trump, has been particularly effective in normalizing the scurrilous aspects of radical right speech. But the deeper threats to U.K. democracy — just as in the United States — will still need to be addressed once these divisive figures are gone.
