Rise of the Far Right in a xenophobic, alt. fact world

President Trump’s first two weeks in office have continued to reflect that ‘tearing up the rule book’ approach to politics and diplomacy, as Australia’s beleaguered Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull discovered when Trump humiliatingly tweeted his response to the Australia-US refugee-swap agreement.

Even China, the world’s rising superpower, has been shocked at President Trump’s approach to international relations. Last Monday China’s Peoples’ Liberation Army acknowledged it was preparing for war. War with China is not likely, of course butit is also worth remembering that, according to conventional logic, that a Trump Republican endorsement, much less presidency, was also ‘unlikely’.

For China, for Australia, for the US Democrats and for US officials, the ‘rules of the game’ have been thrown out the window. It is not that they have been replaced by new rules but, rather, they have been replaced by a series of 140 Tweeted characters or less.

It would be easy to say that this is a peculiarity of the United States and its idiosyncratic choice of president. It is not. Donald Trump is a common reactionary – reacting against undocumented immigration, the supposed threat of terrorism, the vulnerability of the US economy and the unstated fear of an idealised America being in decline.

Thus the rise of American ‘nationalism’ – not a civic pride in well-established and functioning institutions but an insular, exclusivist and dumbed-down reaction to a changing world. This is the politics of fear, and tearing up the rule book is an expression of largely impotent anger at such decline. But it is not just in the United States.

The rise of the reactionary Right in Europe also reflects the same politics of insecurity and fear, with answers being almost as illogical as those currently expressed in the US. France is looking towards elections between the Centre Right – the rule book ‘saviors’, likely to be supported by what used to be the Left – against the Far Right.

In Holland the Far Right now has the single largest proportion of votes among its fragmented parties and the Far Right could create a coalition of Right and other reactionary groups. The UK’s Brexit reflected nationalist populism, so too in Greece, where Golden Dawn showed that a Far Right party based on xenophobia and opposition to ‘elites’ was a viable political model.

Xenophobia is a key manifestation of the loss of faith in the system and critical to the rise of the Far Right. It is also the key-stone of fascism.

In Italy, Spain, Germany and, indeed, Russia, populist reaction against real or perceived decline, insecurity and the need for nationalist assertion is front and centre.  The ‘rule book’ is increasingly regarded as irrelevant and, often, an expression of older vested interests. In Turkey, Thailand and the Philippines, the rule book only had a tenuous grip in any case.

Older vested interests – the ‘political elite’ – grew out of a shared agreement on the rules of the game. As political theorists have long noted, extrapolating theory from the commonly observed principles of practice, the tendency towards the creation of elites is a feature of all political societies, regardless of their orientation. Liberal democracy has its own – increasingly despised – elites every bit as much as more authoritarian regimes.

What has been much less discussed, however, is that the ‘rules of the game’ are also essential to a notion of voluntary political order. Without agreement as to the ‘rules of the game’, not only is there the growth of chaos but also a tendency towards conflict, both within and between groups of peoples. The ‘rules of the game’ are what allow democracy to work; without them it fails.

As novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco noted in his famed essay on Fascism http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ , its qualities include, among others, the cult of tradition, an acceptance of irrationalism, action for its own sake, disagreement defined as treason, fear of difference – racism, appeal to social frustration, the enemy being both strong and weak, contempt for the weak and selective populism in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the ‘voice of the people’.

Finally, the impoverishment of vocabulary and elementary syntax is essential, in order to limit complex and critical reasoning. Welcome to the 140 characters of Twitter, Facebook as the principle source of ‘news’ and post-truth/alt. fact.

As Eco noted, only one of these features of fascism need exist in order to provide a foundation for the others to flourish. History may not precisely repeat, but its lessons remain critical.