The “new” right is succeeding so wildly in Europe at the moment that it’s hard to know where to start in cataloguing its triumphs.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has been in power for 14 years, reconstructing the country into what he calls an “illiberal democracy”. He’s been joined by Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) in Italy and the Finns (formerly True Finns) up north. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders has completed his long march to have his Party for Freedom become the largest in the country’s highly proportional system. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats are the largest party and in the governing bloc.
But the real victories are the ones that haven’t occurred yet, and which are keeping people awake at night. In France, National Rally, the old National Front, has survived its defeat by Emmanuel Macron in 2017, and re-established itself as the principal alternative. And in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) is the second-largest party, and may be impossible to exclude from power in several coming state elections. Leaders from the latter recently met with neo-Nazi leaders in (where else?) a forest to discuss a plan for the mass deportation of millions of non-ethnic Germans, which has tarnished their nu-right image somewhat.
Even the left’s successes are actually victories for the right. The Social Democrats success in Denmark is because it took over the politics of the Danish People’s Party — the first Western European alt-right party to take power — and now enforces immigration controls and de-ghettoisation moves, forbidding neighbourhood concentrations of migrant communities. Donald Tusk’s Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland recently won power with a similar reconstruction of its previous cosmopolitan cultural politics, to go up against the Law and Justice party, which runs at 35% support.
What’s going on? You know what’s going on. Though there is a lot of talk about cost of living and other squeezes, the rise of the right is due to immigration and cultural transformation, with a side order of enforced cosmopolitan values. It’s all been brought to the boil by the pressures of inflation and economic stagnation, but they’re not the actual ingredients. The actual ingredients are that Europeans — and especially the native working classes — see their cultural worlds being worn away by the ever greater mobility of many millions of people. They don’t want it, they unseated centre-right parties that wouldn’t stop it, and now they’re deserting the social democratic parties they created to represent them a century ago.
The success of the new right is in part because it hasn’t asked its supporters to sign up to an old right manifesto with all the trimmings. Thus it’s pro-family and anti-gender/trans affirmative, but not anti-gay (that varies the further east you go), for example. Those and other policies allow a wider range of people to support it. In that sense, as I noted years ago, a basic progressive value system of sorts has won. How could it not? But in assuming much deeper support than that manifested, progressives have then lost.
Sure, such parties have had a lot of help from capital. Some have even been established by shadowy forces, super-rich members of the “right international” and networks such as the one Steve “this picture” Bannon has established across Europe and the world. But they wouldn’t have got anywhere if there hadn’t been a tremendous appetite for what they are offering.
The groups voting for these new parties — a section of the middle class deserting the centre-right and a section of the working class deserting the left parties — do want institutional economic disruption and the possibility of a revived economy, but mostly they’re voting for culture and way of life over the old left-right politics of the system.
The centre-left and progressive leaderships still haven’t got this fully. Across the world, in places where such politics have not yet become a full crisis, they’re sticking to the old formula: progressives from the knowledge class set an agenda of liberal and cosmopolitan culture politics that only they support, impose a social market/left neoliberal economic politics by not organising against it, and expect that the old progressive alliance that held from the ’60s to the 2000s will hold.
It won’t. It’s not. Some at the sharp end of it are learning that. Thus in Germany, Die Linke (The Left party) has split after years of decline owing largely to its adoption of cosmopolitan social policies as a new progressive elite joined it in recent years. Die Linke had evolved from the old East German-ruling Socialist Workers Party, and its focus for a long time was standing up for a semi-socialist economy.
It began to change as all its original members — who remembered and valued the rather drab everyday equality, collectivity and plentiful services of the GDR — died off, and a young left disenchanted with the Greens piled in. The party has been struggling along as a hybrid with declining support for years, while left thinkers such as Wolfgang Streeck have been advocating a turn to a communalist pro-borders party for years. After years in which the party’s vote fell from 11% to 4.9%, one-time leader Sahra Wagenknecht cracked and jumped out, forming a pro-tem list group with nine other deputies, and reaffirming left anti-high immigration policies.
The crowning act of all this would be in the Anglosphere with the reelection of Donald Trump in the US, should it occur. This would be such a nightmare for progressives everywhere. Trump may well win with a minority vote again, but if he does it will be with strong phalanxes of the middle- and working-class, the rustbelt states lost afresh by the Democrats. In Australia? Well, the temperature remains low — low enough for the Coalition and News Corpse to try to start a culture war over Woolies’ commercial choices, lacking anything else — and may stay that way for a while. Curiously, the defeat of the Voice referendum may have assisted temperature control, serving as an opportunity for a public declarative assertion by European-Australians of a majority, relatively unified, culture.
That’s all the more reason for progressive community and cultural leaders to use such time to think about how they will handle this global phenomenon — whether they will take a step back from their deep-rooted cosmopolitan value settings and assess the obvious situation: that strong progressive values, above all on immigration and the moral necessity of a cosmopolitan culture, will be held strongly only by about 25% or 30% of the population, and that may hold indefinitely. There is no point asking the (lumpen)cognitariat to do so. Your average knowledge-class person simply believes that the cosmopolitan, postmodern liberal values and preferences they were raised and educated in are the received truth, and they just happened to be born in the era that humanity stumbled upon them.
It’s up to thought leaders of these groups to start to force them to think about why they’re losing so badly — with potentially lethal consequences — and challenge them to start to come to some sort of middle ground. In Australia, where that sphere is self-contained and irrelevant — as the Voice vote showed — and rejoices in its irrelevance, there is almost no chance this will happen.
It’s a pity there’s not more independents of the Teal-ilk around the world. In my direct Australian experience these people are intelligent committed to making informed decisions and tend to moderate the ideological excesses of both major parties. Privately sensible politicians from the major parties welcome their legislative input.
And yet we have both sides colluding in Australia to reduce funding to independent candidates.
Disgusting and yet another symptom of the disconnect Labour and Coalition parties have with voters. Self preservation at all costs and bugger the country.
The duopoly is under threat with votes for Greens and independents increasing each election.
You didn’t read this article very well. Greens will always hover around that 11-14% mark and are the definition of knowledge workers comfortable in their own superiority leaving Labor to try to get the votes from people who don’t align to Greens values 100% of the time to form govt. there are more people who get sucked into a culture war vortex than vote Greens and the Greens don’t have any answers to that
I note the negative markdowns to Tony Simons post.
It’s very predictable from Greens readers. They (Greens voters), are frequently not an asset to the cause of progressive politics.
They’re too busy congratulating themselves.
Tony Simon’s post is essentially correct.
Sorry, my response should have been to Joe’s post. Please substitute “Joe” for “Tony Simons”.
“Ideological excesses” were surely all jettisoned by modern Labor some decades ago. Whereas excesses without ideology are now standard for the Coalition – excess enough to almost certainly ensure that what GR fears won’t actually come to pass in Australia.
Agree, other countries could learn from this, though the right voting system helps.
We need about 20-odd more David Pococks in parliament.
Unfortunately most of the Teals are just Liberals who believe in climate change. The only two that have actually challenged the status quo is Daniel (on tax) and Chaney (Big Australia).
Sorry, Guy, but I’m not really buying the argument that being against a cosmopolitan culture is the springboard to success is a winner, at least in Australia. It comes down to demographics. 30% of Australians were born overseas (including my wife and I). In Hungary, it’s 5.8%. Even in “melting pot” America, it’s only 14% or so. We’re a country of 5 and a bit big cities.
The demographics alone make your case – the monocultures have the staunchest resistance to new arrivals. We are way past that point here.
However, there is another trend which is that each new wave of immigrants gets established and then tends to express hostility to subsequent waves – as though they had been there for 20 generations themselves. The history of Collingwood where, acording to legend, the anglo protestants treated the Irish catholics badly and then they both united against post war immigrants from Europe before all those groups resisted the influx of Vietnamese refugees in the 70s and 80s. The strength of that resistance was however insufficient to change political allegiances. This was unlike what happened in very cosmopolitan places like Denmark and Holland where inner city progressive types suddenly found themselves living in concentrations of refugees from strife in the middle east. The culture clash drove some of what Guy would call the knowledge class into the arms of these new right types whose central policy was shutting the borders.
We have satellite communities of various ethnicities very different to local historic roots unless you happen to be first nations.
The progressive cognoscenti are their own worst enemy.
For example by dismissing any attempt to discuss of the number of immigrants as racism.
Given Australia’s history, anyone advocating a significant cut to migration should have a plan to counter the racism that will accompany such a campaign.
The ‘progressives’ – to use Guy’s terminology – who continue to advocate for huge immigration should also have a plan to counter racism. The literally uncontrolled mass-rapid migration level of the last year or so, if it is maintained, will fuel racism on its own. Far better to manage the significant reduction to an ecologically and economically sustainable level by measured steps over a period of years.
Raise the refugee intake at the same time.
Of course that is possible but that’s not what is likely to happen.
Cutting immigration by any meaningful amount is (very) not likely to happen, so that’s not really much of a bar.
On the contrary, I think racism will accompany any significant rise in immigration.
Really? Are we more racist than we were 50 years ago?
We are more racist, or at least have more opportunity to express racism. 50 years ago immigrants were less in number and looked like the majority australian population. It is easy to not be racist when migration is small and not noticable. If the post-WW2 migrants were displacing low paid workers’ jobs and housing, there would not have been acceptance of multiculturism.
Multiculturism has been successful because, historically, migration has not disadvantaged housing and public transport.
That’s not how many migrants or First Nations people remember that period . White Australia was very explicitly racist. I’m mixed race and racism has gone down in the last 20 years
You need to re read my post.
Furthermore, what makes you think I am NOT mixed race (a term that is very UK)? Ask A&TI if racism has gone down in the past 20 years, the answer will be a resounding NO . And PLENTY of that racism comes from overseas born Australians.
However, once you leave the working class, racism has less chance of raising its head. It used to be said that “class” did not exist in Australia; however income/weath/ power has always been a surrogate for australian class structure. I note that the UK has started admitting people to the upper classes based on attributes other than family…….my English gentry forebearer will be turning in the grave.
The fact remains that the people most adversely affected by high migration are the people with less wealth. Higher weath individuals are able to protect themselves from resource competition and consequently express less “Racism” than your average bogan living in overpriced rental and existing on insecure low income. It is no accident that populist politicians puposefully appeal to the left-behinds.
From my experience, money has little to do with racism in this country. It is more about how you were brought up. Some parents teach and advocate racism and that flows on into their children and so on and so on. My parents were loving and didn’t teach hate, but they also didn’t teach us to be “not” racist either. It just came from them teaching us to judge everyone on an individual, not collective basis
Yes. But. The debate is not actually about holding racist views, but about high levels of immigration. Wealth insulates from adversity. For those without insulation, it does not take a MENSA IQ to correlate high immigration with inadequate housing supply and insecure employment.
Shutting down any debate about migration policy by shouting RACISM is dishonest.
Of course not.
Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to pay more attention to their grandparents (or even parents) talking about the past.
Australia is probably one of the least racist societies on the planet (which is not the same thing as “not racist”).
Straw man. I’ve not heard this argued by any serious commentator,
There are two retorts every time the possibility of reducing immigration is even thought about too loudly:
They inevitably get dressed up in better language, but that is pretty much always what they boil down to.
A certain poster who will undoubtedly be along later on today should be able to demonstrate with some examples.
I think “Your average knowledge-class person simply believes that the cosmopolitan, postmodern liberal values and preferences they were raised and educated in are the received truth, and they just happened to be born in the era that humanity stumbled upon them” sounds like a straw man argument. Nobody actually thinks that way, do they?
It’s not a thought-through and well-argued position, it’s an unquestioned unconscious assumption.
I’ve only heard that argued when the other side have been quite explicitly advocating race or faith based migration. (e. g. Those that want priority for Christians over every other faith). If we want to reduce migration we’re going to need far more planning and investment in education and training. We are going to need to train enough Australians to account for those who will inevitably die or emigrate or otherwise be incapacitated, we will also need to have the skilled people here to oversee the training in the interim. None of the reduce immigration commentariat actually explain how they would deliver a reduction in net migration.
We got along with 60 000 a year until Howard got in – how did we cope then?
It’s now 2024, not 1996. Which Australians. do you plan to stop coming home? Net migration includes many Australians leaving temporarily and then returning.
Not the small number of Australians, obviously.
More Australians depart than return, generally.
Plenty of low hanging fruit in the foreign student and dependents cohorts.
Sure, would be accompanied by massive reduction in education funding and decisively anti-family.
Fortunately the Government could (and should) put more funding into education.
Though firstly having a look at Vice Chancellor and such salaries would be a good idea.
More than a bit of a streeeeeeeetch from ‘no dependents for people on temporary visas’ to “anti family”.
Dependents of temporary migrants largely do not have work rights or any claim on the state. If anything, they bring more money to Australia. Good luck getting GPs if we’re going to ban them from bringing their partners and kids. Yes, it’s anti family.
Yet they still use resources. Housing. Infrastructure. Hospital beds. School places. They’re people, not poltergeists.
Me: low hanging fruit.
You: some of the highest fruit in the tree.
No I just misread your comment. International students generally cannot bring dependents.
I didn’t say they didn’t use any resources. They tend to live together, few end up in hospital and I’m not sure which school places they’re using. They don’t all come with children and if they’re going to regional areas, the schools are begging for students.
The fact they use resources is kinda the whole point ? Like, half a million more people in the last 12 months need half a million people’s worth of infrastructure to support them (ca. 200k more houses, for example), and we can’t build it that fast.
But you’re not thinking of all those poor US military-industrial complex billionaires who’d have to forego all those $$ from AUKUS contracts. <sigh>
Why would you start with the Foreign Students? They bring in money and they mostly stay temporarily. From a self-centred nationalist viewpoint they’re basically the ideal migrants.
Because they’re the wrong race. They like to pretend their position isn’t racist but if we were getting a lot of students from UK and US rather than our much closer geographical neighbours, do you think they’d carry on like they do? Same with visa over stayers – they go nuts when they hear of some random Asian but completely turn a blind eye to British backpackers.
LOL. There it is. Like clockwork.
Yes because it’s so predictable. You claim it’s just an objection to international students but it’s not actually that. Why do you think so many of the complaints are specifically about Asian international students.
That was an example.
Happy to discuss things I’ve actually said.
No interest in discussing your straw men.
There are cruder ways, like just setting an annual NOM target and then averaging out temporary visas on a weekly or monthly basis to try and hit it. But that’s probably racist, too, I guess.
Because a lot of them are here to work, not to study, then get PR, and continue to work in low-skill, low-wage jobs, often sending the money they earn to their home countries.
Most work locally to pay for their study. This is not “bringing in money”.
The foreign student industry is rife with rorts and exploitation.
they’re not working enough to pay fees. The system is exploitative but all you’re proposing is punishing students, not the rorters.
Most international students do not go on to get PR nor do they stay for long periods after their degrees. You’re information is seriously out of date. And heaven forbid they support the families that you explicitly don’t want to come to Australia. Apparently the evil international students are bringing their dependent families but are also daring to support their families they didn’t bring. Make up your mind as to which aspersion you want to cast.
You might have missed the Nixon Review Privileged. So called international students have switched from high cost uni courses to low cost vocational courses, and instead of going to class, have gone to work to pay the shonk that got them into the country on the dodgy visa.
The fake students have increased demand for housing at a time of low supply. Furthermore, Australia is a desirable destination and we should be choosing from the cream of the crop of those who want to come, not allowing chancers with the chutzpah to game the system in through the back door.
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/fake-schools-fake-students-criminals-make-mockery-of-education-visas-20230419-p5d1mw.html
I haven’t missed it. I just disagree with what the focus should be on the institutions that do the rorting, not their victims. That would require holding Australians to account but no one seems interested in that. Casting international students as inherently evil is much easier.
I’d love to see the people operating the rorts prosecuted. They’re in the business of gaining a financial advantage by deception and that’s illegal. Then again, selling tickets for flights that don’t exist is also gaining financial advantage by deception. Let’s prosecute the perpetrators of that rort too.
> we’re going to need far more planning and investment in education and training.
Absolutely. But everytime the Liberals get in they gut everything including the budget though I’ll conceived tax cuts (I’m looking at you John Howard). Because education is not seen as an investment.
What’s the role of the media and the net in all of this? Granted that there is a market for Right views among disenchanted working classes, but how much of that market has been orchestrated by operators who have the money and means to manipulate views and beliefs? Trump is a classic case; sure, he knew how to milk grievances, but many of those grievances had been long put in place and given a sort of dysfunctional legitimacy by a collection of Right-media operators for decades.
Agree, and ageing electorates, especially regions.
Indeed – Google the “Atlas Network” and “mtpelerin.com” or google “James McGill Buchanan” and read Democracy in Chains by Nancy McLean. Hillary Clinton was right – there actually is a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and it’s got lots of money.
With regard to the US, I’d just remind everyone that the mid-terms were going to be an absolute wipe out for the Dems, said every commentator ever.