It's the German state of Brandenburg's elections this weekend, and as we are in the middle of this thrilling lurch to the right - where people elect Far Right governments in Europe that have not been seen since the 1940s - it's a good moment to stop and think. What's driving this?
But first, as a lot of media are skipping this point, and we have space here, we should first ask the radical questions of "what is the Far Right?", as that has a direct relationship with why I write criticism these days. Many people think they know what the Far Right is, but if they do, then few actually seem to be remembering why they are so dangerous. So I'll dedicate this first section to an ambitious brief overview.
The Far Right
"The Far Right" describes political movements which attempt to genereate societies of authority, control, and hierarchy. They do this though both active and passive promotion of violence, oppression, and exclusion, often through a mix of economic violence, military and institutional violence, and social coercion, using and exaggerating existing structures. Often these have heavily ideological components that inform their power structure, commonly:
- racial or ethnic supremacy (power structure favouring ethnicities, often white supremacy but not only),
- patriarchy (or power structure favouring an idea of "man", often expressed in misogyny or violence against women and other genders),
- xenophobia (power structure designed to exclude otherness),
- religious supremacy (power structure that deploys religious institutions as tools to create submission),
- nationalism (construction of an idea of state that produces submission and excludes other ideas),
- "the family" (power structure designed for a particular image of family, especially one that favours child production),
- ableism (power structure designed to favour an idea of the body or mind as a 'normal' one),
- classism (here the Far Right can be a confusing mix, depending on what is convenient and to whether they are addressing workers or elites), and
- sexual discrimination (power structure designed to favour a specific version of sexuality, commonly heterosexuality as this is most convenient for child production).
(Centre-right or "small c conservatism", which I view as the dominant political force globally from 1991 until now, shares many of these ideas, but uses less direct means to achieve them, and focuses more on the "free market" as a tool).
All of these are normalising factors that create a version of the self that one should aspire to "fit in" to. If you don't fit into it, you are unable to share in the rewards of that structure, and may indeed - under extreme right-wing governments - find yourself accidentally sharing in its punishments. Because no-one actually fits the ideal of the Far Right, their objective is to create an 'aspiring to an ideal', and submission of the subject, who is never quite able to meet that ideal image. Their principle tool is a psychological one: shame, which is a deeply-rooted cause of human behaviour (not-coincidentally the primary tool of pick-up artists and abusers). When this shaming is seen on a wide scale, it creates systems of thinking and patterns of behaviour that define and reproduce that system of violence autonomously within societies, without the need for direct intervention from a state. Because high levels of state intervention are impractical (need too many resources), this "hands-off" approach is often the control mechanism favoured by Far Right governments, although some do make massive state interventions.
"Because no-one actually fits the ideal of the Far Right, their objective is to create an 'aspiring to an ideal', and submission of the subject, who is never quite able to meet that ideal image."
What I have just given is a really brief overview of the Far Right. I would describe this as not particularly controversial, and actually certain figures of the Far Right speak openly about using these tools to manipulate people: Donald Trump, who is a presidential candidate for re-election in the US this year (and a proto-far-right figure in the sense that he does not seem to understand the consequences of the tools he uses, only that they offer power), sometimes speaks directly about it, sometimes accidentally. The "Project 2025" document details these objectives and how it will be achieved. But they are often left unspoken, because of fear.
