Gerry Hassan: With fascism on the rise again, how can we defeat it?

Widespread optimism and belief in globalisation and economic freedom leading to political liberty ran from Thomas Friedman in The New York Times and Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker to cliché-filled PowerPoints by public agencies such as Scottish Enterprise.

This was a mixture of projection, groupthink and propaganda. Fast forward to the present and the hopes and dreams of such a world are in tatters. Not just because the vision of globalisation has fallen apart – which it has – but because of the darkness and brutalness that always lay at the heart of this vision and its consequences.

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This disconcerting picture across the West has aided the rise of the far-right and fascism and raises big questions of why this has happened, how and to what extent mainstream politics has failed, and what can be done in the short and longer term. These ­dangers are here now – and closer to home than any of us want to imagine.

Throughout the West, the forces of populism, right-wing nationalism, xenophobia and racism are on the march and now mainstream. The main threat is not the likes of ultra-right Tommy Robinson and what is left of the English Defence League, but rather that large parts of what used to be called the “­moderate right” are now captured by such politics.

Besides that, significant sections of centre-left and liberal opinion have increasingly accommodated and appeased to the point of capitulation such ­virulent politics. This has aided the normalisation of what were once extreme positions on immigration, race, multiculturalism and the nature of citizenship across the West.

In the next week, the Tory leadership contest will be decided between two candidates offering a right-wing prospectus – Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, and in a little more than a week’s time in the USA Donald Trump may well be elected as US president. Despite his ­repulsive pronouncements and attitudes, ­conspiracy theories and lies, he is now the favourite to retake the presidency and defeat Democrat ­Kamala Harris.

These shifts are part of a wider picture across the developed world. There is Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing ­government in Italy; the rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally; Alternative for Deutschland in ­Germany; Viktor Orbán’s attack on democracy and human rights in Hungary; the authoritarian ­populism of Javier Milei in Argentina and ­previously Jair ­Bolsonaro in Brazil, and of course Vladimir ­Putin’s dictatorial and militaristic regime in Russia.

Underpinning most of these is a belief in the allure of “strongman” politics and the omnipotent leader impatient with democratic mores, the rule of law and a free media, who dispenses with proper norms and processes. Informing this is a distinct ­gender politics of misogyny and anti-feminism, which wages war on women’s reproductive rights and ­freedoms, as in the overturning of Roe v Wade on abortion in the US, while Orbán’s Hungary yearns for the return of the traditional family.

The rightward lurch of the British Tories

TAKE the British Conservative leadership contest. Characterised by arrogance, hubris and entitlement after the Tories’ worst defeat in their 200-year ­history, there has been no post-election mea culpa or soul-searching on why they have fallen so much and were emphatically rejected by voters.

Instead, the main mantra from frontrunner ­Badenoch has been that “we failed because we were not Conservative enough” and that “while we talked right, we governed left” as if that were an explanation for the failures of 14 Tory years.

Despite everything, the Tories still have an inner self-belief in their innate superiority to lord over the rest of us and be in government. This is combined with an unshakeable faith, despite all the evidence otherwise, in the primacy of their central ideology – the belief in letting markets and corporate power have unchecked power and calling it “freedom”.

The Tories are entering uncharted ­territory. Badenoch put her name to a pamphlet – Conservativism In Crisis: Rise Of The Bureaucratic Class – which ­debases the debate on mental health ­issues in ­associating the supposed rise of autism with a ­culture of rights, attacks on ­welfarism and culture wars. It dared to ­argue that children diagnosed with ­autism get “­better treatment” and ­advantages in ­education provision – a small-minded, mean, dehumanising stance.

This part of Badenoch’s treatise got ­major attention, but the rest is equally striking. According to her, the ­major ­factor suffocating the UK is “the ­progressive class” who are ­predominantly ­“bureaucrats – dominating aspects of the state and who have colonised large ­aspects of public life such as universities, further education and schools”.

This is her simplistic take on what is wrong with Britain and holding it back – university, school and public sector ­administrators and of course “the woke mindset”. Add to this the spectre of Nigel Farage and Reform UK – whose ­presence and electoral support in 2024 won four million votes – is obsessing the ­Tories, as it did on the road to Brexit, and ­dragging them further rightwards.

The Trumpisation of the Republicans

THE Tories, for now, are in opposition with no clear route back to office for four to five years. In the US, Trump could be on the brink of winning a second term – the first since Grover Cleveland in 1892 when a president has won office, then lost, and then returned to office. This ­prospect is much more potentially ­damaging ­domestically and ­internationally than his first chaotic term.

In the past few weeks, Trump’s ­support has risen relative to Harris; on ­average she still retains a small lead in the ­popular vote, but as in 2016, Trump has an ­advantage in the Electoral College due to the disproportionate weight of smaller-population states.

This strengthening ­position is ­despite him fighting a campaign which is ­undisciplined and often lacking spirit, zest and motivation, with Trump seeming to be going through the motions.

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Observers have noted the differences between now and 2016 and 2020. One American commentator ­acknowledged that: “In 2016, Trump stood for something, whereas now he appears to be a tribute act continually reminiscing about the past and his greatest hits in 2016 and 2020”. This may be true, but it is far too sanguine about the dangers of a Trump presidency and the potentially ­irreparable damage it will create.

John Kelly, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, said that Trump when president made numerous favourable comments about Adolf Hitler, including that “Hitler did some good things”. Such utterances show Trump’s disrespect for the US ­Constitution and lack of ­understanding of the office of the presidency – none of which bodes well if he is elected.

Trump has also repeatedly called ­domestic opponents – from Democrat politicians to the media and judges – “the enemy within”. This phrase has regularly appeared in the playbook of right-wing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, who used it to characterise the striking miners in the miner’s strike of 1984-85.

But with Trump, it has much more ­sinister overtones as he has openly ­threatened to use military force in the US to crush domestic opponents and critics.

Why has the far-right taken over the right?

WHY is this happening across the Western world? The standard answer offered is first the failure of economic growth, anxieties and insecurities that people feel and the flatlining of living standards over several decades. This is combined with an existential fear about the nature of Western societies and the cumulative effect of immigration, ­asylum seekers and multiculturalism.

This latter set of issues, since the EU ­ascension of central and eastern ­European countries in 2004 and fallout from numerous Middle East wars and Western interventions, has produced a bitter populist backlash.

To some on the right, the very idea of “Western civilisation” is under ­attack from asylum seekers whom they ­associate with terrorism and a rise of ­radical ­Islamism.

The past four decades have seen an ­unprecedented reconfiguration and concentration in wealth, assets and ­ultimately power, to the extent that huge swathes of economic wealth are now held by a very small number of people who ­exert ­massive influence in their ­respective countries and across the world.

Previous examples of grotesquely ­unequal societies such as the “­Robber Baron” era of US capitalism in the late 19th century where a host of ­American ­industrialists (including Andrew ­Carnegie) achieved a near-monopoly ­position across critical sectors such as rail and steel and had to be broken up by anti-trust legislation, pale into ­insignificance in the 21st century.

Today’s equivalent capitalists, ­whether Elon Musk or Mark ­Zuckerberg, have wealth, power and ­influence on a scale which surpasses the Robber ­Barons. Musk’s recent activities – ­including ­campaigning for Trump, ­positioning ­himself for a key role in a Trump ­administration, and blatant attempts to buy voters by offering $1 million prize money each day to polling day to ­registered voters – although potentially illegal and corrupt, is amplified and ­promoted to billions of users of Twitter/X throughout the world, many of whom ­undoubtedly admire his chutzpah and disruptiveness.

This is a world of autocracy, where ­increasingly authoritarian regimes ­suppress democracy, dissent and ­human rights, and unlike in the Cold War, ­often do so primarily for the self-interest and ­financial reward of the elite. Trump ­openly admires Putin, but his ­dystopian vision for America is Putin’s Russia, where the state can be plundered for the advance of the kleptocratic class and rise of oligarchy.

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The new concentration of wealth, ­power and status across Western ­societies and indeed globally has huge ­consequences. The new monied elites individually and collectively are fawned, celebrated and treated as role models. Their influence permeates nearly every aspect of society, from media to culture and society, to once-respected public institutions.

Such dynamics have helped produce a public culture where unaccountable wealth and power is not only venerated but disfigures nearly every aspect of ­society and how we do politics. There is now a whole ecosystem of dark ­monies and funding that can influence and ­impact the democratic process.

In the UK examples, we have ­Arron Banks and his huge bankrolling of the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit ­referendum, and more recently Frank Hester and his near single-handed ­funding of the ill-fated 2024 Tory election campaign – monies that the Tories could not afford to return, despite his racist ­tirade against Labour’s Diane Abbott.

One obvious landscape where new wealth and power distort an already unequal playing field is mass media.

The UK media has long had a right-wing bias, but this ­became even more pronounced with ­Rupert Murdoch (above); his influence along with the other right-wing media ­barons has, in the words of contemporary ­historian ­Anthony Seldon, “trashed ­public ­standards over decades and aiding a right-wing lurch under successive prime ministers from Thatcher and Tony Blair to the present day”.

In countries such as the UK, there has however been a degree of ­regulation in broadcasting, via a legislative ­framework and commitment to public service ­broadcasting, but this is now ­being ­undermined and by-passed by the ­explosion of new platforms, TV and radio stations, aided by significant right-wing investment such as that put into GB News by Paul Marshall (who has just bought The Spectator) and Legatum, based in Dubai. The wider effect of this is the ­pollution of the entire media ­eco-sphere and dilution of the BBC and ITV’s ­commitment to public service ­broadcasting – at a cost to what passes for public debate and politics.

The cumulative effect of the above across the West has been a declining faith and trust in mainstream politics and politicians. This has produced a ­fertile appetite for anti-establishment politics, leaders and disrupters – partly understandable considering the failure of the mainstream.

Yet while the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders can all be seen as ­progressive disrupters, up until now it has been the virulent, unapologetic right making the running and looking for now to be the main ones continuing to do so.

The hard authoritarian right has a template of how to build a constituency, message and winning coalition. It includes claiming to speak for “ordinary voters” and the “silent majority” who are voiceless; asserting that they are bravely against “the new elite” ensconced in the state, universities and liberal media, and proposing that immigration is a threat to society which must be stopped.

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The left can thus be portrayed as in hoc to the equality industry, virtue signalling and an LGBTQ+ culture which wants to proselytise; which fuels anti-diversity, homophobia and transphobia ­permissible on the radical right (and some former ­left-wingers and feminists).

What is new in this mixture is the ­radicalisation of the right, the lack of guardrails and qualification in what is ­being said, and the extreme stances ­taken on immigration. Such positions get ­unqualified support and encouragement from right-wing voices in the UK such as former academic Matthew Goodwin whose critique poses that despite Thatcher and Blair this “new elite” has been running the UK for the past 40 years and that ­people have had enough – one early sign being the 2016 Brexit vote.

In the US, the editor of The Nation Don Guttenplan has tried over the three Trump presidential elections to ­understand the appeal of such a politics to working-class people, industrial ­workers and trade ­unionists. He has come to the view that in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns Trump made a host of groups of ­workers “feel as if they were being seen and ­recognised” and by his rhetoric offered “symbolic gains”.

Trump particularly in 2016 was ­generous in his rhetoric of what he would do for people like current and former car workers, and ­unsurprisingly did not ­deliver when in office. But ­Guttenplan’s point is that when all you have ­experienced in recent decades is the disdain and dismissal of Bill Clinton in his era of high globalisation and Barack Obama’s sweeping rhetoric then “being seen” and “symbolic gains” is better than being ignored. It is also an indication of how American politics has not been able to address class.

The politics of centrism, whether ­watered down social democracy or ­liberalism, is not going to be the answer to the populist and hard right. Across the world, the centre and centre-left have shown their lack of willingness and ­principle to fight such a politics. This is true of Starmer’s Labour, Joe Biden and Harris – and Scotland’s politics from the SNP to Scottish Greens and other parties.

A popular politics that can defeat the hard right and fascism has to speak to people, and in Guttenplan’s words, make people feel they are being “seen” and are being offered both “symbolic” and real gains. This is not as easy as it sounds, considering the vacuous values of much of liberal and centre-left ­politics, with the Harris campaign unable to ­deliver a ­convincing case against re-electing a ­candidate who tried to overthrow the ­result of the previous presidential ­election.

The radical right in alliance with the ultra-rich echelons of the capitalist class are remaking our world, with a belief that they have permission to say and do what they like. The veteran American satirist Jules Feiffer, now 95, has said of the wider consequences of Trump: “He’s licensing his followers to behave as badly as they once fantasised but didn’t dare. And he’s saying, ‘Let’s stop fucking around, this is who we always were’.”

How this can be opposed is not by ­accommodation or acquiescence. Liberal politicians and media have been doing this for decades feeding the right-wing disinformation and lie machine. The only way of defeating the far and hard right is by taking them on at their own game.

Rather than continuing in the tradition of polite, well-meaning politicians, there needs to be a renewed politics of standing up to hatemongers, bigots and ­purveyors of division. This will not be easy and will have to involve grassroots ­organisation and citizen action – as we famously saw in the “Battle of Kenmure Street” in ­Glasgow that took on and defeated the dawn raid of the UK Home Office.

Anti-fascism has to offer more than a politics of opposition. It has to embody action and an understanding that the present confines of democracy across the West are barely adequate. How are ­politicians such as Trump even possible? And are the far-right, base posturings of Badenoch and Jenrick not insulting our intelligence as citizens?

Another dimension in the rise of the right is the relationship of the West to what Trumpians call “forever wars” and the permanent war machine that fuels much of Western foreign policy and which mainstream politicians across the developed world have underwritten.

It is a sad indictment of liberal and ­centre-left politicians that Trump has been able to claim this territory and is a wake-up call that the forces of militarism, conquest and imperialism are central to the idea of the West.

Anne Applebaum in her recent book Autocracy, Inc acknowledges that “the ­liberal world order is no more”. Some would question whether it ever really ­existed. Rather the hubris and over-reach of the West saw it talk of international rules and laws while engaging in illegal wars – and today’s war crimes in Gaza reveal the West’s ongoing hypocrisy and complicity.

The rise of the radical right is a ­symptom of bitterly divided, unequal, ­insecure ­societies and failed ­democracies. We have been let down by mainstream politicians and politics. Unless we hear the alarm bells and wake up and start ­creating in Scotland, the UK and the West a politics of activism, deepening and defending democracy, anti-racism and a new ­international solidarity, then the demagogic politics of Trump and ­Orbán and others are harbingers of a new age of darkness and brutality.

Journalist Paul Mason believes the forces of the left have to draw from the lessons of the Popular Front which fought fascism in the 1930s in France and Spain and again “turn anti-fascism from a tactic into an ethos”, but that cannot be about defending the failed democracy and ­economic and social status quo of the present.

A world that prioritises and gives free rein to a handful of outrageously privileged individuals (typically ageing men) who can indulge their fantasies of global domination, blatantly denying human rights and global warming, while the rest of humanity tries to make the best of it and to survive as best we can.

We have already been warned.