DEMOCRACY, IDEOLOGY AND THE RADICAL RIGHT
The Right wing slide in global politics continues with the recent parliamentary election in the UK. The victory of Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a major political shift in the UK – with the hope of a Left come back crushed – and is characteristic of the consolidation of authoritarian populism and nationalism the world over.
As with many regimes that have come to power with populist mandates through elections, what is at stake in many of these countries is the future of democracy.
AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM
Forty years ago, ahead of a similar historical shift, the Jamaican-born British social theorist Stuart Hall was insightful about the tremendous political changes. Hall in an essay titled, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’(marxism Today, January 1979) had the following to say about authoritarian populism, a concept he is credited with formulating:
“What we have to explain is a move towards ‘authoritarian populism’— an exceptional form of the capitalist state—which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institution in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent.”
The significant characteristic of authoritarian populist regimes which are quite repressive is as Hall mentions, they retain the appearance of formal representative institutions such as the parliament and the judiciary. However, they hollow out the very substance of democracy – including the rights of minorities, people’s critical engagement with state policies and more broadly freedoms of expression and association – and they do it with popular consent. Furthermore, such authoritarian populist regimes were crucial in consolidating class power for neoliberal economic projects that dismantled social welfare states. In the same essay Hall goes onto explain dynamic emergence of Right wing politics.
“The radical Right does not appear out of thin air. It has to be understood in direct relation to alternative political formations attempting to occupy and command the same space. It is engaged in a struggle for hegemony, within the dominant bloc, against both social democracy and the moderate wing of its own party. Not only is it operating in the same space: it is working directly on the contradictions within these competing positions. The strength of its intervention lies partly in the radicalism of its commitment to break the mould, not simply to rework the elements of the prevailing ‘philosophies’. In doing so, it nevertheless takes the elements which are already constructed into place, dismantles them, reconstitutes them into a new logic, and articulates the space in a new way, polarising it to the Right.”
Hall’s analysis has gained renewed interest in recent years as new regimes emerge with characteristics of authoritarian populism. We also see similar contemporary dynamics of a radical shift to the Right within political parties as with Donald Trump’s take over of the Republican Party in the US and Boris Johnson’s ascendance within the Tories in the UK. In some countries like Sri Lanka, we see the birth of new parties, such as the SLPP, which clawed out of the SLFP and has consolidated a powerful nationalist constituency. Furthermore, while forty years ago Hall was concerned about the attack by the new regimes on “social democracy and the moderate wing of its own party”, the contemporary authoritarian regimes focus on consolidating capitalist class interests towards greater extraction of wealth amidst the ongoing crisis of neoliberal accumulation, and they do that in conjunction with xenophobic nationalist mobilisations.
IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE
Hall’s essay published months before the election of Margret Thatcher in 1979 was a warning to the Left that the usual campaigns of organising the working class on demands of labour rights and wage increases would not work, as the Right had taken the ideological struggle to a different realm utilising social and cultural spaces linked to a range of questions from race and education to law and order. The inability of the Left to meet that ideological challenge allowed for their repression and even dismantling with public consent.
In Sri Lanka, as in many other countries, we are now in similarly dangerous times. The usual campaigns of trade union demands, human rights activism and media freedom advocacy will not work, as the public have been ideologically turned against such progressive concerns. While we have to organise the people for those principles of equality and freedom, we also have to meet the ideological challenges put forward in the realm of “national security” and “majoritarian grievances” multiplied by the communicative power of the corporate media. The dangerous power of the racist and polarising Right wing discourse that captures the imagination of majorities is such that the minorities are constructed as the enemy and ironically labelled as the racists and polarisers.
Ideological struggle is crucial in these times, and it is made all the more hard for progressive actors, as the Right has captured and is consolidating state power along with the support of class interests that control corporate media. In this context, dissent has to become the base for ideological struggle. And if the polarising power of Right wing hegemony is over taking social institutions, including by capturing trade unions and militarising universities, the ideological struggle in those social institutions have to be taken forward from rejuvenated spaces of dissent and new forums for coexistence. These are times for rethinking our political strategies to safeguard democracy and that has to begin with ideological struggle around the most cherished beliefs and concerns of the people from their right to protest and ensuring access to free education and healthcare.
We also see similar contemporary dynamics of a radical shift to the Right within political parties as with Donald Trump’s take over of the Republican Party in the US and Boris Johnson’s ascendance within the Tories in the UK