God save us from the moral bankruptcy of our centrist saviours.
Two years after failing to defeat the far right, Hillary Clinton has appointed herself an authority on how to defeat the far right. Two years after a humiliation of global proportions, which delivered the infrastructure of the world’s most militarised state into the hands of a despotic sociopath, she has concluded that her damp squib of a campaign would have been enlivened by a promise to build an even bigger wall. Maybe with a COEXIST Mural splashed across it.
She was joined by Matteo Renzi and Tony Blair, all of whom agreed in a recent Guardian interview that controls on immigration were needed to fend off the advance of the far right. This trio have something in common besides an unfathomably cast-iron conviction in their own right to govern: they all presided over an era of “Pasokification”, which has seen centrist and centre-left parties collapse under the weight of their own dogged allegiance to old economic truths which consummately crumbled in 2008. Their grasp on electoral power has been loosened by the mounting forces of the far right, in parliaments and on the streets.
To this, they have found a solution: to deflate the appeal of the far right by proving that the sensible centre can offer much more efficient and humane stewards of the border walls, prison camps, home raids and charter flights which cart people off in the middle of the night.
To fend off the threat of an ever more rabid contingent of race-baiters and unabashed white nationalists in the electorate, they haven’t recommended that we confront their ideas head on, that we oppose their organisation, that we try heal the economic wounds in which far-right ideas fester. There is little attempt to win the political and moral arguments against the politics of hatred, division and hard surveillance; little attempt to oppose their organisations. No, their winning tactic is to immediately concede ground to the most egregious of their demands – to build the walls higher, to deport people to their deaths, to tear families apart, to let thousands more migrants drown in the Mediterranean.
There’s just one problem. History has equipped us with a word for when governments bend to the will of fascists in order to temporarily secure their hold on power: that word is “collaboration”.
This is exactly what the endgame for fringe far right movements looks like: to pressure a political centre, unable or unwilling to genuinely combat their ideology, into accepting their ideas to fend off the double threats of electoral defeat and social upheaval.
In other words, this isn’t how we defeat the far right – it’s precisely how they win.
