The Alternative Debunk: Far-right populism, privilege and coming to terms with change

Britain, as a country, is depicted around the world as the very personification of privilege. We are tea-supping, tradition-adhering, aristocracy-adoring, wearers of bowler hats. There are people in this country who are proud of that depiction.

That isn't really a recognisable image of Britain today. Except for the privilege. At the core of British concept of liberty is privilege: middle class affluence, home ownership, private schools, inherited wealth, the older sort of social networks.

This privileged middle sort have done well out of globalism - well prepared and adapted for the rising demand for high skill, education and flexibility. But in Britain, globalisation has seen both winners and losers.

As the cushioned middle class have gained, the fragile lives of the working class have been threatened. The old dependable industries have gone, deemed to costly. With them has gone job security, in the name of chasing efficiency.

Pressure to be productive has risen, even as security and stability has declined. It shouldn't be a major surprise that since the 1990s a new era of civil rights movements has sprung up, working to unite people and push back.

There is a point of view that it has also forced working class people to be seduced by the hate-filled, divisive, rhetoric of the far right - to get on board with populist movements that scapegoat refugees and immigrants and minorities.

However, the facts don't support it.

The reality: the far right isn't a working class movement. It never has been. In fact, populism tends to be better supported by the petit bourgeosie and the rich - with the backing only of a violent minority of working class people. Far-right populism is, at it's core, reactionary politics. It is the establishment pushing back against reform. It is about the fear of losing status amidst crisis - it is the moderately well off frightened of losing their privilege.

Something held up against this view are the voters who backed the latest President of the United States into office. Their lack of a college education was presented as a fait accompli of poor, white, racist and ignorant, working class men. But the facts paint a more complex picture. It is true that 70% of Fourtyfive's supporters didn't have college degrees - but then 71% of Americans don't have college degrees. And most of his supporters earn over the median income $50,000 a year.

Now, the middle class base of far right populism doesn't mean appeals are not made for support from ordinary working people. In times of crisis, the populist narrative finds fertile soil among people whose interests it does less to serve. It must be tweaked to include the working class in a narrative of privilege, but it remains simple, emotive and effective.

For the far right, and the privileged few who drive it, the impact of neoliberalism must have been a dream come true: post-industrial Britain, Wales and The North, Labour and left-wing heartlands, excluded from the benefits of globalisation - even as it dismantled the basis for prosperity under the old order.

Huge numbers of people left without job security, sometimes even social security. Communities stripped of their resources, their high streets becoming abandoned. All that was left was to exploit their fears and give them scapegoats.

The story is not an original one: of a majority that are going to lose their status and money to a minority, or minorities, courtesy of a discredited establishment - itself painted as a minority that no longer represent this fearful majority. Legitimacy is questioned. Mandates undermined. A web of emotive propaganda aimed at dividing society, turning the affluent in fear against it's fringes, to the benefit of a reactionary few.

This is the core of the narrative that divided and felled the Second Spanish Republic, used to justify a military coup. The toppling of the Weimar Republic. The upholding of first slavery and then segregation in the Deep South by Dixiecrats.

There have been few places, even in these times of a 'far-right populist wave', where populists have secured a broad base of public support - broad enough to make a claim of significant support from working class people. The barrier that seemed to have some significance was 13% - the level of popular support the far-right in Western Europe have struggled to break through. But the rise of authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe, threaten to make the West less an anti-populist bloc than an enclave.

There are more exceptions. The Fortyfifth President in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro as President in Brazil, and the FPO in government in Austria, the electoral success of Lega and M5S in Italy - these are among the few to have made major electoral breakthroughs in the West. But we know Fortyfive's supporters were mostly affluent and middle class. Are the supporters of Bolsonaro, Heinz-Christian Strache, Salvini and Grillo, much different?

In Britain, rising inequality has started to bite even the privileged middle class. Fears about pensions and wellbeing in old age, stress and pressure at work - core fears of the working class - are worrying Middle England. That made them the dominant supporters of Brexit, some 60% of all Brexit voters - to just 17% of Brexiters who were working class. Populism succeeded, with Brexit, in pulling the middle class apart from the working class, and turning them against the liberal democratic political establishment.

Under pressure and fearful of change, it is the middle class who are the movers of the times. The statistics tell us that when the working class face these crises, they don't vote - their feelings of disenfranchisment become inaction.

Yet there is hope in this analysis. There is common cause to be found between the middle class and the working class. They have the same fears and face the same pressures - though one is far more insulated from them than the other, and felt them later. There is a common platform to be found. One that can unite people on what they have in common: a desire for social security, for wellbeing at work and in old age, for a functioning local community - and a desire for opportunity.

The question left for progressives is, what party or alliance will be the vehicle for such a programme? Whoever they are, they need to get to grips with a simple fact: change scares people. Our answer needs to be bring them together in solidarity.

References

Frank Mols' 'Danny Dorling's research confirms that Middle classes (not working class) voted for Brexit'; from Twitter; video by Danny Dorling for BBC Newsnight; 29 December 2017.

Nicholas Carnes & Noam Lupu's 'It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class'; in The Washington Post; 5 June 2017.

'What next for Merkel and Germany?'; in The Alternative; 25 September 2017.