Cómo la derecha neo- nazi avanza en el mundo(en inglés).
Far-right attempts to storm parliaments and government offices have happened in Germany and the Netherlands in recent years
Last modified on Fri 8 Jan 2021 09.37 GMT
Just one day after black women, once again, protected US democracy in Georgia, white men were attacking the very symbol of that democracy in Washington DC. The first attack was actually mounted from inside, by a group of Republican congress members, who challenged Joe Biden’s election victory. The second attack started outside, as a pro-Trump and “Stop the Steal” rally, and ended inside, with a mob of far-right protesters breaking through the remarkably weak police cordon and illegally entering the US Capitol.
I have been studying the international far right for almost 30 years now and have never seen them as emboldened as in the last years. To be clear, this is not just about Donald Trump or the US. Just last year mostly far-right anti-vaccine protesters tried to storm the Reichstag, the German parliament, also facing remarkably weak police resistance. And in the Netherlands, angry farmers, often led by the far-right Farmers Defence Force, have been destroying government offices and threatening politicians since 2019. Even further back, in 2006, far-right mobs stormed the Hungarian state television headquarters and battled the police for weeks in the streets of Budapest – in many ways the start of the radicalization and return to power of current prime minister Viktor Orbán.
How and why did we get here? First and foremost, through a long process of cowardice, failures, and shortsighted opportunism of the mainstream right. Already in 2012, in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, by a longtime prominent neo-Nazi, I wrote, “the extremist rhetoric that comes from so-called law-abiding patriots should be taken more seriously”. I advised Republican leaders to “be more careful in choosing their company and insinuations”. What happened, however, was the opposite: far-right ideas and people were mainstreamed rather than ostracized.
As in so many other things, Donald Trump has been a major catalyst of this process, but not its initiator. The radicalization of the US right wing predates Trump by decades. It even predates the Tea Party, which mostly helped to bring the far right into the heart of the Republican party. Obviously, racism and racist dog-whistling have been key to the party since they launched their infamous “southern strategy” in the 1970s, which brought white southerners to the Republican party, but this goes far beyond that. The radicalization is not just ideological, it is anti-systemic.
In the past decades rightwing politicians and pundits have opportunistically pandered to the far-right electorate by defining them as “the real people” and declaring this loud minority to be an allegedly victimized silent majority. While this is again a much broader process, it has played out very strongly in the US, where it was amplified by a booming “conservative” media network, from talk radio to Fox News, as well as the still formidable infrastructure of the religious right. It was so successful that, already before Trump won the presidency, a majority of white evangelicals believed that “discrimination against whites is now as critical as discrimination against non-whites”. A year later, a poll found that a majority of white evangelicals believed they are more discriminated than Muslims in the US.
The discourse of “white victimhood” is no longer a purely rightwing phenomenon, however. Whenever far-right successes take mainstream media and politics by surprise, they overcompensate, and go from denouncing or ignoring “the racists” to defending or even exalting them. For years now, journalists and politicians have been minimizing the importance of racism and pushing the narrative of “economic anxiety”. Racists became “the left behind” or simply “the people” – even in countries where the far right barely polled above 10% of the national vote.
Undoubtedly, some rightwing politicians and pundits really believe their own propaganda, but the vast majority knows very well that the far-right electorate constitutes only a minority of the population and that white people – whether Evangelical or not – do not face anywhere near as much discrimination as Muslims, or other non-white and non-Christian groups. And if they don’t believe it, then ask them this question: do you really think these protesters would have made it into the Capitol if they had been African American or Muslim?
Most politicians and pundits probably initially pandered to these groups for opportunistic reasons, hoping to win far-right support. But as the far right got more and more emboldened, and violent, the mainstream right became more and more afraid. Many mainstream politicians and other elites no longer dare to speak out against the far right, afraid to be personally and politically threatened by their mob.
The increasingly bold and open political violence of far-right gangs and mobs should be a wake-up call to all enablers of, and peddlers to, the far right. You don’t control them. They control you. And while these gangs don’t represent the broader part of the population that holds far-right views, or supports far-right candidates and parties, fundamentally they share a similar worldview. And in this view there is no space for nuance or compromise. You are either an ally, on their terms, or an enemy. And there is no mercy for enemies, not even for former allies. Just ask Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, or Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state.
It is therefore high time that liberal democratic journalists, politicians, and pundits finally see the far right for what it is: a threat to liberal democracy. A formidable threat, for sure, but also a threat can only succeed with the tacit help of the mainstream, either by opportunistic coalitions or by cowardly non-responses. We are not in the 1930s. Today, the vast majority of Americans and Europeans support liberal democracy. But they have become the silent majority, increasingly ignored and unprotected by its representatives.
It is time to stand up to the far right and for liberal democracy. It is time to call out the racism and undemocratic discourses and behaviors of the far right. And it is time to clearly and openly reject the toxic narrative of white victimhood. Of course, we should acknowledge the struggle of parts of the white population, notably the farmers and workers, but not at the expense of the non-white population or of liberal democracy.
• This article was amended on 7 and 8 January 2020. A reference to a phrase being shouted by protesters was removed, due to the phrase not being entirely clear in the relevant footage. And it was the headquarters of Hungarian state television that protesters stormed in 2006, rather than the Hungarian parliament as an earlier version stated.
Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist
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