AIBU to be worried about the normalisation of far right politics?

[Apileofballyhoo]

Just that really. I'm interested in what people consider to be far right and what people think causes it and what should be done about it.

I think it's caused by inequality and people feeling hopeless.

Metoo do you speak for the entire Jewish community in the UK then?

Do you really think there is no antisemitism in the conservative party?! Google is your friend.

What about the austerity BS where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the economy gets worse. "Never had it better?" says someone who is clearly on the right side of the income divide! It's all about taking money from the "undeserving poor" while the rich get richer.

Meanwhile the racists are feeling legitimised "Free Tommy Robinson" the convicted criminal who admitted guilt because after all he was shining a light on the paedos, I mean obviously only the non-white ones because we all know they're the worst right?

To me, far right is people who believe that believe their own race and culture has an inherent superiority over those of others. And they want to express that belief by removing people with different heritage or by harming them. And they want privileges for their own race. I think people like that would be a huge worry.

But the problem is that many people don’t accept that description anymore. And what are perfectly legitimate opinions often based on practicality are now condemned as far right.

For example, thinking that nation states are a good thing because they allow the functioning and funding of public services in a geographical area for a discrete set of people who will have contributed if they were able.

Thinking that a sensible and coherent immigration policy is needed which addresses labour needs, tells us who is going in and out and reducing unneeded low skilled labour coming in.

Or that the asylum system needs a bit of an overhaul because it is being abused by chancers and benefits only the richest and fittest and not those in most danger or need.

Questioning why with huge levels of net migration there is no coherent plan about how we will house these people, how public services will cope with increased demand or thorny questions about intergration and difficulties faced when the host and guest cultures reach places where they cannot reconcile (like FGM, attitudes towards women).

I think they’re all fairly mainstream and common ways of thinking or questioning. But they are often labelled far right now.

I think what the question is, is are far right views becoming acceptable, or are acceptable views being labelled far right by those who would prefer even the mildest centre right views to be seen as intolerable.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/us-jewish-lobby-nigel-farage-power-anti-semitism-ukip-leader-a8031191.html

Here’s Farage doing his little anti-Semite turn.

Oh but we love Farage, he’ll get control back. Brexit will be great once we get the immigrants out.

YANBU. It frighten the shit out of me.

because after all he was shining a light on the paedos, I mean obviously only the non-white ones because we all know they're the worst right?well if the fucking liberals weren’t so fucking worried aboutplahibg id politics they would so out the pedos themselves and not left of to the fucking far right

And the people who weren’t actually rasicts were shouted and hounded until they went away

A good example of this is Lily Alan claiming we are living under a fascist regime.

YANBU

Persecution of minority groups, overt patriotism, silencing the press, creating scapegoats, populist slogans..

Leah Jack..if you are not already, you should involve yourself in politics as you have a balanced view.

The goal of socialism is communism.

Also the kids if illegals were being separated since about 2007. Is now that Trump is here people suddenly care

Redneck you do not know a great deal about the history of politics if you really believe what you just said. There are countries in Europe whose policies might best be described as moderately socialist - many of them are Scandinavian, but the German political model also has some socialist traits. Socialism is about limiting the amount of poverty caused by the divide between haves and have nots. Communism is about reducing everyone except the party political apparatchiks to the lowest common denominator of having very little. They are completely different political models.

The Labour Party is basically a grouping of factions, many of which are 'communists' most what are called 'luxury communists' who base ideas on Marx's 'Grundrisse' rather than Marx's 'Capital' they are Corbyn supporters, Google 'luxury communism' if you want to understand them better. There have been a number of articles about this tendency in the Labour Party, such as this one from the 'New Statesman' extract below:

"There are effectively two minority intellectual forces that form opposite poles in the argument over the future direction of the party. The first and dominant force is a counter-cultural left associated with Momentum and the World Transformed and which has gathered to itself a diverse mix of baby boomer libertarian socialists, ex-Eurocommunists, accelerationist theorists, and younger generations of identity liberals, feminists, and anti-colonialists. It is an alliance of the formerly exiled and the newly awakened left, and its progressive socialism is trying to shape a distinctive Corbynism for the long term.
The second and marginalised force is Blue Labour and a wider assembly of communitarians. Less well organised and fewer in number, it has a more robust intellectual pedigree and deeper roots in the common life of the country. It originated as a socialism critical of New Labour’s managerial politics and failure to reform the economy. It now forms a counterweight to the Party’s onward march into metropolitan identity liberalism and universalism.
The Corbynistas influenced by the ideas of accelerationism have larger ambitions than Labours conventional manifesto policies. They argue for a reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Instead of class struggle driving the course of history the motor of change is technology. This theory of post-capitalism politics is about unleashing the boundless productive forces of capitalism in order to accelerate technological transformation and so achieve communism. The working class no longer has a historical role. The facilitators of this promethean politics will be the younger generations of digitally connected graduates. Horizontal networks will replace institutional hierarchy. The task is not to end neo-liberalism, but to “repurpose it”. "
www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/09/labour-must-choose-between-two-fundamentally-different-understandings

With regard to the far right, far right politics, and far right populism, have been on the rise for some time, again just Google the rise of the far right:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/29/right-social-democracy-dying-europe-afd-far-right-germany

The rise of far right politics is so well established it's even been covered in popular magazines like 'Marie Claire':

www.marieclaire.co.uk/reports/far-right-millennials-507601

you will be told your a bigot for wanting women only spaces

Absolutely, I have experienced this myself.

*About 30% of a YouGov poll claimed they'd vote for a Far Right Party.

That's a problem.*

The reality is that people probably don't care any more and have resigned themselves to the fact they are now apparently literally Hitler without having really changed their opinions significantly. We've all seen every variety of fairly uncontroversial normal views described as "right wing" now, by wilfully dishonest people looking to virtue signal and marginalizing everyone on the whole political establishment spectrum except their bit.

I mean look at the rest of the post I quoted, it perfectly encapsulates the ridiculous batshit narrative that people are not supposed to DARE to disagree with. It is not far right becoming normal, it is normality being re-categorized as far right.

The modern left is the little boy who cried wolf, and the Wolf that follows is of its own making.

My autocorrect inserted the word "establishment" there.

I don't think the situation is helped by the clickbait-y outrage that the left-wing media and Twitterati like to use, or the complete failure of both the left and right to acknowledge that most issues are nuanced. I consider myself centre-left and I'm not at all a fan of Trump, but I've seen a lot of articles calling him a 'fascist' and describing centre-ish commentators like Carl Benjamin or Ben Shapiro as 'alt-right', not to mention some people seeming to think the fact that we (narrowly) voted for Brexit and lots of people don't want completely open borders means we're spiralling uncontrollably down into some kind of race war Armageddon. People's words are constantly taken out of context, their actions are twisted to seem as though they had the worst possible intentions. It all just feels like hyperbole designed to feed the internet outrage machine, and as a result, when I see a headline about something that's indicative of a rise in far-right politics my first reaction isn't "how terrible" but "I'm sure there's probably more to this story than the headline suggests".

To be fair I would say the exact same about right-wing media like the Mail, but I don't read them regularly (and I expect most people who are worried about a rise in far-right politics don't either), so they don't have much impact on my views.

It's very concerning but I think that in the UK, the Far Left are more of a worry.

Redneck Socialism and communism are not the same thing. You can be socialist and retain a belief in democracy, communism abandons democracy. I have always supported Labour, but am struggling with that now because of the rise of anti-democratic communist ideology; lack of sustained opposition to Brexit; anti-Semitism; and the lack of support for women's rights. I do however support the more moderate factions but they are in decline. I am not sure if I could vote for them in the future, but do not know who else to vote for.

People might find this website interesting. Parties are mapped on the diagram according to their policies on both society and economics. You can take the quiz yourself to see where you place on the graph. The link I've given shows the current positions of parties in the UK and below the block of text shows how the three major ones have moved since the 70s.

www.politicalcompass.org/uk2017

How can you think the Left is more of a problem than the rise of the Far Right?

We have had one MP (Labour) murdered by a Far Right sympathiser and a second (female, Labour) MP targeted in a foiled Far Right assassination plot.

This is real. It's not a 'what if' or a 'maybe'.

The Left aren't in power, and the Conservative's lurch to the right has meant the Party has haemorrhaged it's more centrists members. This has left the parliamentary party - the group actually in power - extremely vulnerable to an increasingly extreme minority in its membership and funding from dodgy Far Right donors - Brexit has seen the Conservatives lose it's usual funding support from mainstream business.

They are in power - and vulnerable to Co-operation and a push rightwards. I'm not one to think the parliamentary party are Far Right - they're not - but a lot of those parliamentary MPs are increasingly looking like hostages to forces whose views are quite at odds with theirs.

Yadnbu. I have been shocked by the shift in what is considered to be acceptable publicly expressed opinion in the last 2 years.

I agree with all that thecat has said.

Does it not worry people that Steve Bannon has stated that he is seeking to flood the EU with a right-wing ‘supergroup’ of MEPs. Why does he need to do this in Europe?

How can you think the Left is more of a problem than the rise of the Far Right?

The left engages in marginalization, political repression and extremism that is creating a right wing backlash.

Neither exists in a vacuum - two sides of the same coin and always were. Sadly the suffering caused by extremists tends to fall on everyone.

I do disagree with you a little, ballyhoo. I think inequality and hopelessness helps but I think a lot of the people drawn to the Far Right seem to be authoritarians - authoritarians without the authority they believe is their due (by reason of class, race, sex, nationality) really incensed by the progressive direction of travel.

They won't be appeased by more equality/more progressiveness/less inequality. I suspect that will incense the more. They don't want less inequality - they want an inequality where the 'correct' people are under their feet and 'progressives' (the people responsible for this horrible modern world where they are no longer guaranteed a certain type of people under them, not above the) get a good kicking.

And they don't care if the UK has to become a second-world nation to deliver that.

I never understand the whole 'nativist' thing, which rides alongside this modern Far Right. The weird , emotional, fuzzy call to 'authenticity' and 'national home'. These people HATE the UK. They HATE the modern UK. They even hate prosperity, young people's access to education, to opportunities throughout the world. The grimly want to destroy all of that because they are angry and full of hate.

I don't see any 'patriotism' in that.

It's bizarre.

And they're happy to join up with international capitalists, a cartel of multi-millionaires, and nation states that openly state they want to destabilise Western democracies.

That is, surely, the opposite of patriotism.

The modern Far Right is as baffling as it is stupid and angry.

I suppose the inequality is how they get ordinary people to follow them cat.

Once again, @LeahJack sums it up perfectly.

Far Right in this country? Don’t make me laugh. I take it people haven’t travelled around the world much.

Far Right in this country? Don’t make me laugh. I take it people haven’t travelled around the world much.

I’m a left activist. While you may not agree with my politics, the far righty definitely exist. I’ve had death threats from them.