15 David Smith, “Nine Out of 10 Americans Say Racism and Police Brutality Are Problems, Poll Finds”, Guardian, July 8, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/08/americans-racism-police-brutality-problems-poll.
16 Charles M Blow, “‘Law and Order’ for ‘Blacks and Hippies’”, New York Times, June 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/opinion/trump-police-reform.html.
17 Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (London: SAGE, 2015), Ch. 1.
18 Francesco Duina, “The Uncomfortable Truths About Populism”, LSE Blogs, June 5, 2020, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2020/06/05/the-uncomfortable-truths-about-populism/.
19 Julian Göpffarth, “Why We Shouldn’t Call the Far Right an Unpopular Minority”, Fair Observer, September 14, 2018, https://www.fairobserver.com/region/europe/far-right-populist-parties-sweden-democrats-afd-europe-politics-news-analysis-19001/.
How Fascists Have Used Panics to Consolidate Power
Roland Clark
Sometimes it is okay to panic. Or at least, some situations demand radical solutions. But when you are up to your eyeballs in judgement against your neighbour for hoarding toilet paper or the government for jeopardising your children’s future to sell another barrel of oil, keep in mind that, in interwar Europe at least, fascist politics emerged out of a climate of panic and constant talk of crises. Benito Mussolini rode to power on the claim that anarchist and communist violence was out of the government’s control. The massacres of the White Terror in Hungary relied on fears that communists and Jews posed a genuine threat to law and order. Adolf Hitler staged the famous Beer Hall Putsch in the midst of a state of emergency in Bavaria, then used the Reichstag fire of 1933 to end civil liberties and suppress his enemies. Oswald Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists with one speech after another about the dire circumstances British workers found themselves in at the end of the Great Depression. Engelbert Dollfuss shut down Austria’s government in 1933 by over-exaggerating a political stalemate that gave him an excuse to attack the Social Democratic Party and launch the Austrian Civil War. Cries about judicial corruption in the case of the embezzler Alexandre Stavisky brought the right-wing Leagues out onto the streets of Paris in February 1934, bringing down Édouard Daladier’s government and almost resulting in a coup d’état.
In his influential 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the sociologist Stanley Cohen analysed what he called “moral panics”.1 These happen, he said, when the media irresponsibly exaggerates a social problem, demanding radical solutions that are often not even relevant to the problem at hand, and then exacerbates the problem by causing people to over-react to it. His book studied fights on the beaches of Brighton one summer that broke out between two youth subcultures: the Mods and the Rockers. But moral panics are far from being something only for the history books. Panics about refugees and asylum seekers, teenage pregnancy, youth gangs, terrorism, sexual deviants, and stock prices generally work in the same way. The so-called “yellow journalism” of the tabloid press was in full swing by the interwar period, and talk about crises was not just something done by the radical right. But whereas the mainstream liberal press spoke about threats to the proper functioning of the social order, the radical right used the language of warfare and religion to portray corruption scandals or economic disasters as existential threats to the nation. Reporting only those facts which would generate the greatest possible emotional responses, right-wing newspapers and speakers whipped up an atmosphere of fear that helped people feel justified in taking radical steps to protect their communities. In normal times, perhaps it would be abhorrent to ban Jews from public swimming pools, but if Jews were known carriers of disease and parasites then that would be a different matter. Just think of the children!
Especially in its early years, it was not always clear what set fascists apart from the other political options on offer. There was certainly something left-wing about parts of their ideology, but at the same time they managed to gain the support of prominent members of the aristocracy. They talked about nationalism, but so did almost every other political party of the day. They called themselves a party of the future, but few were eager to recreate the societies that had produced the Great War. One thing that fascists did do exceedingly well though, was to make people panic. On street corners, in lecture halls, and in their newspapers, fascists worked hard to transform people’s fears—some of which were legitimate, others not—into full-blown moral panics. Moreover, fascists never pointed out problems that they believed could be fixed with a couple of band-aids and a nice cup of tea. Every problem mentioned by the radical right had to be a life-or-death issue that could only be resolved by an almost apocalyptic transformation; restoring order through revolution and democracy through authoritarianism. The fact that fascism emerged from moral panics should never be a reason not to take responsible, decisive action in the face of serious social problems, but as insipid as it seems today when printed on coffee mugs and internet memes, perhaps one of the most profoundly anti-fascist things anyone ever said was: ‘Keep calm and carry on!’.
Dr Roland Clark is a Senior Fellow at CARR and senior lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool.
1 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Routledge, [1972] 2011).
Can the Radical Right’s Reductionist Narrative Withstand Real-World Complexity?
Alan Waring
There is a general recognition that major problems and issues of our world, including understanding them and their causes, and proposing remedies and coping strategies, are rarely simple in nature. Complexity theory and the long history of systems science, as exemplified by the work of such authorities as von Bertalanffy,1 Parsons, Ackoff, Checkland2 and others, have demonstrated this truism conclusively. Nevertheless, systems science has always recognized that reductionism also has an important role in conceptualization, theory development, methodology, analysis, problem/issue elicitation, and design of practical interventions.3 However, that role is meant to be a controlled and targeted one, to be used judiciously only when appropriate to a particular topic or juncture within a larger and more holistic strategy, and not to be used as the exclusive quick-fix approach to all “problem solving”. Regrettably, there is abundant evidence that radical right leaders, ideologues, politicians, administrations, opinion-formers and others have an overwhelming tendency to promulgate, often dogmatically and even ruthlessly, simple analyses and solutions to complex real-world issues. Unsurprisingly, these rarely work and often make things far worse.
Characteristics and fallacies of radical right reductionism
The radical right exhibits reductionist thinking and narratives in two main ways: 1) trivializing or minimizing the nature and impact of particular risks (and sometimes maximizing them), contrary to known science or factual evidence, and 2) over-simplifying specific problems or issues, or inventing false and unscientific cause-effect explanations for them. The apparent motives for why the radical right engages in such egregious manipulation and fakery centre on four processes, which they believe will bring their cause political and populist benefits:
1) Authoritarian revisionism