Resisting the right-wing vibe shift
The hard right is making serious ground globally. But, while increasingly powerful, their ideas are not hegemonic. Now is not the time to despair, but to fight for a better world.
--------------------
There’s an undeniable sense that a right-wing vibe shift has taken place over the last eighteen months. Bashing migrants, trans people and women’s rights is “in”, as is climate denialism and the unfettered right of billionaires to accumulate as much money as possible. The hard right have become normalised; they are the mainstream in politics.
Donald Trump’s re-election and his rapid-fire assault on the oppressed and regulatory departments are the pinnacle of this new political era. He campaigned on assertions that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of US society and eating pet cats and dogs in Ohio. He celebrated his success in appointing Supreme Court judges who overturned national abortion protections. He vowed to abolish the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Authority. And now that he’s taken office, he’s holding good on many promises, while threatening US territorial expansion.
But it’s not just the US. The far right is on the march across Europe, surging in France, the United Kingdom and Germany, on the verge of taking power in Austria, and ruling Italy and several Central European countries. Many trace historical links to 1930s fascist parties. In Australia, Liberal leader Peter Dutton has borrowed elements of the MAGA playbook, lashing out at the “woke agenda”, lamenting that young men are “disenfranchised and ostracised” by diversity initiatives and setting up his own DOGE-inspired shadow minister for government efficiency.
Unsurprisingly, corporate America is also going MAGA. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has inserted himself into the heart of the Trump administration, while using his control of X to promote far-right parties internationally. In a speech to the fascist Alternative for Germany party, Musk encouraged Germans to move beyond “a focus on past guilt” less than a week after performing a Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration.
The titans of Silicon Valley—where many of the richest men in the world made their billions—have embraced Trump. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now sports a gold chain, encourages companies to embrace “masculine energy” and recently dropped diversity initiatives. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is spending $40 million for the right to make a documentary about first lady Melania Trump, live streamed Trump’s inauguration and, along with many other tech billionaires, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. There was a revolving door of corporate leaders bending the knee at Mar-a-Lago in the months before Trump took office.
It’s unsurprising, because these are the people set to benefit the most from an administration that is gutting regulations seen as impediments to the rich making money. In a world that feels more unstable (economies are stuttering, climate change is wreaking havoc and the threat of global war is looming), Trump promises a more ruthless administration focused only on “making America win”. Be under no illusion: it’s corporate America he is referring to.
Diversity, equity and inclusion programs fitted the vibe of the 2010s and early 2020s, when millions of people mobilised to demand racial justice and the #MeToo movement excoriated misogynistic corporate culture. Companies adapted to try to maintain relevance amongst their consumer base. But that moment has passed, and the naked pursuit of profit and power, the preferred state of affairs for the billionaires, is making a comeback. “I feel liberated”, a top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled ... It’s a new dawn.”
Right-wing politics also feels ascendant in broader society and popular culture. Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson have infected a growing section of young men with their noxious brand of hyper-misogyny and hustle culture. Trump received loud cheers during the Super Bowl live stream. Joe Rogan rules the airwaves. #YourBodyMyChoice trended immediately after Trump’s election. UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell received barely a slap on the wrist for a pro-Hitler rant that called the Nazi leader “a good guy”.
This all amounts to a dangerous new normal in world politics. For anyone who cares about the plight of the oppressed, this is serious cause for concern. It also raises a few important questions: How did we get here? And what can we do about it?
The first thing to note is that it’s not the case that everyone is now a bigot. Trump did not win by a large margin—at 1.8 percent, it’s the smallest since 1968—and nearly 90 million eligible voters stayed home. Only one newly elected president has had a lower approval rating than Trump since the end of World War II: himself, in 2017. Across Western Europe and the UK, a majority of voters still reject the far right. If Dutton wins the upcoming federal election, it will be because of the ALP’s failure to help ordinary people during the cost-of-living crisis: every Australian poll conducted in the last twelve months shows more than two-thirds of respondents do not support Trump.
Polling also indicates that many of the key right-wing talking points are not very popular. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legal access to abortion in most or all cases (which has increased since the Dobbs decision), according to the Pew Research Center. In June last year, Gallop found that more than six in ten Americans opposed banning access to gender-affirming care for minors. Only 37 percent of US adults support Trump’s call to deport all undocumented migrants, according to a survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In the cultural sphere, Chappell Roan, who loudly promotes LGBTI rights and supports Palestine, is the pop star of the moment. And apparently Trump’s cheers at the Super Bowl were challenged by loud jeers—Fox sport just edited those bits out.
The next thing to understand is that the right has not risen to power because the masses turned fascist. The story of electoral politics in 2024 was the crisis of incumbency: parties that have overseen the rising cost of living of recent years were booted out of office. For instance, in the United Kingdom the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives, but now that they’re just dishing out more of the same, the far-right Reform UK party has surged in the polls. Politicians of all stripes are being punished for rising inequality.
In addition to that, official politics has for years been shifting to a harsher, more racist edge. For the last fifteen years, everyone from the traditional conservatives to the social democratic parties has tried to deflect anger away from themselves and on to migrants—it’s a classic case of divide and rule. Fortress Europe—the decade-long effort to keep migrants out of Europe by building barbed wire fences and letting at least 25,000 refugees drown in the Mediterranean—was not constructed by the fascists, but the political “centre”. Last year, deportations under Biden surpassed Trump’s record. When all we are hearing from politicians and the mainstream media is that we can’t afford a house because migrants are flooding the borders, is it any wonder that people start to believe this?
Popular consciousness is not only hardening to the right, but polarising to the left as well. There are countless examples of this: from young people demanding action on climate change, growing acceptance of trans people and outrage over attacks on abortion rights, not to mention the popular response to Luigi Mangione assassinating a health insurance CEO in New York last year. As the world becomes a nastier place, many are looking for a progressive alternative.
So how do you square this circle with the rise of the right? For one thing, it’s easier for the right. Despite their anti-establishment rhetoric, they fit much more neatly into the system, venerating hierarchies, national divisions, racist scapegoating and profit making. They’re not trying to overthrow capitalism and create a society of genuine equality—quite the opposite. When it comes to electoral politics, the right has the advantage: for instance, the left doesn’t have the support of the richest person on the planet (and nor would we want it).
But mistakes have also been made by the left. Many have tried to transform the centre left parties into a weapon for economic and social justice. This means that organising efforts are wasted on hopeless projects like the Democrats or Labor-type parties. When these parties continue to betray their hopeful supporters, people become demoralised and withdraw from politics entirely. We saw this with Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and even more left-wing, but limited, electoral projects in Europe.
The other mistake is thinking that the bosses can be compelled to right society’s wrongs. “Woke capitalism” and diversity programs still gave us soaring inequality, accelerating climate change and the genocide in Gaza.
Left-wing people feel defeated while the right is ascendant, which has a broader impact on society. The right-wing trolls who were hiding in subreddits five years ago are now brimming with confidence.
Instead, we need to look towards forms of organising that history has shown can push back against the right and the ills of capitalism more broadly. Protests are an essential part of that strategy. At the start of last year, support for the German far right fell after mass protests swept the country. The Black Lives Matter uprising—the largest protests in US history—helped put the final nail in the coffin of the first Trump administration. They’re also a way to gather those who share a common outrage and vision for society, cutting against the atomisation and demoralisation that the system relies on.
Working-class power is the other necessary element. Imagine if every teacher in the US stopped work to stop Trump from gutting the Education Department. Or if every doctor and nurse went on strike against cuts to public health or the health insurance vultures. Without the labour of ordinary people, their system would come to a standstill.
But we also need a political alternative: socialist parties that fight this shitty system, instead of capitulating to or compromising with it. Politics that fights for workers, for migrants, for trans people and women’s rights, against war and genocide and greenhouse-gas-emitting corporate criminals.
We’re living in an increasingly dangerous world. The rich want to stamp down harder on workers, the oppressed are having hard-fought rights stripped away, and the threats of war and climate catastrophe loom large. Standing on the sidelines is not an option for anyone with a shred of decency. It’s time to join the fight.
