I’ve been thinking about a famously orange-skinned former presenter of trashy TV programmes, who lives on a luxurious coastal estate. He has a history of racist and Islamophobic remarks, of blaming asylum seekers for bringing disease into the country and ranting about the “supercilious metropolitan elite”. He swept into a rightwing political party and refashioned it in his image, presenting himself as the antidote to politics-as-usual, whipping up culture wars and using the platform to boost his planet-sized ego.
I am, of course, describing the British former politician Robert Kilroy-Silk.
After he was sacked from his presenting job by the BBC for a crudely racist rant in the Sunday Express in 2004, he joined Ukip (the forerunner of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK), energising it and captivating the media with his culture war polemics against the EU, immigrants and “the political establishment”. His unnatural hue inspired the viral video Mr Tangerine Man. But when Ukip could no longer contain his ego, he broke away and started his own political party in 2005, Veritas (widely dubbed Vanitas), which quickly crashed and burned. Thank goodness there are no such characters on the world stage today!
I could just as well have been thinking of Silvio Berlusconi, the satsuma-tinged TV presenter and culture warrior, who, like a certain other politician, went to extreme lengths to hide his baldness. He became the demagogic, rightwing Italian prime minister, seeking (successfully) to return to power after being ejected from office, despite a long series of sexual and financial scandals and criminal charges. Like Donald Trump’s, his loyal supporters somehow managed to overlook his moral repulsiveness, childish attention-seeking and love-in with Vladimir Putin, and saw him as the saviour who would make Italy great again.
Of course, there are differences between these people, but every time one of these characters emerges, we are nonplussed by them. We react as if we’re dealing with something new, and appear to have little idea how to respond. But there are patterns to the emergence of extreme-right demagogues: patterns that repeat themselves with remarkable fidelity. By learning and understanding them, we can better defend ourselves.
I’ve spent part of my summer reading Arno Mayer, the great historian who died in 2023. His book Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, published in 1971, could have been written about any of the rightwing populists we face today: Trump, Farage, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, the leaders of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the National Rally in France, the Brothers of Italy and – lately – Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson.
Mayer’s descriptions of the demagogues of his period are uncannily familiar. These leaders created the impression “that they seek fundamental changes in government, society, and community”. But in reality, because they relied on the patronage of “incumbent elites” to gain power (think, today, of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Paul Marshall, and various billionaire funders), they sought no major changes “in class structure and property relations”. In fact, they ensured these were shored up. “They need to revile incumbent elites and institutions without foreclosing cooperation with them.” So their project “is far more militant in rhetoric, style and conduct than in political, social and economic substance”.
For this reason, Mayer explains how rightwing populists expose and overstate the cracks in a crisis-torn society, but fail to “account for them in any coherent and systematic way”. They direct popular anger away from genuine elites and towards fictional conspiracies and minorities. They variously blame these minorities (whether it be Jews, Muslims, asylum seekers, immigrants, Black and Brown people) for the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness felt by their supporters; helping “humiliated individuals to salvage their self-esteem by attributing their predicament to a plot” and giving them immediate targets on which to vent their frustrations and hatreds.
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The fake firebrands often, Mayer remarks, also issued “rampant broadsides against science” (think of the climate science denial to which almost all today’s rightwing demagogues subscribe), and against innovation, modernism and cosmopolitanism. They combined “the glorification of traditional attitudes and behaviour patterns with the charge that these are being corrupted, subverted, and defiled by conspiratorial agents and influences”. Hello JD Vance and Ron DeSantis.
The demagogues of Mayer’s period adopted a purposely “ambiguous position”, when people who might have been inspired by their claims committed acts of violence – both inflaming the attacks and distancing themselves from them. This might trigger memories of Donald Trump during the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Modi during anti-Muslim pogroms and the video Farage made after the Southport murders, which is seen by many people as bearing some responsibility for last month’s racist riots.
But there is one major difference. In Mayer’s era, the development of what he called “crisis strata” of disillusioned, angry men to whom the demagogues appealed was a result of devastating war or state collapse. The rabble-rousers were able to appeal both to angry working-class men and to anxious elites by invoking the spectre of leftwing revolution. None of these conditions pertain today in countries like our own. So how does the current batch of populists succeed? I think they are responding to a crisis caused by a different force: 45 years of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism simultaneously promises the world and snatches it away. It tells us that if you work hard enough, you too can be an alpha. But it also creates the conditions which ensure that, no matter how hard you work, you are likely to remain subordinate and exploited. It has enabled the formation of a new rentier class, that owns the essential assets and ruthlessly exploits younger and poorer people. Young men step into a world of promises – to find all the golden doors are locked, and someone else has the key.
It is in the vast gap between the promises of neoliberalism and their fulfilment that frustration, humiliation and a desire for vengeance grow: the same emotions that followed military defeat or state collapse in Mayer’s time. These impulses are then exploited by conflict entrepreneurs. Today, some of these entrepreneurs stand for office; others, using opportunities that weren’t available in previous eras, monetise the anger, making a fortune through their social media outlets.
Understanding the tradition these demagogues follow, which long predates the rise of fascism in the 20th century, should help us to develop a more effective response to them. We begin to see this in Kamala Harris’s intelligent campaign, which, in contrast to Joe Biden’s, is starting to land heavy blows on Trump and Vance, drawing attention to their creepy intrusions on people’s private lives and their attacks on fundamental freedoms. If we want to anticipate and stop rightwing authoritarian rule, we should seek to comprehend its eerie consistencies.
