An article in a recent issue of the Byline Times headlined “The British Political-Media Class’ Mainstreaming of the Populist Radical-Right” provides nice simple definitions of some of the words that sadly we’re having to use more and more when considering modern day politics where I live and beyond. These are frequently used words that are often used in a vague or confusing way in my experience.
Here are three that are of relevance to the modern day radical right-wing political ideas that have entered the fray
Populism:
…populism valorises “the people”, which it conceives as a unified and homogenous whole (as in, for instance, the “silent majority”)
“The people” are defined in opposition to an out-of-touch, unrepresentative “Establishment”, or more commonly in the UK, “liberal elite”. This typically includes the mainstream media (“fake news” in Trump)-speak, the BBC in the case of those vociferously lobbying against it); elected politicians (in it only for themselves); public functionaries (obstructive and unaccountable bureaucrats); intellectuals (pointy-headed inhabitants of the ivory tower); the legal profession (“lefty lawyers”, judges as “enemies of the people”); and international organisations such as the UN (interfering busybodies subverting national sovereignty).
Populism almost invariably involves the identification of out-groups: stigmatised Others who are represented not simply as being not of “the people” but as a distinct threat to them — for example asylum seekers, migrants, people of colour, travellers, LGBTQIA+ people, the “woke”, and so on and on. In other words, those who are not part of “us”. Indeed, what constitutes “us” is defined largely in opposition to those who are not “us”.
Finally there is an admiration for charismatic leaders and the increasingly fashionable “strong man” not bound by democratic niceties.
Such values include respect for minority rights, the rule of law and the separation of powers, whereas right-wing populism is anti-pluralist, refusing to recognise the existence of legitimate differences among “the people”, and hostile to cultural, religious, sexual and other kinds of diversity.
Nativism:
…nativism holds that “states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation state”.
Authoritarianism:
Authoritarianism, meanwhile, is the belief in a strictly ordered society in which authority must be respected and deviant behaviour stigmatised and punished.
The article itself is about the mainstreaming of radical right ideas. What is mainstreaming.
Mainstreaming:
Mainstreaming takes place because traditional right-wing parties increasingly address the same issues as radical right-wing ones, and do so in a similar way.
This is particularly the case given the increasing dominance of the political agenda by socio-cultural issues — multiculturalism, identity politics and culture wars. Sentiments that used to be exclusive to radical right parties have increasingly become the “common sense” of the more mainstream right, and the boundaries between the two have become increasingly blurred and porous.
That’s because the modern radical right often doesn’t really have any of its own novel ideas. It just takes existing ones to extremes.
…the radical right “does not stand for a fundamentally different world than the political mainstream; rather it takes mainstream ideas and values to an illiberal extreme.
The press aids with mainstreaming. The most obvious example in the UK is GB News.
Obviously the arrival of GB News in June 2021 and Ofcom’s remarkable latitude in allowing it to run a coach and horses through the due impartiality clauses in its Broadcasting Code has enabled populist radical right views to be expressed on television in an unfettered way that up until very recently would have seemed quite unthinkable.
Whilst it’s hardly a popularly watched TV channel, I do see clips from the station shared widely on the Internet. And perhaps one of its most insidious effect comes from boosting its preferred opinions in other outlets:
…surely the way in which it has allowed populist politicians such as Tice, Farage, Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson such relatively unmediated access to the airwaves and established a bridgehead with the right-wing press by hiring presenters from the Telegraph (formerly Christopher Hope, now Camilla Tominey) and Mail (Andrew Pierce), as well as providing the right-wing press commentariat as a whole with yet another platform on which to air its views.
What’s a critical danger here?
What in fact they are doing is ventriloquising what they claim to be public opinion, as opposed to the views of those who own and run them, and of their dwindling readerships. But as long as governments and oppositions believe in this ventriloquism act, it works politically, and so the process of normalising populist right-wing discourse continues apace.