The simple way is to simplify problems and solutions in a battle of identities that even the left-wing voter believes. The more direct the enemy’s accusation, the more the extreme right manages to monopolize the political discourse.
The extreme right, from Trump to Putin through Milei, Bukele, Meloni, Wilders and Orbán, knows that the key to their electoral victory is in fueling biases and prejudices that we all have and that, carelessly, we had believed to be overcome by advances in rights human rights that have been promoted since the end of the Second World War. Women, LGTBIQ+ people, people with disabilities, racialized people, refugees and immigrants, the civilian population in wars, children, victims of exploitation and trafficking, the gypsy people…
The list of mentions whose political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights must be recognized and protected is extensive and has a clear common denominator, so clear as to be article 1 of the Declaration of Human Rights: each and every one of us is born free and equal in dignity and rights. Dignity and rights on which there is no possible discrimination. There are no human beings who deserve fewer rights than others, there is no reason to justify discrimination, is underlined in article 2 of the Declaration.
At this point in the century, few expected that this consensus, at least dialectical, on the premises and values that are at the base of societies called to coexistence, respect and diversity in a heterogeneous and democratic society, was going to be broken. to return to the rhetoric of hate, discrimination and dehumanization. From the institutional policy and policies of governments voted precisely for exhibiting an anti-human rights political program, contrary to social justice, denialist of sexist violence, which reject humanitarian reasons as a reason to provide asylum and refuge and attack the defense of environment. If you have any doubts, take a look at the policy drift of the European Parliament.
Those who study this rise of the extreme right, especially among the younger male population, the working class, women and even migrant citizens, point out how the extreme right, in this way of fanning biases and prejudices, is taking advantage of the fragilities and difficulties of these sectors of the population that feel aggrieved, disappointed and angry. A vital state of dissatisfaction and unhappiness for which it is easy to blame feminism, queerness or irregular immigration more than neoliberalism, the privatization of public affairs or necropolitics.
It is more popular and accessible to fuel biases and prejudices that have always been there to teach cruelty than to give reasons that help understand the complexity of capitalist dynamics and the intersectionality in the inequalities that cause this unhappiness and discomfort. The simple way is to simplify problems and solutions in a battle of identities that even the left-wing voter believes. The more direct the enemy’s accusation, the more the extreme right manages to monopolize the political discourse. Identification and affinity: feminism threatens men, LGTBIQ+ threatens women, multiculturalism threatens Spanish traditions, migrant children threaten safety in neighborhoods and homes, secularism threatens the Catholic religion, racialized people threaten people. poor whites…
Carolyn Emcke said, in 2019, that we not only have to fight against extremism when it is violent, but against the ideology that leads to violence. For the extreme right, violent ideology is the defense of human rights when what is really violent is creating this confusion about threats that are not real. It is not the logic of human rights that is threatened when our own identities are in crisis because we are experiencing economic, health or emotional problems. Nor when those identities that enjoy privileges in an unequal society: masculinity, heterosexuality, whiteness, cissexuality, Catholicism, the traditional family… are forced to cohabit with difference.
Perhaps the identity threatened in this political context where the extreme right monopolizes the political discourse while citizens are not able to distinguish between lies and truth, is that of “being human”, that of what kind of human beings we want and are going to be, not with “ours” but with “the others.” That is the true identity in dispute.
#threatened #identity
