The West Misunderstands Its Own Far Right

To understand the challenge posed by these far-right parties, they need to be properly named. Not labeling them “populist” would be a good place to start.

In contemporary usage, populism is a term deployed by centrist commentators to claim a monopoly on political common sense for the moderate middle—an objective-sounding word for extremism and excess in the same way as centrism is a synonym for sensible moderation. But the currency populism has gained thanks to this rhetorical maneuver has been bought at the expense of coherence and precision.

The term populism derives from a political movement in the southern and western states of the United States in the late 19th century. Agrarian cooperatives and trade unions in this region founded a political party in the early 1890s called the People’s Party. The party demanded the government become more responsive to its rightful owners, the people. This sweeping rhetoric in favor of democratization was central to the eponymous historical movement that birthed populism. It is an integral part of movements that can be properly described as populist, like Peronism in Latin America.

But the way the term is now used in the West suggests instead that populism is a political style, not an ideological position, which can be used to describe the idiom of both right-wing and left-wing movements. Trump and Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage are routinely described as populists.

The argument for this conflation is that both tendencies are defined by their hostility to the institutions, conventions, and expert elites that sustain liberal democracies. Populism, left and right, is said to be an expression of illiberal democracy undomesticated by the rule of law. This left-right dyad is actually a threesome, because the institutions and conventions that populists are allegedly hostile to are embodied by the moderate center. This middle ground is the vantage point from which populists become visible. The problem with this centrist god’s-eye view is that it obscures both the differences between left and right and the nature of the threat posed by the latter.

Populism became part of the European discourse in the 1980s when French political scientists like Pierre-André Taguieff began to use the term “national-populism” to describe the far-right National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Anton Jäger, a historian of populism, argues that populism was initially used in France as a pejorative term, but once journalists got hold of it, its academic lineage gave reportage and analysis an air of neutrality “different from the semantic overkill associated with terms like fascism or the extreme right.” By the 1990s, the leaders of the National Front looking to escape their neo-fascist past had embraced national-populism as a self-description. According to Jäger, this twist in the intellectual history of a term “transformed the [National Front] from a fascist party to a populist one.”

The extension of the term to left-wing political movements suggested that the center was threatened by extremists from both wings of politics. It was an unpersuasive argument because it was untrue. It’s hard to see Sanders and Corbyn as the left equivalents of Trump and Farage if only because their political careers have been lived out in conventional mainstream parties where their left-wing pieties were a traditional part of the ideological spectrum contained by those parties.

Corbyn’s euroskepticism has a long history on the Labour left, dating back to Tony Benn’s opposition to the United Kingdom’s membership in the European common market, the EU’s lineal ancestor. Sanders’s calls to reform Wall Street, audit the Federal Reserve, break up banks classed as “too big to fail,” and tax the “1 percent” are the stock-in-trade of the Democratic left. For these to be classed as populist in the aftermath of the crash of 2008 tells us more about the dogmas of ideological centrism than it does about populism. The self-serving centrist use of the term populism to describe right- and left-wing movements has lent a veneer of respectability to right-wing extremists and eased their entry into the political mainstream.

A supporter of Italy’s right-wing Lega Nord party wears a shirt with the face of former U.S. President Donald Trump in Pontida, Italy, on Sept. 17, 2023.Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images

The historical font of majoritarian nationalism is not populism, but Hitler’s National Socialist party. The Holocaust disqualified majoritarianism from the political mainstream in postwar Europe. The Cold War, in turn, froze the nationalist imagination on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But Nazism’s master concept of a majoritarian nation-state built on the scapegoating of “inferior” minorities remained an inspiration to supremacists elsewhere. M. S. Golwalkar, the chief ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organization of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), held up Hitler’s treatment of minorities as an example for Indians to follow.

Indians are more sensitive to the significance of majoritarian nationalism than their Western counterparts for historical reasons. Late colonialism and the prospect of self-determination forced anti-colonial intellectuals to actively imagine the post-colonial nation-state. Colonized nationalists tended to mimic European models. They invoked language and religion to legitimize the nations they wanted to build.

The only decolonized states that refused an explicitly majoritarian nationalism and founded formally pluralist nation-states to accommodate their diversity were India and Indonesia. “Formally” is doing a lot of work here, because in several unspoken ways India and Indonesia deferred to the sensibilities of their religious majorities from the early years of their histories as republics. Their constitutions, though, rejected the idea of an established faith. Indonesia is arguably the less interesting of the two because it was for many decades an authoritarian state. India was the only post-colonial state in Asia to combine democratic practice with a rhetorical commitment to a homegrown pluralism that it defined as secularism.

Supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi hold his portraits as they celebrate vote-counting results for India’s general election in Bengaluru on June 4.Idrees Mohammed/AFP via Getty Image

The systematic uprooting of this pluralism by the BJP and Modi made Indians acutely aware of the existential threat that majoritarianism poses to liberal democracy. They had witnessed firsthand the use of institutional and vigilante violence to hack out a harshly Hindu nation. Still, the threat from majoritarianism wasn’t always obvious to Indian commentators; they had to be educated into it by India’s experiences in the 21st century. It wasn’t until well into the first decade of this century that the term majoritarianism achieved currency.

Before that, Indians used a term that, like populism, obscured more than it revealed. The term was “communalism,” a peculiarly Indian political coinage that described the weaponization of religious community for political ends. Communalists came in different flavors; there were Muslim communalists whose parties sought to represent only the Muslim interest and there were Hindu communalists whose parties addressed themselves only to Hindus. There were minority communalists and majority communalists.

But it was the triumph of Modi that forced the recognition that a communalized majority had the demographic weight to reimagine and reconstitute India in a way that wasn’t available to a minority. Majority communalism was best understood as majoritarianism, the nationalism of a supremacist majority. If South Asian commentators were relatively quick to understand this, it was because they had the intellectual “advantage” of being adjacent to the savage majoritarian violence that ravaged the recent history of the subcontinent. The Gaza-like destruction of Tamil areas in northern Sri Lanka and the violent ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State in Myanmar underlined for them the bloody logic of majoritarianism.

From Lucknow, Lahore, Colombo, Kathmandu, Dhaka, or Yangon, it’s obvious that the violence visited on Gaza and the dehumanization of Palestinians in the West Bank grows out of a project of majoritarian supremacy.

Supporters of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni gather in Rome on June 1. Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images

Tough talk about immigration is a form of dog whistling, whether it comes from a ruling majoritarian party like the Brothers of Italy or a centrist one like Britain’s Conservative Party. Stephen Bush writing in the Financial Times notes that Meloni’s government hasn’t brought illegal immigration down; she has actually increased quotas for overseas workers. How could she do otherwise? Italy has one of the worst demographic deficits in the world. But to prove her hard-line credentials, she has made it legal to detain an undocumented migrant for 18 months.

Bush points out that an honest plan to restrict immigration would entail a public willingness to raise taxes to fund the services that immigrants provide or a public commitment to curtail them. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer haven’t made that case because they know that the voting public might not want immigrants, but it does want better care homes, a more efficient National Health Service, cheap deliveries, and low taxes. In the absence of candor or a willingness to make the case for immigration, muscular centrist rhetoric about limiting immigration piggybacks on majoritarian prejudice. The massive gains made by majoritarian parties in the recent European Parliament elections suggest that the center’s bid to steal the far right’s lines isn’t working.

Palestinian supporters march in front of Big Ben in central London, on May 28, 2024.Benjamin Cremel/AFP via Getty Images

The now-mainstream concept of “Fortress Europe” isn’t only about keeping foreigners out—it’s indistinguishable from surveilling and disciplining resident immigrants within. Dog whistling about Muslims is now respectable in Europe because centrist parties and commentators do it, too. The massive marches in London pressing for a cease-fire in Gaza were criticized across the political spectrum for allegedly intimidating members of Parliament. The speaker of the House of Commons excused his violation of parliamentary convention by citing his anxiety about the safety of MPs. Articles in the New Statesman and the Guardian, organs of the center-left, cited in this connection the factoid that three-fourths of all extremist violence in Britain was the responsibility of Islamists. The willingness of social-democratic governments—Germany is a case in point—to use the Gaza protests to put their Muslim citizens on notice is a warning that the majoritarian right might be knocking on an open door.

It isn’t hard to imagine how these tropes about unreliable minorities might be used by neo-fascist parties within a whisker of office in the major nations in Europe. Europeans who believe that internecine violence on a South Asian scale is unlikely in Europe should think back on the genocidal majoritarian violence in Serbia and Bosnia 30 years ago.

Given the backlash faced by single-issue protests like Black Lives Matter and the Gaza encampments, a Trump presidency will amplify the sense of white grievance that put him center stage in U.S. politics. Given his track record of singling out Muslims for discriminatory treatment, the post-Gaza political landscape will be the perfect setting for a Trumpian reassertion of the Judeo-Christian values of a righteously white republic. “Making America great again” would almost certainly entail putting uppity minorities in their place again.

The West is now circling the same abyss as the non-West. France’s (and Europe’s) allergy to visible religious difference in the name of laicité is not different in principle from China’s determination to Sinicize the Muslim Uyghur. Switzerland’s ban on minarets echoes the zeal of China’s Han commissars for remodeling mosques. To continue to describe Trump and Le Pen as populists is to trivialize their historical significance. They are, like South Asia’s bigoted majoritarians, heirs to the blood-and-soil nationalisms of interwar Europe.

The difference is that this time around Muslims are the designated Other. Marine Le Pen has achieved mainstream respectability by walking the RN away from her father’s trademark antisemitism and toward Islamophobia. The reason she swapped scapegoat minorities so easily is that all majoritarianism needs is a minority to mobilize against; any minority will do. After Sri Lanka’s Buddhist-nationalist state bombed the Tamil minority into submission at the end of the civil war, it segued without missing a beat to demonizing Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority.

If the West is to avoid the violence foretold by recent South Asian history, its commentariat should be terrified that majoritarian parties and politicians are making the running in politics across Europe and the United States. Its progressive and centrist parties should learn from their Asian counterparts that stealing policies from the majoritarian right does not buy them time. Europe’s public intellectuals should be trying to make the cast-iron case for welcoming young migrants into a graying continent. Most urgently, the West’s political elites should stop being complicit in majoritarian fever dreams before they congeal into a rancid common sense.