Why is the extreme right everywhere? some notes 1

The idea of democracy

Democracy can be defined in at least 20 different ways. One of the best-known definitions was popularized by Churchill: ‘democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ This is utterly right, but it is not a definition. The other was Abraham Lincoln's: ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people.’ This has the merit of immediately revealing many of the problems confronting democracy: what is a people? Who belongs to it? Can a people govern itself or must it be governed? Put another way, should democracy be direct, representative, or technocratic?

In this general vision of democracy, we can distinguish two main ways of characterizing it: by its institutions, or by its spirit. From an institutional point of view, democracy assumes freedom of thought, pluralism of political parties and the press, free elections, respect for human rights, and the separation of powers – executive, legislative and judicial.

These institutional requirements are inspired, of course, by a certain spirit. Democratic institutions cannot function outside a political culture widespread enough in a society that it allows debate, changeovers of parties in power, and challenges to those in power – and thus at the same time, social division, the inappropriateness of power and the indeterminacy of knowledge. Claude Lefort spoke of the separation of knowledge and of power. Michael Walzer talked about the separation of spheres of justice. Or, if you prefer, the separation of power, knowledge, and property.

But another element of the democratic spirit that does not necessarily have a clear relationship with the elements just described was powerfully brought to light by Tocqueville. It is the aspiration to equality of conditions (or outcomes), the hatred of privilege. In democratic societies, Tocqueville said in his Democracy in America, over and above differences in wealth there reigns an imaginary equality of conditions. Each aims to be the same as, and in this sense, the equal of, all others. Among the members of a democratic society, there can be no difference in nature, only in position. This desire for equality, Tocqueville showed, is as irresistible a force as Providence; it sweeps up everything in its path and resistance to it is pointless. The best we can do is channel it.

Among these dimensions of democracy, we can distinguish three sets of tensions that can be posed as questions:

What is a people? Is it one or several ethnicities? The grass roots? The electorate? All those who share a religion or a rational vision? Should it be restricted to enlightened citizens, to nationals, or broadened to include foreigners who join it?

We might note that all social and political upheavals in the past two or three centuries arose from uncertainty about the answers to these questions. More precisely, they have been the site of a permanent oscillation between opposing terms, often mirroring each other, like a pendulum in perpetual motion.

The mid-point in the pendulum's swing is the point of a dynamic balance between the openness and closedness of the people, individual and collective liberty, imaginary and real equality. The corruption of democracy is proportional to the breadth of the movement of the pendulum away from this mid-point in one direction or the other. The greater the swing, the greater the domination of the represented by their representatives, turning into oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorship, or totalitarianism.

I want to suggest here that what makes our era particularly difficult to think about is that the pendulum's swing between the two opposing poles is becoming more and more rapid and wide, so that everyone has increasing difficulty finding their own identity and to know its value. We all aspire to be recognized, but we no longer know why or by whom and for what. In this state of general disarray, the left and its democratic and humanistic ideals lose their points of reference, leaving room for the spread of multiple varieties of the extreme right. Similarly, the left itself explodes into multiple shades of red, pink and green, fighting one another.

It is impossible here to summarize centuries of history to show in detail how the oppositions and tensions identified here have been used, so I present just a few snapshots that capture a few configurations, in ideal-type fashion.

Classic democracy

Modern democracy was born in Western Europe and the United States of the tension between the Christian message of the equality of all human beings and the reality of despotic power, even if it was legitimized by that same religion based on the notion that there was an almost insurmountable gap between dominated and dominating, between those with blue blood and those without. In the English, Dutch, American and French revolutions, a people revolted against inherited monarchical power, but it is important to understand that the people take a very long time to arrive at such awareness. Until the end of the twentieth century in France, the dominant elites, mainly rentier capitalists, considered that workers and farmers, even if they voted, were not part of society. It took time for suffrage to become universal. Women did not get the vote in France until 1944. Today in the United States, a whole range of tricks are being used to reduce the electoral weight of the poor and people of colour. Nevertheless, for long periods, this classic model of democracy was more or less stable once the structural conflict between economic classes was accepted as legitimate, as well as a certain distance between equality in law and inequality in reality. This conflict is encapsulated and represented by the opposition of the right and the left, which supposedly summarizes all the forms of domination exercised and suffered in this society. Freedom of the press and elections assures a certain balance between collective and individual freedoms, even if we discover each day the extent to which they are framed and restricted by a raft of traditional social norms.

Classic totalitarianism

The first great attack against the classic democracy model came in the twentieth century from Communism, Nazism, and fascism, together responsible for between 100 and 200 million deaths. If I think it is useful to group these under the label totalitarian, despite all the differences among them (one coming from the left, the other from the right and the third from a left that turned to the right), it is because they all share certain specific traits. Like them, dictatorships abhor and repress as much as possible the freedoms they call bourgeois, but the great difference, the first difference between dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, is that dictators only imprison, torture, and kill their opponents, while totalitarian regimes massacre entire categories of people who do not threaten the status quo, arbitrarily designated as scapegoats and sacrificial victims.

Such massacres begin with the ‘logic of an idea,’ as Hannah Arendt showed, from a radical simplification of the superior and overarching knowledge of the charismatic leader, of which the Fuhrer, the Duce, Uncle Joe (Stalin) or the Great Helmsman (Mao), is the supreme source and keeper. Knowledge, assets and power come together in or through him. It was in order to arrive at a radical simplification of human history, transparent at last, that in Russia, the vestiges of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the gentry, independent peasants (kulaks) and all the opponents real and imagined, were destroyed, and in Germany the Jews, the travellers, the disabled, and the opponents, real and imagined.

To realize finally the promises of democracy, to attain real equality and make the people sovereign, each new failure of the project requires it to be reduced more and more – to the pure Aryans in Germany, to the proletariat in the Soviet Union – and one step at a time to the Nazi Party in Germany, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and China, and finally to Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong. ³ At the same time, to achieve the collective liberty dreamed of by an imaginary people, reduced to its simplest expression, all individual liberties are suppressed. It might be resumed in one sentence, the central formula of classic totalitarianism: ‘the collective (undivided and indivisible) is all, the individual is nothing.’

To finish, let us note that among these diverse forms of totalitarianism there was an initial swing of the pendulum. If the Bolshevik revolution resulted in the overthrow of tsarist despotism in alliance with the bourgeoisie, the latter was soon reduced to nothing; it was precisely in order to avoid a communist victory that the German and Italian bourgeoisie and elites promoted the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini.

Inverted totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt sought the origins of totalitarian impulses in the feeling of desolation created after the First World War by the rupture with tradition and the shaking up of the class system, which left everyone uncertain of their identity. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi sought the same origins in the unbearable feeling of impotence and uncertainty created by the reign of the free market, self-regulated (these days we would say deregulated and unfettered), dis-embedded from social relations. But he attributed at the same time the victory of Western democracies over the totalitarianisms (such as it was), to a certain re-embedding of the market through state regulations, what he called a counter movement. And indeed, these regulations, those introduced by Roosevelt in the United States and through le Plan in France, among others, allowed the prosperity of the Trente Glorieuses (‘Thirty Glorious Years’) and the embrace by the working classes of parliamentary democracy.

From the 1980–1990s onwards, there was a change that was both imperceptible (because gradual) and radical, a sort of counter-counter movement. Under the aegis of neoliberalism, not only did the market again become dis-embedded from politics but also market or semi-market standards became the norm throughout all spheres of society. Now, it is the latter that is embedded in the market. What we call globalization extends this universalization of market standards to the whole world and ensures the triumph of rentier and speculative capitalism.

All this is well known. What is less well recognized, sometimes not seen at all, is that the ubiquity of the market, aided and abetted by the Internet, generates a new kind of society, unseen before, which in many ways represents an inverted double of classic totalitarianisms. It constitutes a sort of ‘inverted totalitarianism’ (which I also sometimes call ‘parcellism, or parcellitarianism’). This parcellism (parcellitarianism) has certain traits of old totalitarianism that I do not have time to rehearse here (but includes notably, hatred of intellectuals and the fantasy of creating a New Man), but it radically inverts their central tenet: it is no longer ‘the collective is all, the individual is nothing’ but rather, ‘the individual (multipliable into an infinite number of avatars) is everything, collectivities are nothing but transitory constructions.’ All collectives, nations, states, institutions, unions, social classes, political parties, families, too, are largely seen as damaging and with a tendency to be dismantled to make way for individual consumers.

In the context of inverted totalitarianism, there is no more great overarching knowledge but instead an infinity of precarious knowledge, fragmented and transitory, whether it be the uncertain knowledge of experts, or imaginary and fictive knowledge, fake news that circulates on social media. Everyone has their own truth, which is worth more or as much as the next person's because ‘it's my choice.’ As a result, the prospect of collective freedom, of the capacity of peoples to determine their own destiny, is eclipsed by an overabundance of individual liberties that are imaginary. There is no more ‘people,’ strictly speaking, merely an aggregate of ‘mutually indifferent’ elementary particles (to repeat one of John Rawls’s formulae in A Theory of Justice) increasingly reluctant to go to cast their votes. Indeed, what is the point of if no-one can influence the common destiny? Since there is no collective liberty? Neoliberalism can be seen as a counter-counter movement in response to the re-embedding of the market in the state.

The ambivalence of inverted totalitarianism and the two standards of justice

One of the great difficulties we have as heirs to the humanist and democratic left facing inverted totalitarianism (and neoliberalism), is that in some eyes, it responds, in its own way to the democratic promise, as classic totalitarianism did in its own way, while for others, it renders that promise impossible and empties it of meaning. Or, rather, we are witnessing simultaneously an extraordinary – and welcome – increase in the demand for equality and emancipation, and the difficulties it faces and the risks it creates. In the market, all groups are in principle equal – what could be more democratic … so long as one has money?

In the context of classic democracy, emancipation could seem hard to obtain but reasonably easy to think about. First, it was a matter of emancipating oneself from wage exploitation. All other emancipations still to be won would follow. But today, the principal battle is less about emancipation than it is about recognition. Each social group, everyone, wants to be recognized as having the same value, or more, as the others. There are innumerable battles that cannot be reduced to the economic dimension of the class struggle, including that of women to escape male domination and of formerly colonized people and victims of racism to achieve full dignity; of those whose sexuality is repressed or forbidden; of religious and cultural minorities, and so on. Thus we are seeing the apotheosis of the democratic dynamic that Tocqueville analysed so well. Nothing must stand in the way of the demand for the fundamental similarity and therefore equality of all.

This demand is of course quite legitimate. The problem is that it is largely being made on the terrain of neoliberalism. Put another way, in the context of the representation not of a democracy that must be built collectively (and if possible, on the global level), but of a democracy that is compatible with the market and provides only rights. This is not a democracy to which we must give, or give ourselves, but on the contrary a democracy in which we feel entitled to receive. ⁴ A democracy without democrats, in short, in which everyone feels like a victim and demands their due to be recognized as equal to everyone else.

There are numerous symptoms and analyses of this parcellitarianism that has led to the breakdown of society, including those of Jérôme Fourquet on the ‘archipelitization’ of French society. But I want to consider for a moment a discussion that took place between two of the best French sociologists, both disciples of Alain Touraine – François Dubet and Farhad Khosrokhavar. The discussion was especially representative, I think, of the ambivalence of inverted totalitarianism.

In his last book, Tous inégaux, tous singuliers: Repenser la solidarité [‘All equal, all singular: rethinking solidarity,’ not translated], ⁵ Dubet shows how the dominant representation of justice has changed profoundly over the past few decades. During the Trente Glorieuses, and even a little later, we believed that justice presupposed a certain equality of social position (conditions, Tocqueville would have said), and especially economic positions. But the ideal of justice is now the ideal of equality of opportunity. We no longer call into question existing inequalities, but rather think that each should have the right to success according to their merit. However, since not everyone can make it to the top, clearly, everyone feels discriminated against and slighted.

‘Minorities,’ Dubet says, ‘are despised, workers are despised, students are despised, artists are despised, housewives are despised, the ill are despised, the users of social and government services are despised. By extension, the professionals who look after students, the ill and the poor, also feel invisible and despised’ (p. 148).

The American writer Larry Temkin has identified more than 40 inequalities that can define us. ‘Imagine,’ Dubet says, ‘that we could cross five strata of income multiplied by two depending on gender and by three according to origins … Imagine that these 30 sets are crossed with just 10 criteria of inequality, we could put the individuals into a few hundred boxes’ (p. 101). Let us say a good thousand at least, if we include the 40 inequalities – a good thousand reasons to feel discriminated against, made invisible, scorned and maltreated. So many reasons for hatred that will be vented on social media.

Khosrokhavar reproaches Dubet for overestimating the dispersion of feelings of social injustice, for fixating on individual subjectivities and thus not giving enough weight to the objective and massive injustices that exist, not more than a dozen of which, he says, require tackling, for example those experienced by women, Arabs and Blacks. He suspects that Dubet is nostalgic for the post-war industrial society, even for the nation. But the first problem for Dubet is knowing how to recreate solidarity in such a fragmented society. According to him, we need a new theory of justice, one that takes into account the problem of equality of position as well as the equality of opportunity. Indeed, it is clear that the ideal of equality of opportunity is itself impossible to achieve if there is not a certain equality of position. ⁶

Let us go back. We are witnessing the deepening, the radicalizing and the general spread of the democratic trend of equalization of conditions that Tocqueville anticipated and analysed, but the fact that they are occurring within the context of neoliberal parcellitarianism that fragments all struggles, makes them fragile. We can but rejoice in seeing, at last, recognition of the equality of men and women, of the former colonized peoples and their colonizers, and of diverse cultures and religions, the denunciation of racism, machismo and virility, and the acceptance of the plurality of legitimate sexualities, etc. The problem remains, however, when these struggles begin conflict with others, and even more when each of these causes divides into multiple varieties that turn on each other, as we see more and more often, for example within feminism and the LGBTQ + movement, and between the latter and the antiracist movements, post- and de-colonial.

These conflicts and one-upmanship of victimhood, ⁷ in the guise of better serving the common cause of feminism, anti-racism, decolonization, etc., do sometimes advance that cause but in the long term and increasingly often, they instead feed the extraordinary backlash we are seeing now – for example in the banning of abortion in several states in the United States and in the wave of masculinist posts on the web.

The paradox in the rise of the extreme right

Let us return for a moment to our point of departure, which was to find the reasons for the rise of the extreme right virtually everywhere around the world. To begin, we can note a first paradox, perfectly highlighted by Michael Walzer in The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, who observed that the twentieth century wars of liberation were fought in the name of secular and radical democratic values but ended in the restoration, even the intensification, of religious powers. He shows this through the cases of Algeria, India and Israel, but we can also add Egypt, Iraq and Indonesia. Each time, the people were resisting a too-rapid and overly-ambitious modernization, which ‘fueled the resentment of ordinary people … against the modernizing elites, with their foreign ideas their patronizing attitudes and their big projects.’ ⁸ This resentment is explained in part as a mirror-image reaction to both the deepening and radicalizing of the democratic revolution that was sweeping away established values and thus the identities built upon them. Somewhat like how Nazism was constructed in reaction to communism – at once against it but also borrowing certain traits from it.

So much for the social dimension of the process; now we also must bring the economy back in. Inverted totalitarianism (or parcellitarianism if you prefer) creates a widespread sense of identity panic, which also results from and increases the economic panic that affects almost all population categories, working classes and middle classes, who see their standard of living go down year after year. In this cascading fall, everyone clings on to what they can and reaffirms their status by denouncing the class below them as scapegoats: the poor, the very poor, the unemployed, those on welfare, migrants, the non-indigenous ‘races’ and religions, etc.

The second paradox is that the struggle against the explosion of economic inequalities should benefit the left because it is, in a way, their core business. Yet the contrary is happening. Not only has the left not known how to fight neoliberal hegemony but it has also contributed to its triumph. Powerless to oppose the reign of rentier and speculative capitalism (when it has not allowed itself to be bought by it), it has overemphasized social struggles while simultaneously undermining them because they appear as both symbol of and quid pro quo for abandoning the struggle against the growing inequality.

But the second dimension of the paradox is that in order to fight against inequalities and the degradation of living standards caused by rentier and speculative capitalism, the people vote increasingly often for personalities who are the epitome, even caricature of it – people who know how to make money and who openly mock morality, people who smash to pieces all moral censure in order to clear the way for, as Freud would say, primal forces and the liberation of the most basic impulses. These are the personalities who incarnate the aspiration to de-civilization, Morin would say: Berlusconi yesterday, Duterte, Trump and Bolsonaro today. Contrary to Stalin, Hitler and Mao, these new leaders are not the holders of great knowledge. Nor of the little knowledge of experts (like Mario Draghi). They introduce what Christian Salmon rightly called, following Foucault, a tyranny of buffoons. In their own way, they are reacting to the dis-embedding of the market which, according to Polanyi, gave birth to classic totalitarianism, but they do not propose the re-embedding in state regulations that Polanyi characterized as a counter movement. On the contrary, in playing with the idea of equality of opportunity for a people who have rid themselves of their parasites, they aim to liberate the market even further, scorning all the rules, but proposing an imaginary reinsertion into more or less fanciful traditional values. To wit: work, family and fatherland.

They thus achieve a paradoxical alliance (but which we have already seen in neoliberal thinkers, in Hayek, for example) between a neoliberalism that is cosmopolitan in principle and a nationalism that recalls the finest hours of fascism. In sum, a neoliberal reaction to neoliberalism. A counter-counter counter movement! But speaking of nationalism immediately raises the question of its relationships to globalization. The geostrategic question.

The global dimension

Up to now, I have been arguing on the level of states and nation-states. But we know very well that the most severe problems are to be found on the global level, starting with the environment and global warming on the one hand, and mass migrations on the other, followed by state and religious rivalries. The double panic, economic and identity, ⁹ caused by neoliberalism, and the dissolution of the collective does not affect only individuals, it also affects states and religions. Each tries to regain past national or imperial grandeur. Or to acquire it.

It is impossible to do anything here but sketch a typology of the regimes confronting each other on the global stage. We need only keep in mind that what remains of democratic institutions and spirit are clashing everywhere with increasingly dictatorial and authoritarian regimes, whether the latter are driven, as in traditional democracies, by reaction, the counter movement to inverted totalitarianism, or whether like in Russia and China, they follow in the traditions of classic totalitarianism. Whether coming originally from the right or the left, it is a neofascist extreme right that has the wind in its sails at present. ¹⁰ We can add to this the emergence in the last 20 years of a new form of classic totalitarianism in radical Islamism that gaining more and more ground – in Africa and elsewhere in the world – makes it very difficult for Muslims to adhere to democratic values, both in traditional Muslim countries and in the West.

The domination of the far right results in the refusal to take environmental questions seriously, and by a determined fight against immigration. Along with the hatred of social justice warriors and of human rights, this hatred of immigrants and the quest for an imaginary ethnic purity forms the hard core of the far right regardless of its particular variety.

Conclusion

We see then that the future is not bright for humanist and democratic values. They will not triumph easily, far from it. If they are even to have a chance, the essential condition is that they be made attractive, by showing the whole world that it is in fact possible to have prosperity without infinite gross domestic product growth, by overthrowing neoliberalism and inverted totalitarianism. Let us not forget, indeed, that everywhere in the world, despite everything, it is always in the name of democratic values that people rise up in the name of freedom of opinion and the right to vote freely, and for protection against the arbitrary. The West has discredited the democracy that it professes through trying to impose it by force, through colonization and predation. It must reinvent itself to make its actions match its words.

It will be the goal of a renewed left, a post-left, as it were, to achieve this reinvention of democracy. To wage the indispensable ecological struggle, it cannot count solely on the so-called ecological class evoked by Bruno Latour, if it even exists. We must know how to talk to those who suffer from neoliberal hegemony, form the domination of rentier and speculative capitalism. Perhaps not all the 99%, but let us say 80% or 90% of them. Among them are not only the popular classes but also many senior executives and business leaders, and even more importantly, their children. We must also draw lessons from history, understand how to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of classic and inverted totalitarianism, supporting the emancipation struggles already underway but bringing them to fruition without creating a climate of civil war.

This most likely will require reconciling the two standards of justice identified by Dubet: equality of position; and equality of opportunity. We can only do that by adhering to three principles:

We must treat as inadmissible all demands arising from neoliberal hegemony, whose satisfaction would only strengthen it.

In leading such a battle against inequality, the post-left would return to its basic mission. But one of the only ways for it to do this and to recuperate the people who deserted it, perhaps the only way, will be to avoid being seen to be giving lessons, like the keeper of a knowledge that it is bringing it to the people, and on the contrary listen to them (which does not mean bending to their slightest whim). I see no better formula than to collect cahiers de doléances et d’espérance (books of grievances and hopes), which I prefer to call Notebooks for a shared future, to summarize them and to learn from them.