Name: The alt-right has taken the political centre. It’s not too late to win it back
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The alt-right has taken the political centre. It’s not too late to win it back

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Railway crossing at the Croatian-Hungarian Border, Illocka, October 2019. All photos in this article are by photographer Rafal Milach (Hollandse Hoogte / Magnum), who followed the 523km long south Hungarian border fence, that was erected in 2015 by Viktor Orban’s administration. The fence was erected in an attempt to stop thousands of refugees and asylum seekers crossing Hungary to get into western Europe. (Hollandse Hoogte / Magnum)There is a new normal now in global politics. What was once the– athat exist outside of and are&nbsp;more radical than mainstream conservativism – has moved rapidly to the centre.rewriting the rules of the postwar political order.Ten years ago I warned that this far-right wave was coming. Hours before the Conservative Party took the reins of power in Britain on 6 May 2010,that election would be the first stage in “the increasing legitimisation of far-right politics by the end of this decade”.Sure enough, the global shift to the far-right has involved a resurgence of nationalism whose fundamental electoral strategy is theThe popularity of&nbsp;anti-European Union (EU) nationalists in the European Parliament hasfromBy 2014, this had grown to some– just under a quarter of all seats in the European Parliament. Two years on, Britain voted to leave the EU in the same year that Donald Trump became US president. Then by 2019, the EU elections saw nationalists capture. Later that year, after a period of sustained attacks on parliamentary institutions, Boris Johnson – a politician with aagainst black people, migrants, and Muslims – led his party to a landslide victory on a hardline anti-EU platform.As 2020 picks up pace, far-right politics is no longer the province of the fringe. It has encroached onto, and defined, the parameters of the political centre. And if these growth trends persist, it will continue to determine how the centre works throughout the coming decade.Shortly before Trump was first elected, I had been commissioned to investigate the trans-Atlantic networks behind the far-right by Tell Mama UK, a London-based charity that exists to track anti-Muslim hate crimes.&nbsp;The report,&nbsp;, found that nationalist movements and political parties across the US, UK and Europe were increasingly operating in unison.&nbsp;While they all mobilised on the basis of anti-Muslim, anti-migrant sentiment; many were also rooted in traditionally antisemitic political movements, and some secretly worked with active neo-Nazi groups. Many self-identify as ‘alt-right’,, and the idea of&nbsp;This is a theory that goes bybut which boils down to this argument: that&nbsp;By seeking to protect the west from a perceived Muslim takeover through mass migration, cultural subversion, and political infiltration, the far-right have positioned itself as defenders of freedom and civilisation from a fascist takeover – and, as the ideas have moved from the fringe to the mainstream, the rhetoric of hate has made its way into everyday political life.Adama Dieng, the UN’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, described this trend asof the 1930s, an age when antipathy toward perceived outsiders on racial grounds, particularly Jews, was not only widespread but led to the mass appeal of fascism. Much has changed in the world since the 30s and the alt-right has changed with it.&nbsp;One of the most important distinguishing features of the new global far-right network is that it now uses the political centre to disseminate its language, beliefs and political programme. This is done through a range of strategies that include mobilisingtocarrying outwhich often bypass political regulations, and the extensive use of() to radicalise people susceptible to its messaging.These strategies have successfully created what I call the ‘alt-Reich’: a global network of nationalist movements, civil society groups, and political parties by which far-right groups rooted in racism are attempting to influence mainstream conservatism. So far,they’re succeeding. Not every group or government in the network is necessarily racist – the political groupings within the European Parliament for example are a broad church that range from the traditionally conservative, to the openly bigoted. Other groups in the network actively deny and conceal their racist roots. But it is these complex, networked connections between the entities and individuals that has enabled a worldview historically rooted in white nationalism to increasingly impact national governments, from the White House to Whitehall and Brussels.Here’s an example of how this network works. One of the most quietly influential organisations, in spreadingacross the Atlantic, is the New York-basedfounded by heiress,In one investigation into how anti-Muslim propaganda spreads between Europe, the US and then onto Trump’s Twitter account,found a story of a “Muslim biker gang” in Germany which had been translated and repackaged by the Gatestone Institute. Now the article “included warnings about the country’s supposed slide into Islamic fundamentalism”. That tale of a Muslim group wanting to establish “a parallel Islamic legal system in Germany” was widely reproduced and has outlived even the activities of actual bikers, who according towere reminiscent of Hells Angels and had just one member was considered a possible threat by German authorities.Gatestone chairman, John Bolton, was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. Even now, Gatestone remains close to Trump’s inner circle. Within a week of resigning, Boltona gathering of Trump allies at a Gatestone luncheon, including another billionaire conservative heiress Rebekah Mercer (described), Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz ()&nbsp;and Chris Ruddy (and CEO of Newsmax, a conservative media company).&nbsp;The chief of staff of Bolton’s National Security Council from May to October 2018 wasnow president and CEO of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a Washington thinktank&nbsp;the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement”. Fleitz co-authored a&nbsp;2015 publication&nbsp;for CSP arguing that naturalised American Muslim citizens whoshould be subject to loss of citizenship and deportation. The CSP’s founder is Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan defence official, and a manGatestone haswith the far-right antisemitic Canadian websitewhich hasdefending Holocaust denial and hired former Trump adviserCSP has a long establishedwith the International Free Press Society in Denmark, an anti-Muslim coalitionwith the neo-Nazi Belgian Vlaams Belang party.In 2004, following a legal ruling that deemed Vlaams Blok to be racist, the party rebranded as Vlaams Belang (VB) and is todayin Flanders, the Dutch-speaking area of north Belgium. The party has followed theof the alt-right, focusing heavily on attracting young audiences online. In 2019,&nbsp;Meanwhile,with leverage in Conservative-run Whitehall, includingand thewhichAll the while, Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, invites “misfits and weirdos to apply to work at Downing Street, and appoints Andrew Sabisky, a man whoThere are public figures – Great Replacement conspiracists you might call them – on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, who make deft use of dehumanising racist memes, distorted demographic data, and debunked science to validate their hate. Best known: former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, whoAnd then there’s Katie Hopkins, whoof denigrating blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and Jews, and – of course –&nbsp;Clearly music to Donald Trump’s ears as he retweeted a message Hopkins posted in July 2019 – beforeAside from cooptingalt-Reich governments have aWhen the German thinktank Adelphithe climate agendas of far-right parties in Europe last year, it found that two-thirds of far-right members of the European Parliament (MEPs) “regularly vote against climate and energy policy measures”. Meanwhile, someof global carbon emissions come from countries led by populist, nationalist leaders.&nbsp;Economically, the alt-rightbe consistently sceptical of international institutions, more protectionist – often fetishising national corporate power – and wanting to restrict public services for the benefit of worthy ‘natives’ rather than foreigners or minorities.&nbsp;This is an indication of what lies ahead: the past ten years of persistent far-right expansion in the west, represents – to my mind – the beginning of a more permanent illiberal turn. Particularly when it comes to Islamophobic attitudes, prejudice has intensified as quickly as it has been normalised.The world average was 21% at the time, with highest rates of prejudice found in then Czechoslovakia at 49%, and Bulgaria at 41%. In the 90s, US Americans demonstrated some of the lowest levels of prejudice towards Muslims, polling at 14%.Again: this is the ‘new normal’ – the backdrop against which this decade’s political struggles must be waged.Having now set the tone of the debate by normalising fear of minorities and foreigners, the alt-right is better-placed to secure election wins. With more far-right groups either in power or with direct access to those in power, over the coming decade they are likely to focus on trying to rewrite the very rules of democracy. We see these processes underway already, as leadersand openly deride core institutions of democratic governance:Simultaneously, and perhaps in places with fewer checks and balances on the power of the state or the army, we are likely to see an escalation of state-backed security, paramilitary and communal violence against Muslim minorities, some of which has already been described by experts as “genocidal”: the mass incarceration of up to three million Muslim Uighur minority citizens in detention camps; the mass expulsion of nearly a million Rohingya refugeesthe systematic persecution of Muslim citizens in India including the risk ofin Kashmir and Assam.It is a pretty gloomy picture but the very expansion of the alt-right is also likely to open up unprecedented opportunities to change course.I spoke of a new far-right wave in 2010, seeing it – as others also have – as a consequence of a deeper global structural crisis. This new and improved alt-right ideology that’s found its way from the political fringe to the mainstream is a direct consequence of a convergence of multiple complex crises including:People are feeling a deep sense of unease at the pace of change. This is why the alt-Reich’s most successful political experiments claim to be returning people to a glorious past - an attempt to cling onto a way of life that is gradually, inexorably crumbling; an attempt to rationalise its failures by imagining that the causes of those failures are not the system itself, but particular groups of inherently problematic people.&nbsp;&nbsp;If the alt-right has capitalised on people’s desires to remake and redefine their societies, then so too can new social movements that join the dots between the various crises humanity faces and proposing strong opposing ideas to those of the alt-right.&nbsp;Promising a return to some imagined world of old, parts of the extreme right will continue to deny climate science while resisting calls for climate action; yet others may well come to incorporate climate discourses into their xenophobic agenda, using the acknowledgement of crisis to buckle down on closing national borders. But the alt-right’s insistence on business-as-usual will ultimately be its undoing, as the gap between its promises and ecological-economic reality widens. This is likely to drive renewed discontent even among those constituencies currently propping up extreme rightwing governments. In turn, the alt-right will become much more brittle and susceptible to failure.&nbsp;This is cause for hope, but not complacency. We cannot afford to simply wait while the ‘alt-Reich’ takes us all down with it.From a systems perspective, change becomes possible when we all recognise that the rise of the far-right is a symptom of a global industrial civilisation in demise. Referencing ecologist CS Holling who identified that all systems go through a cycle of rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganisation, thewould say now is “the time when new ideas can have an outsize impact.”report points to “the rise of countervailing voices inside the formal political ring, among liberal elites, and especially in grassroots movements.” These voices, quoting environmentalist Bill McKibben, need to be “rooted in broad movements, not elite opinion”.&nbsp;Such broad alliances are possible when citizens start to imagine together what the next life cycle of civilisation could look like.The nationalist impulse is unlikely to disappear – nor will hate for that matter. But in terms of how societies are organised, it is entirely possible to move towards participatory, inclusive societies; built on more local institutions of political and economic empowerment. This, ultimately, means telling new stories, not only of how we got to where we are, but where we might be able to go if we work together, rather than against one another. It also means building bridges across disparate movements addressing climate, race, finance, and all the other global systemic issues, so that we cease operating in silos, but work more holistically to develop and implement these new stories.The alt-Reich is the last hurrah of a global system in decline, but it will not go quietly – nor should we take it lying down.We no longer support Internet Explorer, so we recommend you switch to Edge, Chrome or Firefox when browsing this platform.You can continue on now, but please be aware that you're not going to have the best experience with your current browser.

Railway crossing at the Croatian-Hungarian Border, Illocka, October 2019. All photos in this article are by photographer Rafal Milach (Hollandse Hoogte / Magnum), who followed the 523km long south Hungarian border fence, that was erected in 2015 by Viktor Orban’s administration. The fence was erected in an attempt to stop thousands of refugees and asylum seekers crossing Hungary to get into western Europe. (Hollandse Hoogte / Magnum)There is a new normal now in global politics. What was once the– athat exist outside of and are&nbsp;more radical than mainstream conservativism – has moved...

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Nafeez Ahmed

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The alt-right has taken the political centre. It’s not too late to win it back

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