ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Reactionary Democracy w/ Aaron Winter & Aurelien Mondon

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

How do mainstream politicians and pundits contribute to the normalisation of far-right ideas, even as they claim to reject racism and populism? That’s one of many vital questions asked by Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon in their book, Reactionary Democracy. Following ACFM’s recent Trip about Fascism, Keir and Jem speak to Aaron and Aurelien about […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. This is a special micro-dose episode to accompany our episode on episode on fascism that will have gone out in the feed some time before this one does. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm joined as is so often the case by my friend Keir Milburn. Hello. And we are also joined by two special guests who are going to be talking about their research and their work. I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves so that you can get used to the sound of their voices. So maybe Aureenianne first. Hi, I'm Orillian Mondon. I'm a senior lecturer.

at the University of Bath in politics. And my work is mostly on the mainstreaming of far-right politics and populist hype. And Aaron. Thank you. I'm Aaron Winter. I'm a senior lecturer in sociology at Lancaster University. And my work is on racism and the mainstreaming of the far-right. Fantastic.

We'll get into some questions. I think we really want to go through your book, Reactionary Democracy, how racism and the populist far-right became mainstream. I think we'll sort of go through, perhaps, almost chapter by chapter, because we want to get your analysis over. But before we do that, I'll just do the parish notices that we always do on this show. We have a newsletter you can subscribe to you. If you want to get even weirder and left, yeah, that goes out with every new trip.

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Parish notice is done. Yeah, so part of the reason we wanted to talk to you too and part of the reason why we did an episode on fascism and when we did the episode on fascism, we looked at all sorts of stuff, but we looked at like various theories of fascism going back to the 20th century and onwards. One of the reasons we wanted to do that

was because we have this sense that the far right is on the rise. One of the things we wanted to start with was to ask people who actually know about this and they're not just going on their sense that they derive from media and social media, is it fair to say that the far right is on the rise? And if so, where is it on the rise? And what is the extent of the rise of the far rights?

Yeah, I mean, look, that's a great question. And I guess, you know, we could talk about it for days with Aaron, I'm sure. I mean, we have certainly the two of us talked about it for days and for years, in fact. The far right is on the rise. I think we can safely say it is on the rise, but I think it really only paints part of the picture. And in a way, only saying that the far right is on the rise

doesn't really help us understanding what is happening at the moment. And, you know, this is one of the things that we try to show in our research in a way is that you cannot understand the situation if you only look at the far right. And if you only look at the far right electorally in particular, what we argue in the book and what we are doing in our research more widely is that we need to understand processes of mainstreaming. And these processes of mainstreaming take place beyond electoral politics and they take place beyond the far right itself.

it's without, you know, without the involvement of mainstream elite actors, the media, academics, to some extent, politicians, we argue really that the far right wouldn't be able to do as well as it is doing right now. So I think, you know, there tends to be a mistake in a way when we look at the far right, which is to kind of look at the far right only and think that their success is only based on their cunning, you know, abilities or their popularity or the fact that what they say is what the people want. What we argue is in fact that mainstream political actors, including academics, to be honest, have helped the mainstreaming of the far right, not consciously. Quite often they are against the far right, but by hyping it, by talking about it as something that is over to the mainstream, without looking actually at structural elements of mainstream discourse, which have always been reactionary and therefore always were under the surface really to kind of bubble up again. We could get into that a little bit deeper, I think, because I want to just go to the book now, because one of the distinctions, the key distinctions in the book you make is between illiberal racism and liberal racism, and then the connection between the two is almost like a double helix where they revolve around

each other. I think we might put it that way. Could you sort of go through the definitions of the liberal racism and liberal racism and that connection between them? Yeah, of course. I mean, I think it follows quite well from the previous question because one of the things that struck us is that while we do think the far right is on the rise and has mainstreamed and it is a massive concern, it's where the dangers of all. all the sort of inequalities and injustices that we are concerned about sort of manifest in their most extreme form. But oftentimes it serves as a distraction from those.

So when we talk about the dangers of the far right or the far right on being on the rise or mainstreamed or in power, what we're effectively signaling is now it's gotten really bad. But the thing is that that is often a way of displacing or distracting from all the bad things that we claim to hate the far right because of, whether it be racism or misogyny, transphobia, some of various economic kind of positions. One of the things that we were concerned about in the work,

and I think it comes to the title, is racism. One of the reasons we constructed the notion of liberal versus illiberal racism, and it followed on from our work on liberal versus illiberal Islamophobia, is the way in which we have this idea in liberal democracy, democratic societies, particularly post-war and in America, post-civil rights, that racism is somehow this illiberal, extreme outlier to our tolerant, egalitarian societies. And this requires a construction of a form of racism that is what we call traditional racism, sort of race science, slavery, colonialism, segregation, apartheid, things like that, that are illiberal out of step

and historically defeated, I guess at least in the minds of many sort of liberals. And this is the contemporary manifestation of this kind of out of date and out of time racism is the extreme right, the far right, as a sort of a remnant of an old defeated order. We know that order has not been defeated. We just know particularly manifestations of it have while at the same time they're often celebrated in colonial nostalgia or sort of narrative. about the benefits of colonialism, et cetera, et cetera. And we've seen a lot of those. But what we argue is that that notion of illiberal racism is constructed by liberals and uses the far right often as a proxy for racism and a scapegoat for racism in these societies. So illiberal racism is often the

product of, as we argue, of liberal racism designed to distract and displace. And liberal racism can be defined partly as the construction of illiberalism, is the construction of extremism and the exceptionalism of exploitation of racism. And it can take the form also of forms of racism, which are less explicit, less illiberal, often predicated on or justified through liberal tropes, like free speech. You know, I think we were talking about sort of LGBT rights, but it's often sort of LG rights, women's rights.

what are sometimes called homo-nationalism or femo-nationalism to sort of set other work in the area, and various democratic, liberal-democratic tropes and narratives, so much so that they can be often, and I don't want to sort of jump ahead to another question, but the way in which they can be constructed as the will of the people, as a part of our democratic mandate. The notion of liberal racism is also built upon the work of people like Edward de Villanilla-Silva, and the way in which racism has formed with plausible deniability in the post-civil rights for Bernalva, the post-civil rights era.

You mentioned homo-nationalism, a femo-nationalism. I think, could you just explain those terms a little bit? I just think that the audience would be interested in those. Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, we use the term liberal racism and liberal Islamophobia to cover a variety of articulations of these racism. and Islamophobia. Two dominant ones which we've seen, this occurs in the justification for the war and terror and invasion of Afghanistan to EDL organizing in marches, is the way in

which you can have the defense of a nation, its culture, its values, its fundamental British values, for example, as a defense of women's rights or gay rights, as if And this goes to that liberal narrative I was referring to before, as if our society has overcome racism, it has overcome all these inequalities and injustices. We've reached this moment of sort of self-congratulations where we then turn to other cultures, other religions, other peoples, and claim that they're illiberal and they will bring these bad ideas here, or they enact those injustices where they are. And that can justify hate. exclusion, deportation, war occupation, and so-called democratization. And so when it's femo-nationalism, it's sort of the construction of the nation as a defender of women's rights against other peoples and nations. And that's, that is constructed as liberal, but it's also based on like, you know, the entire history of sort of, you know, of racism that has often been, and I'll go back to sort of

the first era Ku Klux Klan, where emancipation, myths and conspiracy theories and narratives of the threat of emancipation, and Reconstruction was the idea that white women would be vulnerable to black men. So the far right has always had this patriarchal, paternalistic kind of white racist chivalry narratives going on. But now what it's done is it's being articulated in liberal progressive terms because we've beat the clan. And if I can add something on this as well, which is important between the liberal and the illiberal articulations of racism and Islamophobia is that they're permeable, right? There's not like a strict barrier between them.

And in a way, this is these two articulations that allow the far right to then become mainstream and to come back because the far right is allowed to position itself away from the extreme right by saying, no, no, no, we're against biological racism. But then we've been the liberal tradition, which is, well, we buy into, femo-nationalism, we buy into homo-nationalism, you know, and this is something that we've seen, for example, that we discuss in the book in France, you know, where the idea of laicite, secularism, you know, has been hijacked by reactionaries and the far-right and Martin Le Pen to kind of like mainstream normalize their racism against Muslim people in particular and Muslim

communities. And, you know, here you can really see how the mainstream discourse and the far-right discourse become merged in these liberal articulations of racism, both of them standing against the extreme right, saying, no, no, no, we're not against. you know, like Arabs. We're just against Islam, right? So it's not about race. It's about culture. It's about religion. And so this is why we always stress that it is important to see these things that's kind of moving and kind of like fuzzy borders in a way. Absolutely. And we can see it right now. So thinking about manifestations following the book or in recent times, we can see this the way in which Zionism and the assault on Gaza is being framed in oftentimes in defense of women as

revenge for women and children, and as an expression of the liberal values of Israel in relation to the illiberalism, misogyny, and homophobia of Gazins and Palestinians. And that is absolutely connected, not to a form of liberalism only, but to the idea that Israel is sort of the protector of and the frontier of Western civilization. And so that's where you get the sort of the far right and the fascist kind of framing that where liberalism and authoritarianism and fascism meet. Yeah, that's very helpful. I think it's important to underline this for listeners

who might not even remember some of this history. You might not be old enough to that the war in Afghanistan when it was first being carried out by the US with UK support, a big part of the discourse justifying it was the claim that we were going to liberate young women from the Taliban so they could go to school. But that was why we were going to do that. And that was the sort of end of the period of what came to be known as liberal interventionism when we intervened in Serbia to protect the Bosnian Muslims from Serbian fascism and then we intervened in Afghanistan so the girls could go to school, and that's absolutely foundational to a certain kind of centrist Zionist

discourse in this country, in particular, which claims, which wants to claim that. Well, we'll even use the word fascist to refer to Hamas, for example, say Hamas are fascist, so therefore it's anti-fascist to do this. And they use the same language about the Ba'ath Party in Iraq. They claimed that the war in Iraq was a war on fascism. I think there's a few things going on there at the same time, aren't there? Because there's on the one hand, there's this, I mean, in some ways, quite old-fashioned. sort of cultural notion of a cultural superiority, which arguably predates even biological racism as a concept. There's also a sort of liberal anti-communalism, I think. There's sort of, there's a liberal suspicion and fear of any group that seems to have any kind of a coherent

identity, like outside the kind of atomized space of liberal consumer capitalism. So it's very easy to point any group of people who have any sort of a collective identity at all and say, well, look, they're dangerous, the threatening. That sort of liberal racism is obviously important there. I suppose, I mean, I guess one thing I'd like to ask about there that we wanted to ask about at some point then is if you can say a little bit about what is your concept of racism? Because if you're expanding the concept of racism beyond reference to what you're calling old racism, what I sometimes call classical racism, the actual belief. in biological difference, biological racial difference and biological racial superiority. If you're

expanding it out to include all these other categories, is it an entirely elastic category? Is there a distinction that can ever be drawn or should be drawn between, say, racism and xenophobia or fear of the other or colonialism? Or is it more useful from your perspective to understand racism in this quite, in quite elastic terms, something that's quite malleable and can be quite capacious. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question and this is something that, you know, we've been thinking a lot since, since working together and before as well. And in a way, I think, you know, we have, I think you can see the thinking that has been taken place with our work together starting on Islamophobia and then expanding to kind of racism and more recently even to kind

of transphobia. And of course, you know, what's happening in the kind of like transphobic movement is not based on racism, but we would argue, I think, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Aaron, if you don't agree with this, but I think we would argue that what's taking place with the transphobic movement and organized transphobia in particular is based on similar processes. So at the end of the day, you know, we called it racism because we felt this was key to the far right in 2019-20 when we wrote the book. We felt that racism really was the core element of overization, this kind of homogenization of particular communities and minorization of particular communities.

But in fact, what we, I think the framework that we created with liberal and illiberal articulations can be applied to various forms of exclusion, right? And so, you know, it applies to the racialization of certain minorities or communities, but it could apply to also the overization of other communities the way we have seen trans people being overrised in various reactionary discourses, which can be posited as, again, potentially liberal and even progressive, you know, we are against the rights of trans people to protect women, to protect children, to protect certain spaces of these kind of things, right? So in a way, the malleability, I think, is important. I guess you could say that what we're looking at is the processes of over-authorization to push reactionary politics, which are eventually in service of a particular form of hegemony, which is based on kind of white patriarchy, white patriarchy capitalists and so on, you know, the way bell hooks in a way, I guess, defined it. I think what's interesting about that is, I mean, it's a really important question.

One of the reasons we started this work was not because we wanted to define racism, but because what we saw in political discourse, and particularly sort of reactionary political discourse, was a very narrow definition of racism which allowed for deniability on all other forms. And so the idea that this is racism, we know it's gone. So what you're claiming, experiencing, accusing me of is not racism, right? And so we developed it as a way of responding to the kind of compartmentalizeate, the politically functional compartmentalization of racism. But at the same time, we wanted to map out how racism can morph change as political sort of, you know,

demands and crises emerged such that it became useful to debate. And this, I think this goes back partly to work, you know, Bonilla Silva's done Gavin Titley and other people on debatability and Elena Lenton. But the thing is, is that partly what's underpinning it is are debates about racism, which are, you know, they're ongoing within race and ethnic studies, sociology of race and racism. But one thing that we maintain, I mean, I try to stay away from the idea of othering just because it abstracts, and it's a language that's used often in like terrorism and extremism studies, so that there's not a particular understanding of the structural or systemic nature and operation of racism. Also, I can promise you if you spent any time in literary studies in the 90s, you never want to hear the word othering again. no absolutely

I did move from humanities to sociology in the late 90s so I remember but that we want to find there is a need for abstract concepts we can show the structures upon which racism can be articulated

manifest and change but then we also look at the sort of wide spectrum of the ways in which racism does develop grab hold of and is utilized in other things, including racist practices like colonialism, but also in xenophobia. And I think the work of Sivanandin on this on xenoracism is quite helpful. I think on the trans issue, I agree with Aurelian, but I would also argue that they're also anti-Semitic underpinnings to that transphobia. And what's particularly interesting

about it for me also is the way in which the sort of the liberal racism the femo nationalism has mapped onto this and even some homo nationalism to say we're protecting women's rights, we're protecting women's spaces, women only spaces, women constructed in a gender critical and anti-trans way. And so we see the morphing of this discourse. And it's, you know, at different times, we're going to see a misogynistic version of it. We're going to see a liberal version of it. And it doesn't mean it has no definition, but it's actually it's It's operational and functional. So part of what we think we're talking about is perhaps a distinction between a conception

of racism, a sort of liberal conception of racism as individual wrong thought. There seems to come from nowhere. Perhaps you just need to go to eliminate your wrong thought versus like more systemic conceptions of racism. And perhaps the way it works is that if we are in a post-racial society, and yet there are still disparities in terms of outcomes which line up with racial categories, then you need to account for that, basically. And if you don't have a systemic account for this,

a systemic and historical account for this, you basically led down past, which look very much like old-fashioned racism, in fact. And you do see the return of, like, scientific racism, and because it's a podcast, obviously I'm doing inverted comments around, that there's very little scientific about it. Those sorts of, you know, return of the repressed, if you want to put it that one.

Is that what we're talking about here? I think so. I mean, I think that's kind of a point that we're trying to make in a way is that if we only look at the kind of like whatever we want to call them, right, the extreme, the kind of classical forms of racism, today bar the kind of mimetic movements on the fascist neo-Nazi side, right, like no one would espouse them quite openly, right? Even the people who say incredibly, like, openly racist things would say, oh, no, no, I'm not racist or, you know, the far right say they're not far right.

I mean, we had, you know, the Reform Party like yesterday. Was it yesterday, two days ago, whatever? He said, like, you know, they will sue anyone who calls them far right. We had Marine Le Pen doing the same thing a few years back about extreme right. You know, these people don't want to be called extreme right, far right, because it's very useful for them to say we are not far right, we're not the extreme right, because this is evil, right? This is what, you know, Robert Meister talks about in a way in his work on after evil, you know,

in politics of human rights where, you know, we've passed evil and now we're fine, and, you know, that allows us kind of this kind of ability to kind of say that we are part of this kind of broad liberal consensus and therefore it can be wrong. whatever is left of racism is individuated, it's individual circumstances, exceptional circumstances, is freak events, it's moments that we can all denounce and, you know, and then move on.

And this is what we're saying day in, day out. And the problem with this is precisely what you were saying, which is that it opens doors to actually racism coming back because of this kind of fuzzy nature here where discourse is shifting at this at the moment, where things can be said more and more through liberal articulations of racism. And therefore, what seemed extreme 20, 30 years ago, doesn't seem that extreme in discourse, right?

And then eventually can end up not just preventing us from addressing systemic racism, but in fact opening the door to the return of things that we thought might have been defeated. And I say, you know, a stress might have been defeated because I don't think they were. But I think we comforted ourselves in the idea that we were past that and that would never come back.

And you can see that, of course, happening with the issue of race, racism and so on. But you can see that also happening with women's rights and the kind of domino effect, you know, and questions of abortion, for example. for coming back front and centre, which, you know, I think most of us 10, 15 years ago, would have been like, surely this is, you know, beyond debate. Perhaps one of the ways in which the discourse is moving to reflect this,

is this sort of anti-woke discourse and not just discourse, of course, it's like the laws passed by Rondisantis in Florida. They focus on critical race theory. Once again, I'd do inverted comments if it wasn't a podcast, which does seem to be like the thrust of all of that debate is to try to sort of to pre-eliminate the prospect of developing a systemic conception of racism or of capitalism, basically, these sorts of things. You can see that specifically in terms of the anti-woke law, whatever it was called, in Florida. You know, it's an attempt to sort of preempt the development of systemic analysis, basically, almost make it illegal or certainly subject to removal of state funding, etc.

That, I think, is another link between, you know, a liberal conception of the world and this, I'm sure you'd call it illiberal, although I'm sure Ron DeSantis claims he's a liberal, I'm not sure. I think what's fascinating in all of this is that power is always abstracted, right? You know, these people claim to stand, you know, as rebels, as, you know, against kind of like the elite, all of these kind of things. But power is always abstracted. I mean, Ron DeSantis, you know, claiming that, you know, the walk elite has taken over universities, has taken over politics, has taken over the mind of children. you know, other people are, you know, arguing that trans people are a lobby, for example, and going back to what Aaron was saying about kind of the links to anti-seminism here. I think the narrative here is fascinating again, this idea that people who are mostly made voiceless,

minoritized and so on, somehow are in power. And I think, you know, again, the ignorance of power structures, power relationships here are fascinating. But what's even more fascinating from my point of view, I think is also the way it's been lapped up and accepted as part of a debate, which is like, well, that's one side of a debate, right? And therefore, you know, but we need to think about it when we talk about politics. And it's like, well, do we? And of course, then that taps into issues of polarization and the idea that, you know, anti-racism today is just as bad as racism and we need to find a middle ground. It's sort of that post-racial kind of conjuncture where the idea is

racism has been defeated. Any claims of it are by definition invalid and actually may, and this is where you get this sort of sliding scale, where they're actually an attack on. our culture, our nation, our goodwill, our tolerance, our liberalism, etc. And I think it's interesting the way in which that kind of racism is over requires no discussion of systemic racism. And I think that's what liberal racism does, but that's also what, again, as you note, what a backlash against critical race theory does. The amplification and elevation is sort of like just the blowing up of what critical race theory is to be sort of cultural marks. postmodern identity politics,

wokeness, et cetera, et cetera, into this massive conspiracy, it makes the mere acknowledgement of systemic racism sound like something so evil and so conspiratorial and all-consuming as earlier mentioned. And I think that

what ends up happening is you then turn critics or people who acknowledge into those who hate and want to destroy our nation, which takes us right back to old fascist kind of conspiracy theories, which is also where the door gets opened. Now, in terms of the liberal, they also have to construct the woke conspiracy as that which

doesn't allow anyone to speak for fear of being canceled, etc., etc. And in a sense, that is not only a denial of power, but the absolute inversion of it. There is that line, I mean, is it really sort of rightly says that power has to be taken out of it for those in power to ensure they maintain it. Yeah, it's worth remembering, I think, there's a long history to this struggle to have racism recognised as a systematic feature of institutions and societies.

So there's already a moment in the immediate post-civil rights period, both in Britain and the States, where it's quite clear that it's outside the scope of civilized liberal discourse to advocate for anything like racial superiority, or kind of classical racism.

Enoch Pound is expelled from the Conservative Party. You know, when I was a kid in the 70s, like both American and British TV shows, almost any sitcom or drama show would have an episode about how racism was bad, but racism wasn't a systemic thing. Racial prejudice is the term that would be used. Like discrimination against individuals was always, was bad.

And then the idea that there even was a thing called racism, which was distinguishable from individual prejudice, as it was called. really was something that had to be fought for very hard over the 80s and 90s. And I think what you're describing is this process, partly this push back against that, because of the extent to which actually liberalism itself can only go so far in allowing racism to be conceptualized systematically before the premises of racism as such start to break down. You can't acknowledge the historicity of it and you can't acknowledge the systematicity of it. And all you can do is put in place a set of laws,

which are supposed to guarantee a certain set of liberal norms around the treatment of individuals. But then if you carry that to its logical conclusion, whether you just end up with Matthew Goodwin, endlessly, like, ranting against this imagined figure who describes Britain as a racist country and is wrong to describe Britain as a racist country. That's his little phrase, where it becomes a kind of question of the essential identity of the entity called Britain. You're either for it, in which case you can't possibly acknowledge, like, systematic racism, or you're against it by claiming that racism defines its total identity.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because when you said you're either for it that reminded me of a slogan that was fairly mainstream in Australia in the early 2000s, you know, either love it or leave it, right? You know, the anti-immigration slogan. And it's like, you know, I'm not surprised that Matthew Goodwin is 20 years late again to the party. But yeah, but I think it is interesting again. And I think, you know, this is what kind of struck me when, like, my early research was on Australia,

and it always felt that Australia, a reaction race in Australia and particular were 20 years ahead, you know, the way what's happening at the moment with the kind of stop the boat's campaign of Rishi-Soonak happened in Australia in 2001 and the John Howard and was incredibly successful, the dehumanization of people coming by boat, even though there were few compared to the people who, for example, came by plane and other state their visas and were mostly white, British, American and so on, and never get any coverage, for example, at the time. So it's kind of dehumanization, de-communization, de-communization, of immigration, again, reversal of power, of course, what we've discussed before. Yeah, this is very, very interesting.

And I think it, again, like, points to the impact of the mainstream on the mainstreaming of far-right politics, because why are these bad faith factors given so much time, so much airtime, so many platforms, so much space to actually kind of peddle their ideas, including on left-wing media as well, right? And we know full well that, you know, their ideas are dangerous, their ideas are bad, but all they want is the platform that they're

not interested in debating, they're not interested in discussing, and it's not easy to, you know, to invite them and then just provide the kind of gotcha moment that's kind of bring them down completely, right? I mean, these people have been saying a horrible thing for many years, and they keep doing it, right, and they keep giving platforms. So platforming them anymore will not help us, and I think we need to find other ways to kind of combat these ideas. And again, it means that we need to kind of really take a good look at mainstream political discourse, including the left to an extent. The Goodwin case is also for someone who denies racism

to always be articulating people's views on racism and people's views on immigration and on multiculturalism and things like that. There's a fascinating tension. It's going back to the comment before about liberal racism being sort of like individual or extreme. There's also this hollowed out middle ground where to, to acclaim the structures of the system or racist is an assault on the nation or culture and society. But we can say that the bulk of the people want more racist policies in some form or another.

And I think that slippage between the selective slippage between the individual, the extreme or outlier and the people is partly what is going on. So that's why it's sort of like it's the perfect opportunity. he also would make the argument Goodwin and Goodwin sort of types would make the argument for liberal free speech and sort of more authoritarian kind of like civilizational defenses

and I think one of the things to go back to the love it or leave it also seeing traces of that like or the legacy of that from the Americans from the 1960s and the sort of the love it or leave it rhetoric from the right and sort of in mainstream liberal society

and the way in which that is a rejection of progressive social change. It's interesting how progressive social change that then at a certain point becomes a pat on the back, a collective pad

on the back, that we've gone beyond this and now you can't speak or say anything else. And I think you see this along in Britain with the sort of the abolition discourses. Like, we embole of slavery, so get over it. that's a really good point the problem with that argument though is it because you see it all the time yeah

well britain was the one who abolished slavery first so yeah well look doesn't that lead you to to understand that we you know the foundation of the nation was based on this wealth created through slavery i mean that's part of the equation isn't it yeah there's such an irony on that like you know to abolish slavery you have to have had slavery first right exactly so the book the reactionary democracy book is partly an intervention into this field of populism discourse, populism studies, there's a huge explosion of discussion of the concept of populism

I guess in the 2010s in both political science and theory and mainstream liberal political commentary not least in my own post-Marxist and neck of the theoretical woods. So could you use say a bit about the nature of the book's intervention into that field? Firstly, why did everybody start talking about populism, do you think? And then what do you think about them talking about

populism as much as they did? And what do you have to say about it? Well, when I think about it, it really, really annoys me. And I think, you know, it don't have to look very far into my publications to see how much it annoys me. And I know it annoys Aaron as well a lot. Look, I mean, It's fascinating because it's been shown very well by various colleagues, you know, I'm thinking about the work of, like, Sofia Hanger and Fred Paxton, for example, who have done like a survey of everything that's been published on populism over, you know, the last 10 or something years. And they show very, very clearly that people are completely misusing populism, even by mainstream definitional standards.

So it's like academics have just been pumping out a lot of work on populism, misusing populism, using populism instead of other things, such as, you know, whatever you want to call it, racism, far right, nationalism, you know, ethno exclusionism and so on. But it's sold because populism has become this kind of, like it was even word of a year, I think, in 2016. Lots of movements have been called populist. And I think, you know, it takes us back to the idea that some people felt uncomfortable talking, talking about so-called populist in other terms, such as racist, extreme right, far right, because we had bought into the idea that we'd overcome the far right, we'd overcome the extreme right, with overcome extremism, racism, and so on.

And also, I think it came through a lack of, in a way, courage and accountability, particularly in the media to call a spade a spade, you know, when Marine Le Pen threatens to sue you, if you call her extreme right, when Richard Thais threatens to sue you, if you call his party far right, regardless of how well-defined they are as far-right or extreme right in academic literature, what you would see is the media putting it either in inverted commas again, or, you know, scare quotes, or they will not use the term at all. And so populism became this very useful term for people to call these parties something else,

which they're incredibly, I think what's incredible about it and what's fascinating about the use, the start of the use of the term populism is two things. The first is that it links to the concept of the people, which I think shows how the liberal elite still sees the people and the threat of the people, the fear of the masses, right? and that takes us back to Gustave Le Bonn, to like, you know, a various kind of early... Friend of the show, Gustave Le Bonn. Yeah, so I don't need to talk about Gustav Le Bonn all that much then in that case. But yeah, it takes us back to, you know, the fear of the masses, all these kind of things.

And so I think that's interesting because, again, it shows us how little kind of liberal elites have evolved in their discourse and their faith in democracy in particular. The other thing that I think is fascinating and perhaps even more so is that a lot of the people who have been using populism, I've been using it as an insult, And as a way to say, the far right, or whoever I call populist, is a bad person. The fascinating thing in all this is that the people who are called populists absolutely love it. They love being called populist. In fact, back in the 1990s, early 1990s, Jean-Marie Le Pen was trying already to get the Front National being called populist.

At the time, no, one bought it. Everyone was like, no, you're an extreme right party, you know, Holocaust provisionist, all of these kind of things, right? He linked to fascism. So no one bought it, but it was really keen on getting it called populist, right? Then we had, more recently, Matteo Salvini, leader of a leg guy in Italy, wearing a t-shirt, I am a populist. We had Marine Le Pen saying, you know, oh, if populism is being for the people, then of course, I am a populist.

We had Trump who was quite happy being called a populist, all these kind of things. And, you know, it's fascinating because you get the liberal elite being like, oh, these people are populist thinking this is an insult, but then the people who are called populists love it. And why do they love it? Well, it's obvious. because these people who used to be kind of like marginalised, they put on the mainstream of politics being linked to fascism, to Nazism, to evil politics that were scary in and of themselves,

all of a sudden, are linked to the people. And even though they have very little popular support, if you look at it more broadly at the time, you know, if you think of the early 2000s, early 2010s, not huge popular support when you take into account abstention, not huge popular support when you take into account ideas, all of these kind of things, they are all of a sudden linked to the people.

and therefore that gives them a sense of democratic authority to some extent. They are talking for the people. They are talking for the left behind in particular. They are talking for the people who are the losers of globalization, as they used to be called. They were called the left behind and so on. And this has been incredibly damaging and incredibly pervasive as well. And it remains so to this day, I think, you know, today people, academics, journalists, politicians still use this term completely carelessly, knowing full well that they're doing,

knowing full well the consequences of what they're doing, knowing full well that Marine Le Pen loves being called a populist. Richard Tice will love being called the populist all the way to the elections. And yet we still do it, right? And that angers me because it's a complete lack of responsibility, of accountability. And I think it speaks a lot to the hegemony

and how much they hate democracy, you know, and linking us back to Jacques Concier right in 2005. This hatred of democracy, I think, was very much about this. Yeah, I mean, there is that Guardian article that says here. It was at 1998, there were 300 articles about populism in 2016, I think it was. There were 2000. What happened? As if like editorial decision making had no bearing on this.

But I think one of the powers of populism is, as Iurelian says, it can take all these, repackage all these kind of bad ideas and stigmatized ideas and somehow euphemize them, democratize them. But at the same time, leave that sort of trace of a stigma when things go wrong. And I think you can see this in the way in which it became so highly used and so sort of positive in some terms and negative in others that it could be used selectively about Chavez or Corbyn as well as Trump and Farage. And it's quite interesting because one of the things it does is for the right, it masks, it takes an articulation of social inequality and a search for social justice and makes it

against some shadowy elite who are often generating this discourse in this narrative and makes it about nothing structural, nothing that any policy that the right would have would fix. But for the left, it then caricatures their politics as not structural, but just sort of like a hatred of elites. Yeah, just demagoguery. Yeah, I found all that populism discourse terribly frustrating. Partly because one of my influences is Anesto LeClau, but a point that was often lost by liberal readers of LeClo is he was saying populism was good. He was saying it was irreducible as a feature of any democratic politics. You couldn't get away from it. You couldn't do without a populist dimension to any kind of democratic politics. But then, I mean, for me, any time a liberal

political scientist or commentator is talking about populism, what they are doing is choosing not to look at the total functional breakdown of liberal democracies at the 1970s. It's just, it becomes a name for a set of totally disparate phenomena, which are all responses to the fact the entire project of liberal representatives of democracy has simply not survived post-faudist capitalism, basically. And they have a massive investment in not talking about that. So instead, you call every possible response to that situation. This thing called populism, which then evokes, as you've said, this long history. It's millennial history of the fear of the mob and demagoguery.

Sorry, Keir, you were going to say something before. The discussion so far made me think of this point about whether there's actually been a shift that we've moved out of this populism era in which both left and right were castigated as populism to exclude them from mainstream politics. My sense is, in fact, that that detoxification of the far right has led to like a redrawing of the cordon sanitaire that used to be around the far right that, you know, the far right must not be allowed into government. And of course, we've seen that's basically that's broken down. That's definitely broken down. But it seems to be there's a really quite a strong effort to try

to redraw that cordon sanitaire around the left, particularly around this discourse, around extremism, etc. If you just look at the UK, I mean, you know, the left is the one has been excluded from politics, from political representation, and to quite a large extent, being re-excluded from, you know, from media discourse. I mean, is that a fair analysis? I'm not absolutely sure of it myself. Well, I think it follows on from your account of mainstreaming in the book, to some extent, the mainstreaming of the far right?

I think it does, but I think it's important in a way not to kind of go too far, because the mainstreaming is never complete, right? the far right, the populist right, whatever it's called in the kind of like, you know, mainstream narrative is still important. You cannot exclude the left without keeping the sense that the far right is a threat. So, you know, the court on sanitaire has never been useful, in fact, and it's always been like a very bad idea to, again, pretend that we were the good mainstream, the good centre, the good moderate, the reasonable politicians against the evil kind of like remnants of some bygone ideology. But, you know, you can have a cordon sanitary electorally, but if you bring in all the

ideas of the discourse of the policies that we've seen, you know, for the last 30 years, 40 years or so, and so on, without even talking about the kind of systemic inequalities that remain as part of the systems, when the cordon sanitaire is a bit ridiculous. And in fact, the cordon sanitaire allows for that contradistinction to be made, which is you need the far right to be able to keep the liberal, especially now, especially at a time when the liberal elite is completely unable by any standard to address any of the many crises we are facing, right? People are unhappy. People don't believe in the system anymore for very good reasons. People see that things are not working. Things are not working for them. They're getting poorer. They're getting, you know, the future is getting scarier. Young people are incredibly worried and all these kind of things. But, you know, one of the ways to keep the whole thing ticking is to say, well, it's either us or the evil far right. And the aim really is to completely eliminate the left. So it's not to make them the new far right with a cordon sanitaire, but it's to kind of ignore them. They are childish. They are elitists themselves. I mean, it's quite interesting, I think, the way the populist people are constructed when it's about the left

or the right. The populist people of the left are constructed as young, as naive, as too radical, as, you know, unreasonable, you know, not sensible enough, all of these kind of things. And to some extent, elitists themselves, you know, if you think about who the populist people would be, it would be like the people who supported Corby, you know, young people who are students, who are well-educated, all this kind of thing. That's the way they constructed, right? I'm not saying that's the way they are in reality. If you think about the populist, the right-wing populist people, they are constructed as generally uneducated, working class, people who have been fooled to some extent. And so while the left-wing populist people are considered as

responsible for their misgivings, for their mistakes of supporting Corbyn, the populist right people are almost excused, which is like it's not their fault, right? And they have, and scare quotes again, like inverted comas, they have legitimate grievances. We understand they are suffering, globalization hasn't been great for them but unfortunately they fell foul of the populist right. So we need to respond to them and we need to address their legitimate concerns. And I think that's why it's important

not to do a complete reversal in a way. I think it's not about the left being excluded the same way the far right was excluded because the far right was excluded and served the purpose to publicize it that it was excluded. You wanted to make it known. The left you wanted to be forgotten and I think this is why in a way what has been called the populist left

is not the far left, it's not the extreme left. It's a social democrat left, right? It's a tiny little kind of improvement on the status quo. What has been called the populist right sometimes has been people who are extreme right, like people who are really, really nasty. And I think, you know, that that plays a very important part, I think. The fact that it's not even the extreme left that is excluded, it's the center left. And in the U.S., it is even the center right, I think, to some extent.

I think the way in which the illiberal versus liberal racism and mainstreaming also come together or intersect, is the way in which the far right becomes a way of scaring people and scaring themselves, the establishment parties, into more and more far right, sort of interests, ideas, policies, et cetera, as if they're saving society from the far right. And I think it goes back to sort of one of the things that we talked about early in our work together is the way in which work on the far right. particularly I think from political science, has focused on the far right as a threat to the establishment political system and parties. And as long as we keep them out of electoral success,

we're fine. And at no point was there any analysis or any understanding of the way in which the ideas of the far right could trickle in because of this fear and this kind of this, I mean, I hate to use the word for the far right, but scapegoating the far right for all the racism and all the bad stuff in society. And in a sense, the far right can fulfill that function. Like we can have, we can have a society like in Britain 2016-17 and Islamophobia, anti-immigrant racism or xenor racism is at its peak. And the government decides to prescribe national action. It picks the most sort of overtly fascist and violent organization to say, see, we're fighting the far right. And they do this. You even see this more recent.

in the Tory party with the way they're divided, like far right got too close under Braverman and Braverman gets kicked out, but the ideas remain, the policies remain, and that fragmentation is not a threat to the party or threat to the mainstream right. It helps them. It allows them to move in different directions, distance while assimilating. It's absolutely fascinating what you just said Aaron. I was at a workshop and presenting on like these kind of ideas in a way and you know, discourse and the importance of discourse if we want to understand, you know, reactionary politics. And then there was a question in the audience and, like, the person introduced themselves as a political scientist saying, like, I'm not sure

if you're a political scientist yourself. As a political scientist, what I think is important is really looking at elections and electoral parties, right? And so, you know, I think what we need to do is block electoral parties and, you know, discourse is secondary. And so, how has it worked for you? I mean, how has it worked for you? And the mainstream in the 30, 40 years to block electoral, you know, the electoral far right. And, you know, there's no, there's no even, like, will to even reflect upon what has happened in the last 30, 40 years. Like, it seems like it's still the extreme lefts or far left's fault that the far right is rising, right? There's no, like, it's a bit like the Guardian, what you were saying before, Aaron, you know, about, like, that Guardian headline.

There's no, like, feeling that maybe the people in power have something to do with the situation we're in today. And, yeah, that kind of diversion is very important. There's something there about the way in which liberal political science, capital P, capital S has really, is developed in a way which just excludes, even on its own terms, really, any measurement of outcomes in terms that most people would recognize as plausible. I mean, all the debates around democracy, very rarely ask the basic question. If you ask people in the street what they want governments to do, do governments do those things. That's not the measure of democracy. The measure of democracy is like how many, like how many representatives. does this party get? How many, you know, well, that's it, really. But where's your debt, Jeremy? That's the day.

That's a good point. I suppose a question then that comes up that we did want to ask then is, to what extent is it important to differentiate at all between the far right, the radical right, the extreme right, fascism, and really where do we stand, or where do you guys stand on the great fascism debate, the debate over the classification and usage of the analytical category of fascism? Yeah, okay.

I mean, it's an interesting debate and it's something that we've discussed a lot as well. I think, to be honest, I think if we were writing the book again, I'm thinking that probably fascism would make more of an appearance. You know, it's quite actually scary, to be honest, how things have evolved in the last five years. You know, I think we probably started, we wrote the book probably in 2019. it came out in 2020, so yeah, we probably wrote it mostly in 2019, right? So, but I think things have evolved in a way that I think has even surprised us.

Like, and we were fairly pessimistic. I don't think the book is a very optimistic one, right? I don't think it's a blueprint towards like a very bright future. It's more like a really kind of green contextualization of a state of things in 2019, let's say. But I don't think we saw the 6th of January 2020 coming, you know, all these things are 21. Sorry. So I think fascism probably would make more of an appearance in the book. But at the same time, look, I don't know. I think these debates of a terminology, even though I love them, you know, even though like we've written a lot about them, they also tend to be distracting. I think, you know, for example, the difference between the extreme right, the far right, radical right, or these kind of things. I think it's important to have very precise definitions. I think at the end of the day, they also term. So I think as long as we define them properly, which I think we try to do in our book personally, I think this is, you know, this is what makes a difference. I think fascism can be useful. I think it can be an important kind of like term when it comes to kind of warning people about where we're heading.

But it can also be discarded quite easily by the liberal elite again, you know, this idea about, you know, the left called everyone. They don't like fascists. And so I don't know. I think it's tricky. I think, you know, the term can be very useful from my point of view in certain circles. But I think it can also be probably unhelpful in other circles, you know, just like populism, for example. I think populism is a very important concept. You know, you were talking about La Clow.

I think there's a lot of very interesting debates happening about populism, about populist politics, all these kind of things, but in particular circle, I think, for example, populism in public discourse is completely useless and we should really avoid using it entirely, right? Fascism, I disagree. I would have said that maybe 20 years ago, but maybe it wasn't particularly helpful to call Le Pen a fascist, even though I might have believed that myself. Now I'm thinking fascism might have more of a role to play as a term and a concept as well. I think when I saw the Reform U.K. debate about libel using the far right, I immediately sort of like, I looked around and I could see this debate amongst political scientists starting

going, was this populist radical right? Is this populace? Radical right? Is this populace? Is this extreme right? And they're like, there's all this really serious debate. And I don't think like there was any engagement with the ideas or the problem or the political, there's like an academic function for definitions, but there's also a political function for them. And they're not necessarily reconcilable in all cases. Like the libel accusation is not a court case where they're going to have like expert testimony from academics. I don't think. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I often find I was thinking back recently to my PhD when I spent like the first year writing about definitions. And my supervisor was like kind of, are you done now? Do you have that out of your

system? Can you pick one and move on? And in a sense, I think we all have to do that. And I think all the people who obsess about them are also editing and publishing books where they have to pick one. Otherwise, everyone in the book is using, or special issues is using another, a different term. But I think there are certain political meanings to these terms. Like, I don't like the word radical. I don't like the way it uses a word that's used non-pejoratively for the left to be seen as something that's related to fascism, right? Or racism. I don't tend to like to use the words extreme when we're talking about parliamentary parties. Not because I don't think their ideas can be conceived of as extreme, but that very concept

involves a lot of sort of state security logics, but it's also designed to make this seem like an outlier and the other things seem acceptable and legitimate. In terms of fascism, it takes me back to January 6, 2021 as well. And I wrote something at the time where a lot of my anger was about the use of fascism and potential genocide in America at this moment. And my argument that this wasn't fascism or this isn't a precursor to genocide, as some scholars and journalists argued, is not because it's not bad and fascistic, etc., but it's an isolated group attack that's built upon the mainstreaming of fascist ideas and in a nation that's founded upon genocide.

So why is this the moment and this the group that we say this is how fascism is coming to America? So it wasn't that I don't think this is dangerous, but I think this is a manifestation of something, which is far more serious that we then will deem as more acceptable than the mob, effectively. And my secondary worry was the way in which this could be compressed with or conflated with Black Lives Matter and the acknowledgement of systemic racism to then develop a national strategy against domestic for domestic terrorism in America that then is looking at finally dealing with the far right and racist movements and movements of all stripes, ideologies, you know, all communities, and fighting them using the full power of a state that is institutional and agencies that are

institutionally racist. And it's predicated on the idea that this may bring. I suppose we should sort of move towards the sort of conclusion of the interview. We've detained you for an hour already. Detains a bit strong. And it's of course traditional to move towards the sort of what is to be done sort of question. So that's the question is sort of like, what should we do about that? I mean, you could phrase that in this way. How do we stop the rise of fascism?

I don't think that's the way that the conversation's gone. It's more like, how do we get out of this sort of double bind that we're in, in which liberal and illiberal racism seem to revolve around each other and exclude the left. So what does the left do about this situation? How do we get out of it, I think is the question. As Ereliant said, it wasn't a hopeful book.

But I think it might be more hopeful than the moment we're in now because I think we did talk about alternative horizons to the far right and everyone chasing a sort of anti-immigrant vote. We talk about the way in which these narratives have to be undermined. challenged and undermined. The idea that the only way to get elected is not through racism and

reaction. If that is all it takes, then getting elected cannot be the only way in the popular imagination view change, progress, resistance, justice, equality, et cetera. But I think the idea is that while we did have these ideas at the start, at the book, things have become worse, but in a sense, that shouldn't make us more pessimistic, it should make us more, a greater sense of urgency that something needs to be done. I think we really, really have to untether class inequality from whiteness. I think we have to untether it from sort of like nativism. We have to untether this idea that the working class demands racism, that they are not the engines of this. that the structures and systems are being reaffirmed and consolidated using the very people

that they leave, the elites leave behind. And I think we need to challenge these. And I say this because I know that's not enough, but you still see this. I'm listening and I'm following the American elections. They're using the white working class argument again. And I know we've tried to debunk it. Other people have tried to debunk it. but it's still happening and I think until it's sufficiently challenged and resisted

by working class movements as well I'm not sort of saying it's just it's an academic thing or by any means but it's that that it just you don't you don't there's no outside there's no oxygen to this debate and that that also pushes it forward yeah I think so I mean like you know I think we really need to I think stop falling for these reactionary narratives that but we have fall and of course, you know, we would expect kind of the liberal elite media and all that to fall for them because I think it serves a purpose for them, but I think we've seen the left accepting this far too readily, you know, the idea of kind of left behind all these kind of things and, you know, and, you know, we've seen many well-meaning people, you know, argue this as well.

I mean, the number of times I go to, you know, I do talks or I go to talks and I hear like the idea that, you know, how well, you know, we need to, you know, Brexit, Trump, they were working class movements, you know, we need to reclaim the working class, all this kind of things. It's been debunked, as Aaron said, many times by many people. We have, other people have, and what this kind of things. And yet, yet we still kind of buy this idea that, you know, the working class is still the same as it was like 40 years ago or 60 years ago. And it hasn't changed.

And it's like it has changed massively. And that can lead to apathy. That can lead to the defense of the status quo in many ways. And that can also link to things getting worse. I mean, we've seen, for example, people on the left targeting so-called identity politics as if it was actually undermining class movements and class. struggle. And it's like, I'm sorry, but like you cannot understand the class struggle today if you don't actually involve conceptions of identities and how kind of intersectionality works, right, in these

struggles. If you avoid doing this, then I think you're going to end up with a white working class narratives, which are deeply reactionary and certainly not in the service of the working class more widely and workers' interests more widely. So I think, you know, again, I think, you know, it's not surprising. I think, I mean, in our conclusion of the book, and I think in the work we've done since and of view of the world is that discourse is absolutely essential to all of this. And I think we need to pay a lot more attention to that. We need to create new narratives. You know, we would be more pessimistic in the book now, probably,

but I don't think anything has surprised. I said we were surprised. I think we were surprised at the pace of change, but not necessarily at the way things have gone, like the directions, like the direction of travel, we've known for a very long time, but this is where we're heading if we don't have a regeneration of democracy, if we don't have actually a move towards more real democracy,

you know, and we could talk about it for another couple of hours what a real democracy would look like. But I don't think anyone today believes that we'd really live in democracy. I don't think anyone who's going to go and vote in the general election this year is going to vote for something that they really think is, you know, is a kind of democratic party in any way, shape or form. The only thing that people are going to vote for is against others, which has been, you know, of course, happening for a long time, right, which from my point of view, I think is a mockery of what democracy is. But I think this year is going to be even worse, and the U.S. is going to be exactly the same. And I think what we need to do is, again, create these new narratives that stops buying into far-right narratives and reactionary narrative and liberal narratives who are all heading us in the same direction, right? We need to break away from that, break away from the idea that liberalism and the liberal elite are a bulwark against the far-right, they are not. They haven't been by any historical standards, right?

So I think we just need to kind of, we need to imagine new things. I also, I mean, I also think that we're in a perfect storm right now. I mean, we're seeing massive global protest movements in the name of Palestinian solidarity and liberation. We're also seeing, you know, a genocide take place. And we're seeing in a massive crackdown on protest. In fact, now it's like with the new extremism definition. And in a sense, I think that the both the challenging these reactionary narratives, challenging these policies that are designed to suppress and maintaining.

activism on the streets, on paper, everywhere is really, really important. Because this is, I do, I do believe that this has, this moment has kind of also exposed the absolute sort of direction of travel, but it may, it may be a moment where people are also mobilizing back on a mass global scale. And I think that's really important. It's interesting, that just made me think of a quote that has always kind of haunted me throughout my kind of like, I guess, academic life or even activist life from a French neo-fascist called Barthesh in the early 1960s when, you know, fascism was that it's Nadir and all of that. And he was one of the people who kind of stuck to kind of fascist ideals and so on. But he said very clearly, he said, you know,

when fascism comes back, it's not going to come back, you know, with like spasticar, armbands, with, you know, jackboots on the ground or things like. It will come back as something we won't recognize until, you know, until it's too late and we're in power. And I think, you know, that goes back to the point you were making, Aaron, about, about fascism. You know, the term fascism can be distracting if we think of fascism as this kind of like historical fascism. But what we've seen happening in the last few decades is actually, you know, the removal of rights, the removal of rights to protest, the removal of rights of activism, the removal of rights of certain minorities, you know, and that's not been in the name of fascism. That's not even been in the

name of far-right politics. That's been in the name of liberalism in protecting certain interests, in protecting us against ourselves as well to some extent. And I think this is happening without us noticing it. And I think this is what we need to counter us, as Aaron said. Fantastic. Yeah. I mean, thanks so much, Aaron, Orelian. I just emphasize again for listeners that the book they wrote together is reactionary democracy, which came out on Verso 2020, but like it is, unfortunately, it's very much still pertinent. Have you got any more to say, Jim? No, no, that's fantastic, guys. Thanks. I think, I think your, I mean, your overall analysis is very close to the conclusion we came to on the main the episode about fascism actually yeah what we're looking

at as a sort of crisis of liberal democracy in which a particular technocratic elite is just using every possible means to dig themselves in and really what they want their only plan is to find themselves in this cycle where they alternate government with sort of these clownish far-right administrations yeah I was struck by how close what you guys have been saying today how close that was to what we were saying in the interview and you've really fleshed it out for us and I can only also agree that the book is really important and really worth reading and also I already and an hour and are also quite active on Twitter and social media and are worth following because their work is going on and they're really making an important

contribution and despite what people think you know at British-based academics or in any way active in the left public sphere are not that, there's not that many of us and they're both doing really important work. So please follow and support. Thanks guys. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead.