![]() Trump’s “We love you” message to his supporters exposed how in thrall the president had become to the anti-democratic, often white supremacist, forces he had unleashed, and serves as a warning to all conservatives of where alliances with the far right can end. In the United States, it culminated in Trump’s incitement of his supporters to storm the Capitol on 6 th January to overturn the result of the 2020 election. A politics of demonisation, exclusion and “othering” has seeped into mainstream right-wing parties. Echoing the rhetorical tropes of anti-democratic forces from the interwar years, populists like Trump promote conspiracy theories in which liberal politicians plot to destroy national sovereignty in the interests of global financial capital. The nationalist far-right rejects these values. These values were rooted in the French Revolution and European Enlightenment and comprised an alliance of liberty, equality and solidarity, which could accommodate Christian Democrats, liberals, social democrats and orthodox socialists, albeit in different proportions. This new fault-line not only redrew the political map: it fractured the old consensus around core democratic values-stretching from right to left-that had existed since the Second World War. And Trump promised industrial protection against overseas competition, as well as the biggest programme of public works since the New Deal. Johnson committed his party to an interventionist “levelling-up” agenda. Marine Le Pen’s National Front professed to abandon its fascist past and moved the spotlight onto protecting French industry. Poland’s Law and Justice Party adopted an economic and social programme that would win over “left-behind” Poles. ![]() From Warsaw via Workington to Wisconsin, working-class voters received promises from right-wing populists that their economic interests would not be sacrificed on the altar of neoliberalism. The British right was not alone in affecting to spurn both liberalisms. But by 2019, identity trumped economics-on which the Tories had anyway begun to change their tune under Boris Johnson-and the red wall crumbled. Back in the conventional world of parliamentary elections, in 2017 Labour’s anti-neoliberal economic programme under Jeremy Corbyn added 3.5m votes to its 2015 general election tally. Many of the towns that repudiated the EU were voting just as much against the deindustrialisation that took place during the years Britain was in the EU as they were voting to restore a supposedly Edenic 1950s. ![]() But despite many jumping to the conclusion that fervent nationalism explained the whole Brexit phenomenon, it was not clear which liberalism was being rejected. The 2016 Brexit referendum freed such voters from this restraint-and it certainly set back the old liberal order. In essence, they had to decide which liberalism-social or economic-to reject. The traditional right-left dividing line-economic liberalism and social conservatism on the right, economic interventionism and social liberalism on the left-forced working-class nationalists to choose between their socially conservative instincts (including hostility to immigration) and their support for state intervention in the economy. Despite the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020, progressives have yet to find a strategy to combat this potent-if false-divide. This new fault-line pits economic and social liberalism against social conservatism and the promise of muscular economic intervention. Over the last decade, an increasingly confident right wing has presented disillusioned voters with a simple choice: elitist, neoliberal hyper-globalisation or popular, patriotic nationalism.
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