The Far Right Contagion

It’s not a Trump thing. It’s not a politics thing.

At twilight, the cage doors would rattle open. Eyes white in faces streaked black with dust, the exhausted miners would lurch out into the stark yard lights after a day at the coal face. The work was hard, dangerous. But the pay was good, the local communities were flourishing.

That scene was repeated on a daily basis for centuries in the UK’s coalfields in South Yorkshire or the East Midlands. In West Virginia and the Ruhr and Saarland. These were proud men, unionised, usually voting for the party of labour.

Now it’s a scene from the hazy past. The coal mines in the UK are closed. The industry is on its last legs in the US and Europe. But those times are still remembered fondly by the miners’ descendants in the white working class communities of the hinterland, days when everyone had cash in their pockets and they all could be part of the National Story, without any education and only the strength of their arms to see them through.

And it wasn’t just coal. The men swinging hammers in the shipyards. The steelworkers enduring the white-hot heat of the blast furnaces. The farmers tilling the land their ancestors had worked for generations.

All of them slipping away into history.

These post-industrial areas are now the breeding grounds for the Far Right in the US and Europe. Communities which once voted for economic self-interest are now rallying round what is said to be cultural issues.

But it isn’t culture really. It’s the past.

The US is an inward-looking nation. Most of the think-pieces after Trump’s rise in 2016 focused on the particularly American reasons for his emergence — the failure of the Democrats, the influence of evangelical Christianity, celebrity, economic precarity.

That insular view completely missed the big picture. This wasn’t about America at all. It certainly wasn’t about Trump. It was happening everywhere, in virtually the same form, across the entirety of what we used to call the Western World.

When you look at the profile of those who support MAGA, or Reform in the UK, or the AfD in Germany and Rassemblement National in France, they’re the same people. Low, often very low, educational attainment, usually white, and emerging from those post-industrial landscapes.

It’s a global tribe.

When the old 20th century world died in the meteor strike of the new Age of Digital Technology, vast oceanic currents rushed across the globe. Change came fast, though many didn’t see it because it was happening in areas far from where they lived.

Before the transformation, you could leave school with no qualifications and still make your mark on the world. Set up a business. Sweat and toil and the nation would see you as heroes for keeping the wheels of industry turning.

But as the 21st century progressed, it soon became apparent that you couldn’t thrive without some level of education. Brains were what mattered now, not manual labour. And as the sweated industries gradually slipped into history and the new industrial revolution of digital technology caught everyone’s imagination, those labourers discovered they weren’t the heroes any more.

When you haven’t got much, being a hero is a big deal.

Pride is a powerful force.

You saw it in the movies of the 1940s and 50s where two-fisted males and feisty females were the ones who put the world to right. The pointy-headed educated people either caused the problem or got in the way of solving the problem, but at least they were in the minority.

These stories celebrated the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil who carried a grateful nation to victory.

Now the time of the strong arm has passed. The educated people are taking over everything. They’re the usurpers. The threat. The Elite.

It’s a worldview that’s prevalent right now in the hugely-popular work of Yellowstone creator Tyler Sheridan, shows that have been taken to heart by Red State MAGAworld. They capture that Trumpian view of the dispossessed, where educated people are stupid and dangerous and uneducated people are actually the clever ones who should run things.

One of the mistakes a lot of political people make is that voters have rational and reasoned choices about which party they support; if you vote for a Far Right party you must love Far Right policies.

That’s not true.

Most decisions are vibe-based. We have enough data to show that the lowest of low information voters who are behind Reform have zero idea of the party’s policies. In fact, many of Reform’s aims are in direct opposition to what those voters want.

While they can be considered Far Right on some fronts — massively racist, “hanging’s too good for ‘em” — in other areas they have what would be classed as socialist beliefs. Tax the wealthy till the pips squeak. Invest in public services.

They’re better characterised as Smash the System voters. It’s not working for us how it used to - I’ll vote for anyone who looks like they’re going to upend the status quo.

That bitterness at losing their place in society has made them easy prey to those who promise the clock can be turned back to the days when they were on top. Right now those disillusioned voters feel they’re in an existential fight and they’ll take the support of anyone who says they will break the new way of operating. Trump. Farage. Le Pen and Bardella. Weidel.

I grew up in the coalfields of the East Midlands. My grandfather was a coal miner. He was missing two fingers and a thumb, his spine had crumbled from being trapped in rising water in collapsed tunnels and his skin was blue from impacted coal dust. Despite that, I remember a happy and caring man who had enjoyed his work but was overjoyed I didn’t follow him into a life underground.

The community was joyous. The pubs overflowed with people from different walks of life, the chip shops filled with people seeking good quality, cheap food, the working mens’ clubs flooded with families dancing the night away at the weekends. Most of all I remember the humour that crackled through everything, scabrous, anarchic, a bond of laughter that tied everyone together.

I find it hard to return to the place of my birth now. The optimism, the humour, the kindness, has curdled into something distasteful. Reform has sunk deep roots across the region, not only preying on that sense of unfairness but twisting it into something unpleasant, cruel, divisive.

In the times I spent in the US I found MAGA had done the same. These once-supporters of the Left, now supporters of the Far Right were so desperate to be back on top, they were ready to displace those they felt were standing in their way, the educated, the immigrants, the elite.

Seen through this prism, it’s not about party politics or Left and Right. It’s about the Past vs the Future. And one side has to lose.

And now, in the US, the rest of the world has the opportunity to watch a massive experiment unfold as Far Right manipulators answer those desires to retreat to the 20th century. The victims are people of colour and immigrants, women, the non-religious, the educated.

The ones who haven’t adapted to the 21st century, however, are not the winners.

This isn’t a plea for sympathy. Far from it. If innocent people get harmed by your actions or your conscious choices, your motivations can only ever be explanation, not excuse. But it is a plea for understanding the root cause: that these are people unmoored by the 21st century tsunami of technological change.

Once you have that understanding, the opportunities are clear. No one would say it’s easy, but it’s certainly a lot easier to convince someone they actually have a stake in the system than it is to talk them out of fascist ideology.

I said the Far Right contagion wasn’t about Trump and that was the case originally. Trump was merely one of the manifestations.

But now Trump is the super-spreader of the contagion. The power he has accrued, and the lies he tells, have convinced these people that, yes, they can have the past back again. The coal mines will reopen. The steelworks will fire up. The money will flood back in. We, the uneducated working people, can be back on top again.

He turbocharged Bolsanaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary and with the aid of his henchman Elon Musk has been trying to do the same in the UK, France, Germany, Austria and Romania.

But the key isn’t defeating Trump or any of those Far Right parties. Those who raised them up will still be there, still angry and bitter. And you won’t be able to placate them by bringing back the industries and those well-paid jobs where you could thrive without investing in yourself. They’re gone for good.

In the medium term there’s only one answer. Education should be a primary policy for every party of the centre-Left everywhere.

People need to be given the skills and the knowledge to prepare for the vast changes that are coming in the next few years — far beyond anything we’ve lived through since the turn of the century.

Leave them to fend for themselves and that Far Right contagion will spread even further.