Could there be a reason the lower orders keep electing fascists?

Perhaps conventional centre-left and centre-right parties should consider whether they might be the problem rather than their erstwhile voters

Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

“[There has been] an implicit pact between the major parties to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate… they have done this by keeping the subject off the political agenda.”

Bob Hawke, 1994

In the hopes of avoiding cancellation, let me start with the standard throat clearing. Some of my best friends are migrants or the children of migrants. The only father-in-law I’ve thus far had was born in China after his Russian naval officer father had to flee to Shanghai to escape the Bolsheviks. I’m the son of a £10 Pom. I often fantasise about migrating, at least temporarily, to another country. None of what follows should be read as an attack on migrants, most of whom are admirably hard-working, enterprising and law-abiding individuals.

But what follows certainly is an indictment of the disingenuousness and self-dealing of both right-wing and left-wing elites in Anglosphere and Western European nations. These people have gotten to enjoy most of the upsides (notably access to cheap labour coupled with a sense of moral superiority) of living in high-immigration societies while making sure they weren’t much affected by the downsides (overcrowded schools, hospitals and roads, an inability to gain a toehold in capital city property markets and lower wages or unemployment)   

A fascist is elected… again

It used to be rare for serious people to label politicians or political parties as fascist without possessing strong evidence that was actually the case. A politician might be labelled a conservative, or a Christian Democrat, or a populist, or even an authoritarian. They might be criticised for being sceptical of the notion that migration and multiculturalism are all pros and no cons. But prominent academics, activists, journalists, human rights lawyers and political pundits used to understand it was juvenile and counter-productive to go around labelling anyone not totally on board with the Left’s current agenda as a fascist.    

For instance, I don’t recall anyone accusing John Howard of latent or overt fascist sympathies after he released his ‘One Australia’ immigration policy, which called for an end to multiculturalism and a slowing down of immigration from Asian nations, in 1988. Or even after he ‘stopped the boats’ back in 2001. Yes, the Left was driven into a white-hot rage in both instances. Yes, plenty of progressives inferred or baldly stated Howard was either a xenophobe or racist. But back then, glibly accusing a political opponent of being a fascist was considered a bridge too far by mainstream progressives.      

Granted, there was some speculation Howard’s father, a right-wing service station owner enraged by the ALP’s generous funding of the railways, was a member of a fascist paramilitary organisation back in the 1930s. Yet nobody but the most unhinged of Leftists ever suggested Howard himself was obsessed with racial purity or determined to establish a strongman dictatorship. It would have been a strange accusation to make about a Prime Minister who oversaw the arrival of many hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Indian immigrants during his long premiership and was unfailingly gracious about being voted out of office, as well as the seat he held for three decades.  

Political discourse was a little more rational back in the eighties, nineties and aughts.

They are all fascists now

Since the Howard era, the amount of fascists elected to high political office could pack out a 1920s Munich beer hall. Viktor Orban wasn’t identified as a fascist during his first stint as Hungarian Prime Minister (1998-2002) but has been seen to let his fascist flag fly during his second premiership (2010-present).

Orban’s Turkish contemporary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is also apparently a fascist; given his religious background, I presume the correct nomenclature is ‘Islamofascist’.

Nobody pays much attention to Polish politics. But when they do they rarely fail to mention the ruling (2015-present) Law and Justice party is fascist.

Chief Brexiteer Nigel Farage was regularly accused of being a fascist.

I scarcely need to point out that Trump is widely considered to be Orange Hitler.

Indeed, fascism is so hot right now that even the notoriously progressive Nordics are getting in on the action by voting for the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats in large numbers.

And now Italy, the birthplace of fascism, has elected its first lady fascist Prime Minister. At least we can all look forward to the trains running on time during any future visits to Rome.

Might mass migration have something to do with this?     

I carry no brief for the likes of Orban, Erdogan, Trump and Meloni and disagree with many of their policies. In fact, I suspect even many of those who voted for them would disagree with many of their policies.

But to quote the Never-Trumper David Frum, “If liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, voters will hire fascists to do the job.” After several decades of mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties resolutely ignoring their voters’ wishes on immigration, they are now reaping the whirlwind.

The horse has very much left the barn at this juncture, but it’s worth pointing out that it didn’t have to be like this. Well, I suppose it did have to be exactly like this given the unwavering neoliberal belief that the unimpeded movement of labour, capital and goods across borders would lead to utopia. But let’s sketch out the counterfactual anyway.

In this alternate reality, politicians on the Right showed more backbone in standing up to donors with an insatiable appetite for cheap and compliant labour. Meanwhile, politicians on the Left were a little less intoxicated by ‘vibrant diversity’ and a little more mindful of the sense of cultural loss felt by the natives; especially that class of people who would never get seconded to the Shanghai office, or holiday in Tuscany, or dine at a Mexican-Japanese fusion restaurant.

Politicians from across the spectrum would have ensured natives didn’t see new arrivals as competitors for scarce resources. Those billionaire conservatives and upper-middle class progressives so committed to open borders would have shouldered a much higher tax burden to enable the generous funding of public goods such as schools, hospitals and roads.

A robust social safety net, including well-funded retraining programs, would have been constructed to ensure large numbers of people weren’t left behind by globalisation. Nation-building infrastructure programs (think the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme) would have been rolled out to keep unemployment low. NIMBY zoning laws could have been resisted or repealed to ensure new arrivals didn’t worsen existing housing supply-demand imbalances in the capital cities of many first-world nations.

But the powers-that-be – well-heeled Rightists who long ago won the economic debate and well-heeled Leftists who long ago won the Kulturkampf – wanted to accrue all the benefits of high migration while cost-shifting all the costs onto the little people. And then scream “Racist” or “embittered loser” at any little person – even non-white migrants – who had the unmitigated gall to raise any concerns. (It’s worth noting that few migrants, especially legal migrants, support open-slather immigration.)       

The “implicit pact” continues

The thing about hiring fascists to defend borders is that even they usually turn out not to be much interested in defending them. Trump passed a big tax cut that chiefly benefitted the class of people who traditionally vote GOP, but never got around to building the wall his blue-collar supporters were so enthused about. Boris got Brexit done, but that merely seems to have resulted in somewhat fewer people entering Britain from EU countries while many more enter Britain from non-EU countries. In recent days, Liz Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced they want to increase immigration into Britain to, you guessed it, support economic growth.

Speaking of Kwarteng, am I the only one who finds it a little odd that the Left is so keen on immigration when first-generation and second-generation migrants are so often economic and social conservatives passionately opposed to all or most progressive cause célèbres?

Advocating for anything other than high immigration remains a third rail for Leftist activists and politicians, despite the incompatibility of open borders and a generous welfare state. I imagine many on the Left were in silent agreement – emphasis on the silent – with Bernie Sanders when he observed, “Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers' proposal. I think from a moral responsibility, we've got to work with the rest of the industrialised world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer."

But in the current environment, no progressive with any sense of self-preservation will acknowledge that, like everything else, mass migration has costs as well as benefits. Or that those costs are overwhelmingly borne by what used to be the Left’s natural constituency. (Even the irascible Sanders crab-walked away from the position he bluntly expressed in 2015, promising not to deport illegal migrants during his 2016 presidential run.)    

What happens now?  

Debates about migration tend to be ugly and divisive. I’d argue that when they have erupted, they’ve been uglier and more divisive than they needed as to be a result of mainstream political parties' frantic attempts to ignore the mounting concerns of their voters and “keep the subject off the political agenda”.

As counterintuitive as it might sound, I suspect the anti-migrant backlash might have peaked in 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump. If the nativist insurgency hasn’t peaked, I’m confident it will have by the end of this decade.

As discussed in my last musing, digital transformation means even white-collar work can now be easily outsourced to other countries. The Vietnamese software developer who once would have needed to migrate to a first-world nation to earn a first-world salary can now stay in Ho Chi Minh City and work for businesses based in Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand. Likewise, an Australian, American, Canadian and Kiwi software developer can now earn a first-world salary while choosing to live in Bali, Bridgetown, Dubrovnik or Ho Chi Minh City. (Growing numbers of people engaging in cost-of-living arbitrage will create another set of economic and political issues, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Also, regardless of what happens with digital nomadism, the world is running out of people. This is something Elon Musk bangs on about and which I explored several times (see here, here and here).

To some extent, whether Giorgina Meloni and her voters are crypto-fascists is beside the point. Like almost all developed nations, and a growing collection of developing ones, Italy is confronting a demographic crisis. Given increasing lifespans and collapsing fertility rates, Italy will inevitably need to switch from seeking to rebuff migrants to rolling out the welcome mat for them if it wants its aged-care facilities to have any staff.