{"id":14885,"date":"2024-10-10T19:02:03","date_gmt":"2024-10-10T08:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=14885"},"modified":"2024-10-10T19:02:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-10T08:02:03","slug":"its-time-to-take-a-stand-against-far-right-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/10\/its-time-to-take-a-stand-against-far-right-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s time to take a stand against far-right politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Political operatives on the far right have long spoken about their\u00a0ambition to shift<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cOverton window<\/a>\u201d. The aim is to \u201cmainstream\u201d ideas long considered unthinkable, through gradual, step-by-step radicalisation and repetition \u2013 especially on hot-button issues such as immigration, sexuality, race and identity.<\/p>\n

If challenged, commentators respond by appealing to \u201cfree speech\u201d, accusing their critics of denying this basic liberal right.<\/p>\n

The career of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson represents a case study in the success of this political strategy in the United States. As his recent\u00a0interview with Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper<\/a>\u00a0highlights, the Overton window seems to have shifted so far that it now includes the extreme right in ways that were unthinkable as recently as a decade ago.<\/p>\n

The interview on Carlson\u2019s YouTube channel raises unsettling questions about the visions of history and politics all of this \u201cfree speech\u201d is opening us towards, and how democratic debate could possibly be benefited by this process.<\/p>\n

Carlson has a history of promoting baseless claims. In late 2021, he exercised his freedom of speech by producing a\u00a0three-part documentary<\/a>\u00a0alleging that the riot of Trump followers at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was a \u201cfalse flag\u201d FBI operation, the true aim of which was to vilify the MAGA movement.<\/p>\n

He has pushed\u00a0COVID vaccine conspiracy theories<\/a>\u00a0and promoted the\u00a0\u201cgreat replacement\u201d conspiracy theory<\/a>\u00a0on more than 400 shows. Long restricted to the\u00a0extreme right fringe in Europe<\/a>, this \u201ctheory\u201d suggests that progressive elites in Western nations promote non-European immigration for their own political advantage, with the sinister ambition to \u201creplace\u201d the \u201cwhite race\u201d.<\/p>\n

Carlson was\u00a0ousted from Fox News in 2023<\/a>, shortly after the cable network\u2019s\u00a0$787.5 million settlement<\/a>\u00a0with Dominion Voting Systems for spreading disinformation about the 2020 election. His own\u00a0emails admitting Fox\u2019s dishonesty<\/a>\u00a0were used as evidence in the case.<\/p>\n

Then came 2024. In February, Carlson visited Russia, becoming the first Western journalist to interview President Vladimir Putin since the start of the Ukraine war. Carlson allowed Putin to air his rationalisations for Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine,\u00a0without any real challenge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Carlson then sat down for his YouTube channel with\u00a0Russian neofascist Aleksandr Dugin<\/a>. Dugin is a pro-Putin intellectual who was once fired from his academic position for urging his countrymen to\u00a0\u201ckill, kill, kill\u201d their Ukrainian neighbours<\/a>. He has\u00a0expressed admiration<\/a>\u00a0for the Waffen SS \u2013 the\u00a0most radical military arm<\/a>\u00a0of the Nazi SS \u2013 and\u00a0decried the \u201cJewish elite\u201d<\/a>, which he proposes runs the US. In 1996, Dugin called for \u201can authentic, real, radically revolutionary and consistent fascism\u201d in Russia, \u201cborderless as our lands, and red as our blood\u201d.<\/p>\n

Shortly after his interview with Dugin, Carlson\u00a0hosted Cooper<\/a>, who proposed that British prime minister Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the \u201cchief villain\u201d of World War II.<\/p>\n

As for the Holocaust? Cooper challenged almost everything \u201cmainstream\u201d historians agree about Nazi atrocities. He claimed the Nazis\u2019 hands were tied due to food shortages after Hitler invaded Soviet Russia. Since Churchill had refused to admit defeat after the fall of France in 1940, the Nazis were effectively blockaded. This left them with a choice between slowly starving the millions of \u201cprisoners\u201d their invasions bequeathed them and the more \u201chumane\u201d measure of \u201cfinishing them off quickly\u201d.<\/p>\n

These views, which have long circulated in neo-Nazi circles, are\u00a0demonstrably false<\/a>. They transparently serve to sanitise Hitler\u2019s atrocities.<\/p>\n

With his interview with Cooper, Carlson\u2019s journey to the farthest reaches of the political right finally seems to have sparked bipartisan concern. Alongside\u00a0condemnation from the White House<\/a>, criticism came from\u00a0some conservative lawmakers<\/a>, including New York Republican Mike Lawler, who commented:<\/p>\n

Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing. During my time in the State Assembly, I worked with Democrats and Republicans to ensure all students in New York received proper education on the Holocaust, something Mr Cooper clearly never had.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conservative political theorist Leo Strauss\u00a0once opined<\/a>\u00a0that Weimar Germany collapsed because its liberal freedoms allowed Nazism, with its craven appeals to base hatreds, to proliferate. The shift of the Overton window in the US to include the far-right makes his warning newly unsettling.<\/p>\n

We have slowly arrived at a place where a commentator of enormous influence, who is\u00a0close to a presidential candidate<\/a>, is platforming a fan of\u00a0Heinrich Himmler\u2019s SS<\/a>\u00a0and neo-Nazi talking points.<\/p>\n

The problem here is arguably not only that Carlson is hosting extremists such as Dugin and Cooper, but that he presents them to his many followers as courageous truth-tellers, whose views have been \u201cforbidden\u201d by censorious elites. He extolled Cooper as \u201cthe best and most honest popular historian in the United States\u201d. Elon Musk\u00a0posted on X in praise of Carlson\u2019s interview<\/a>, before quietly removing the post.<\/p>\n

If challenged, commentators respond by appealing to \u201cfree speech\u201d, accusing their critics of denying this basic liberal right.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The same wide-eyed sympathy characterised Carlson\u2019s exchanges with Putin and Dugin. Little wonder the latter celebrated his interview as\u00a0a great tactical victory<\/a>. Carlson had, in effect, given Dugin\u2019s ideas an entr\u00e9e into the US, from which Dugin himself\u00a0remains banned<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The pressing question all this raises is just what good can possibly come from opening the Overton window to ideas which generations of people since World War II have known to be toxic and incompatible with the political values of nations such as the US and Australia, which Carlson\u00a0visited earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In response to this question, formulaic outrage about the right to freely express any and all ideas, including the most hateful and patently false, really doesn\u2019t cut it. In political scientist\u00a0Robert O. Paxton\u2019s<\/a> definition, fascism is characterised by:<\/p>\n

obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is nothing in such a militant perspective consistent with the basic principles of democratic countries: social pluralism, the rule of law, multiparty politics with the peaceful transition of power, and the protected liberties of citizens \u2013 including freedom of speech.<\/p>\n

John Stuart Mill\u00a0argued for freedom of speech<\/a>\u00a0on the grounds that the contest of opinions is needed to discover and share the truth. This classic liberal defence of free expression faces inescapable challenges, however, when it comes to the opinions of avowed enemies of \u201cliberalism\u201d such as Dugin and Cooper.<\/p>\n

They are people who deride\u00a0concerns about individual rights and protections<\/a>. They assert the demands of the mythologised \u201cethnic community\u201d. They conceive of politics as a\u00a0war or struggle<\/a>\u00a0for domination.<\/p>\n

Proponents of far-right views have, at best, a conditional interest in seeking the truth. Mill\u2019s conception of a pluralistic public sphere of competing voices is anathema to them, if they attain power. They have no interest in fostering an independent-minded population capable of holding leaders to informed account.<\/p>\n

The far right accepts the need to lie, suppress information and \u201cstrategically\u201d present its position to different audiences. Such dishonesty is an instrument in the existential struggle. Its shameless deployment is a sign of strength and fidelity to the higher \u201ctruth\u201d of the cause.<\/p>\n

All of this suggests deep \u201cfree speech\u201d reasons for scepticism about the formulaic appeal to this liberal value being used to mainstream the ideas of Dugin and Cooper. Liberal democracies champion toleration. Yet as philosopher Rainer Forst has shown in\u00a0a classic study<\/a>, this toleration necessarily requires the clear-sightedness to identify, and the forthrightness to oppose, principled intolerance and the promotion of group hatred.<\/p>\n

The time is surely past for the postwar complacency that far-right politics \u201ccould never happen again\u201d in new forms. This is a time when a US vice-presidential candidate has\u00a0happily shared a stage<\/a>\u00a0with Carlson after his Cooper interview.<\/p>\n

The same candidate now owns his\u00a0willingness to \u201ccreate\u201d stories about immigrants to spread fear and division<\/a>\u00a0before a national election whose results his party has again\u00a0committed to challenging<\/a>\u00a0should they lose.<\/p>\n

It is time to outspokenly defend democratic values and institutions against their foes, rather than let the disingenuous appeal to \u201cfree speech\u201d be used to undermine them.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on <\/strong><\/em>The Conversation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr<\/a> (CC).<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Political operatives on the far right have long spoken about their\u00a0ambition to shift\u00a0the \u201cOverton window\u201d. The aim is to \u201cmainstream\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":775,"featured_media":14886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[343,417,581,332],"coauthors":[727],"class_list":["post-14885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law-politics","tag-christian-right","tag-freedom-of-speech","tag-liberalism","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/775"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14885"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14891,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885\/revisions\/14891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14885"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}