The 'Far-Right'
The contemporary Left dismisses populist insurgencies, such as those behind Brexit and Trump in 2016, as right wing mobilisations led by a political ‘far right’ vanguard - Trump in the USA, Brexiteers in the UK, Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany and the other populist parties of Europe with a strong appeal to a domestic (white) working class. The Left needs its invention of a resurgent ‘far-right’ to animate its anti-populist fervour, to dismiss the democratic revolts of the working class in Europe and the US as nothing but the reactionary, ‘far-right’ handiwork of anti-immigrant hate and racial prejudice, just one Nuremburg rally away from fascism. Thus does a mythical ‘far-right’ spectre, an elaborate garment spun from the tiniest of actual and historical threads, allow the Left to portray its anti-Trump, anti-Brexit, anti-populist, anti-working-class opposition as a continuation of its proudly historic, and heroic, battle against class exploitation and social oppression.
Whilst the Left spins its wheels in doctrinaire anti-populist political analysis and campaigning, it is the Populist Right that has rallied to the rise in working class populism. If the Left wishes to regain political relevance, it needs to reflect on how far its contemporary identity politics obsessions have drifted from the concerns of ordinary people and how the Left’s identity politics often run counter to working class interests.
By getting back to (Marxist) basics, the Left would have much more credibility to be able to challenge the less palatable, anti-working-class policies of the populist (and orthodox) Right (corporate tax cuts, hostility to unions, government deregulation, fossil fuel addiction, environment-trashing, etc.). For, as it stands now, working class supporters of the Populist Right are tempted to discard the entire left-wing agenda because the Left’s ‘Diversity’ fetish spoils the whole dish.
The ‘anti-fa’
A Populist Left is not the ‘anti-fa’, that vigilante, largely anarchist street mob of self-proclaimed ‘anti-fascists’ who engage in 1930s-style ‘anti-fascist’ street struggle, violently suppressing the freedom of speech and political assembly of those people with whom the ‘anti-fa’ disagree, primarily Populist Right supporters, particularly those who want mass immigration reined in.
Social democrats (Corbyn, Sanders)
A Populist Left is not mainstream, leftist social democrats such as Jeremy Corbyn (the British Labour Party leader) and Bernie Sanders (Democrat presidential aspirant who pushed Hillary Clinton to the wire for the Democrat nomination in 2106).
Corbyn’s pro-immigration stance, and multiculturalist orthodoxy, is untroubled by the negative economic and social effects of open-borders immigration on the British working class. He has also caved on a not-very-solid profoessed desire to see Brexit through.
Sanders, in 2016, initially refused to buy into the centrality of identity politics to the modern Left and instead persisted in talking in class terms about rich and poor, instead of identity terms of Hispanics, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Asian-Americans, LGBTQI Americans, etc. For all his Old Leftist, FDR New Deal-type virtues, however, Sanders is an open-borders conformist:
Sanders voted against amnesty for illegal immigrants in 2007 but Sanders subsequently voted for amnesty in 2013.
In 2015, Sanders dismissed open borders as ‘a Koch brothers proposal’ ‘bringing in all kinds of people, who work for $2 or $3 an hour, cutting everyone’s wages and making everybody in America poorer’. In the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination race, Sanders broke Democrat ranks by saying that ‘of course’ immigrant labour drives down wages and ‘makes everybody in America’ worse off by ‘doing away with the concept of a nation state’, adding that ‘what right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy’. However, Sanders’ 2016 platform was a near complete wish-list for the Open Borders billionaires he claims to despise. It called for the legalisation of illegal aliens, the dismantling of “inhumane deportation programs and detention centres”, free healthcare for immigrants, and the expansion of the Diversity Visa lottery system.
The immigrant-reliant US Democrat Party needs an open-borders immigration policy, both for its electoral ‘Diversity’ voting base and for the big corporate donors that fund the Democrats so they will keep open the supply chains for cheap immigrant labour. In order to survive in the party and have a shot at being a Democrat President, Sanders has yielded to the inevitable – in 2019, he has formally pandered to the Democrats’ Diversity dogma (of which mass Third World immigration is a major ideological pillar) by conceding that his 2016 nomination campaign was ‘too white and too male-oriented’. Whatever his past ‘immigration-sceptical’ form, the current Bernie Sanders is now regulation ‘Diversity’, his populist Left credibility seriously flawed.