Countering Right Wing Populism

An Essay on Social Democratic Strategy

15 min read2 days ago

I spent the past few days at the Oxford Symposium, where the challenge of right-wing populism for social democratic parties was a major theme. There was a lively debate about how to counter the threat. What follows is a summary of the notes I made in preparation for the Symposium. I’m de-paywalling it to stimulate wider debate.

Five socio-economic factors are driving the electoral success of right-wing populism in the West, and radicalising its mass base:

The globalised free-market system, impaired since 2008, is no longer delivering rising incomes, social cohesion and wellbeing to working people in the West.
This creates — both domestically and globally — a zero-sum game, in which many of the assumptions of the pre-2008 era are reversed in the popular imagination: for example, the idea that immigration and industrial offshoring are a win-win for developed world populations.
Policy elites have failed to recognise the severity of the crisis, and to adapt monetary, fiscal, energy and industrial regimes to the goal of delivering higher growth, redistribution and social cohesion (for example the German debt brake, the distributional failures of Bidenomics, the French budget crisis).
The elevation of identity-based concepts of social justice over class-based concepts, challenging the universalist assumptions on which Western politics were built. In the context of the zero sum game this is fuelling dissatisfaction among working people, including settled ethnic minorities (for example the US minority ethnic votes for Trump).
The impact of climate change, which intensifies pressure on resources, drives inflation, reduces potential output, erodes physical resilience and creates a fatalism among young people that is driving some towards the extremes.

Together these factors have fuelled a narrative that — stripped of its emotive language — says to working class people:

“The system does not work for us; life is only going to get worse;
The political elites don’t care;
They’ve created an identity-based game that we can’t win, as opposed to the class-based one we once could win;
It’s all the fault of immigrants, feminists, human rights lawyers, woke regulators and police chiefs etc;
The current system is doomed and likely to end in a cataclysmic crisis, or state failure.”

Ultimately, because the centre left has refused to vocalise, or even accept, that the economic system is broken, we’ve deprived ourselves of being able to give different answers to the ones proposed above.

Much of social democratic politics is framed around an offer to re-start the positive sum game — through growth, the green transition, public service reform, higher wages.

Yet until we can deliver that — and the global headwinds against us are strong — the target population for right-wing populism is stuck with the central assumption of the zero sum game: “when someone else wins, we lose”.

As a result, liberalism appears to have no effective strategies to counter the far right — as evidenced this year in the Harris campaign and Macron’s failure in the French Assembly election.

Mainstream conservatism too is failing: its mixture of neoliberal economics with mild nationalist authoritarianism can no longer hold together a broad electoral coalition on the right.

However, social-democracy because of its roots in working class communities and institutions, has evolved partially successful survival strategies — as evidenced in Denmark, Spain, Norway, Australia, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. As liberalism and mainstream conservatism fail, it is likely that social democracy will become the main bulwark against the far right.

But social-democracy itself faces fragmentation, with “values voters” emerging on the green, left nationalist and far-left end of the spectrum, while our formerly solid electoral base among ethnic minorities is also disintegrating under pressure of the zero-sum game.

The danger of radicalisation

Mainstream academic accounts of the right-wing populist threat see it primarily as electoral. This chart from Halikiopoulou and Vlandas (2024) tells that part of the story well. Outright fascist parties remain low in the threat assessment.

However, right-wing populism is not only an electoral phenomenon: it is a networked social movement, international in scope. In many countries parts of its mass base are radicalising towards fascism. In the UK, for example, one in five Reform voters thinks the August 2024 racist riots were justified.

Thanks to algorithmic manipulation, proposals originally identified as fascist have become central to far right thinking (eg the Great Replacement Theory, White Genocide, Cultural Marxism and the expectation of global civil war).

As I argued in How to Stop Fascism this is because — as in the 1930s — the thought-architecture of fascism is always more coherent than that of “organic” right wing populism. Fascist ideology, as Ernst Nolte wrote, has a “staggering logical coherence”, even if based on false premises.

Thus, no matter that the public discourse of right-wing populist parties remains within the realm of acceptability and the law, the private and subcultural narrative is tending towards open racism, misogyny, homophobia, irrationalism, conspiracy theories and fantasies of violence.

Who is driving it?

Alongside grassroots radicalisation, the range of powerful actors driving right wing populism has broadened to include:

A radicalised section of the tech and financial business elite, who are using their wealth to capture parties, media organisations, social media platforms and — where they win power — shaping deregulation in their own interests.
The “Axis of Resistance” powers, who are mounting sophisticated influence operations using social media manipulation (eg Romania, the British riots), proxies on the extremes (AfD, BSW in Germany), covert funding (eg Tenet media) and disinformation operations to promote extremism.
Western public affairs, data and social media and media companies who share the far-right agenda.
A dense global network of individuals who earn money from driving the public discourse towards extremes, and promoting the right-wing populist narrative (a.k.a “grifters). There is an ample reward system for them, while there is no similar reward for journalists, commentators, researchers and public figures who stick to the old rules and assumptions.
The Crypto movement, which is effectively a bet on the breakdown of the global finance/central bank systems and, as per El Salvador, the rise of an authoritarian right.
Social media platforms accelerate the radicalisation process: their business models normalise extreme solutions, especially among demographics who consume politics visually and verbally (eg TikTok in the Georgian presidential election).

The expanded Grievance Matrix

The social groups susceptible to right-wing populist ideas are also diversifying. The trend we are familiar with is for older, small-town, low paid and lower educated people to move right and for better-educated, younger and city-dwelling people to move left.

However, we are now seeing the emergence of numerous, parallel zero-sum games — which may co-exist to the central anti-immigration and Islamophobic narratives of the right:

Men-vs-Women: The advance of women’s education, achievement and reproductive rights has created a misogynist backlash which is particularly strong among young men, apparently across all cultures. This is not just evidenced in the “incel” phenomenon, but in the widespread consumption of violent/racially themed pornography, normalisation of sexual violence and plummeting conviction rates for rape. Though right-wing populism may play only lightly on this grievance, in the online fascist culture it is central.

Ethnic Minorities-vs-New Migrants: In countries with insecure labour markets, not only are white, Christian, conservative people turning against irregular and undocumented migrants, so are settled ethnic minorities. This was evidenced in the US election but is anecdotally rising in the UK.

“Decent people”-vs-criminals: Neoliberalism has atomised society, opening a space where low-level criminality co-exists in synergy with serious organised crime, to the extent that the justice system is overwhelmed: in the UK the jails are full, the courts are blocked and 12.5m people have criminal records. This creates a complex enmity between social groups accusing each other of criminality, and fuels the impression that the rule of law is evaporating. Rising insecurity gives further impetus to people seeking radical solutions through unlawful action.

Feminists-vs-Trans Rights: Though this conflict exists inside all political tendencies, including the labour movement, it has tangibly drawn some “gender critical” feminists into alliance with conservatives and right-wing populists.

Everybody-vs-woke: The far-right’s “war on woke” is no longer exclusively attractive to older, socially conservative people. It has been reframed as a defence of meritocracy, and can therefore mobilise any group that feels aggrieved by the attempt to impose identity based policies in the workplace, university or wider society.

On each of these issues, the right wing populist party can become the magnet for these discontents, especially as it does not require this ultra-diverse group of “victims” to actually join or identify with the party, but to give them a protest vote at election time.

In the online ecosystem of the right, these and other issues (eg anti-vaxx) have merged into an “Omnicause”, where discontent over one issue pulls people into alignment over them all.

What doesn’t work

A catalogue of failed social democratic responses to right-wing populism might include:

Ignoring the problem and sticking to the old economic and social policy assumptions, on the grounds that this is a generational issue and will go away, that economic growth will solve things, and that the current fiscal/monetary architecture is inviolable (eg Macron, Trudeau).
Actively embracing the culture war, in the hope that an electoral coalition of migrants, graduates, LGBTQ+ people, trade unionists and feminists can be mobilised around a common set of socially-liberal principles and “messages of hope” (eg Harris/Beyoncé, NZ Labor, the UK “Rejoin” movement). [This has been the default strategy of the social democratic left, some Green parties and the GUE-NGL parties.]
Pandering to the language and obsessions of the far right, but delivering none of the concrete things they want (e.g. Macron’s pronouncements on migration and Islam).
Stigmatising the far right only as the vectors of an external threat rather than recognising their deep-rootedness in domestic civil society. (Eg the US Russiagate narrative).

The wider problem here is that, though there is plenty of evidence about what doesn’t work, many social democratic parties (especially British Labour) lack the capacity to process theory and professional research. So typically the debate revolves around what not to do: “let’s not talk about migration, let’s not mention Brexit, let’s not address the issues everyone else in our network seems obsessed with in case that raises their salience…”

What can work…

However, there is some evidence that certain social democratic strategies are working:

Delivery in office: the Biden administration, the Scholz-led coalition, the Albanese government in Australia have all attempted to deliver higher and more inclusive growth. But where the economy is structured to reward rent-seeking and financial profits, growth simply produces higher inequality and inflation — as Biden found out to his cost.

Refusing the culture war: the Starmer administration, and Labour in opposition, learned to instinctively defuse/stay away from emotive issues such as the rights of transgender prisoners, curriculum battles over the British Empire, school controversies over images of the Prophet — and to accentuate the message that we have “more in common”.

Controlling economic migration, while policing the borders against irregular migration, positively integrating new arrivals into civil society and effectively policing crime. This is the implicit policy of numerous current social democratic-led governments, for example Denmark, and is finding growing acceptance across European centre left.

Charismatic leadership and crisis management: Where social democrats can step out of the role of faceless technocratic robots and project a combative image, especially in moments of national crisis, and where their message crosses political boundaries between the right and left, we can neutralise the advantages possessed by demagogues. A good example might be Robert Habeck’s “staatsraison” speech against anti-Semitism.

However, an interim balance sheet of the above strategies is that they only work if you do all of them at once and they have still not decisively turned the tide.

In part that is because of the breakdown of the conservative firewall against coalitions with the far right (eg Sweden, Finland, EPP); in part because there is too little growth; and also because the far right are being consciously aided by Russian/PRC and Iranian influence operations, and media oligarchs with massive resources.

Ultimately however I suggest it is because we are unwilling to recognise the existence of the zero sum game.

We go on promising a return to growth and redistribution but the population goes on experiencing stagnation, competition for resources and rising inequality.

In a zero sum game, every factory closed by a foreign-owned company, every job lost because of decarbonisation targets, and every low-skilled inward migrant raises concerns that are not offset by the assurance that — somehow in the future — the benefits will outweigh the negatives.

On the central issue, which is legal inward migration, we are only going to maintain consent by rigorously demonstrating the short as well as the long-term benefits of the numbers arriving.

A destructive far left?

A complicating factor is the rise of a far left that is overtly hostile to social democracy, and happy to promote anti-systemic politics. In the inter-war period we faced the Comintern, which in its “Third Period” decided that social democracy was a bigger enemy than fascism and fought us, at times, in alliance the far right.

Today we have something even more challenging: a proliferation of identity- and values-based movements whose effect is to erode the social-democratic principles of solidarity and universalism, who are relaxed about their own susceptibility to influence operations by the PRC, Russia and Iran — and increasingly do not care whether social democracy survives or dies.

For example the BSW in Germany overtly mobilises social conservative voters around a pro-Russian agenda, while advancing impossible left economic demands. In the UK, we are about to see the formation of a new party around Jeremy Corbyn, some of whose component organisations staged harassment and disruption operations against Labour’s electoral campaign.

Though some parties of the GUE-NGL bloc continue to operate as the critical allies, and even coalition partners with social democrats — eg the left parties in Finland and Norway, and Sumar in Spain — the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts have significantly intensified the hostility of others.

Thus, while the fascists, right-wing populists and national conservatives operate as a continuum, echoing each other’s messaging and sharing online spaces, the pro-Putin, pro-PRC, pro-Hamas far left increasingly operate as a wrecking ball against social democracy.

***

It is entirely possible to defeat and contain right wing populism if social democrats and their allies adopt an evidence-based and professionally executed strategy, mobilising our substantial support within civil society and our working class roots.

However, it will need a mindset change, analogous to the transition from peacetime to wartime ways of thinking.

The precondition for success is that we accept that, for this generation, defeating right-wing populism is our primary task.

All the other things we want to do — Net Zero, redistribution, women’s liberation, the defence of human rights, upholding the Refugee Convention and the maintenance of a rules-based international order — can only be achieved by keeping the far right out of power. What follows are suggestions of how to achieve that.

Elements of a Strategy

When in power, switch off the factors driving right-wing populism.

Recognise the zero-sum nature of current economic and geopolitical competition; design a plausible route to a positive sum game and narrate the story of how we get there to a mass audience. “Yes the system is broken”, has to be the start of the conversation…
Radically restructure policy and institutions to deliver low-inflationary, high productivity growth. This means detaching energy systems from global gas prices, using price controls once the growth kicks in, increased investment in skills and using industrial strategy from low- to high-value sectors — and loosening fiscal and monetary policy rules that are strangling the mid-2020s recovery.
Adopt a strictly universalist language. De-emphasise social justice claims based on identity; emphasise claims based on class, citizenship and universality. That does not mean denying or downplaying racism, sexism, homophobia etc. Nor does it mean abandoning the celebration of diversity. It means our primary story has to be about the redistribution of wealth to working people, and about our shared hardships — not a story about competition for power between identities.
[This is particularly challenging for left social democrats, whose default strategy has been to “own” the most difficult causes. But any left social democracy that is simply a collection of identitarian claims has zero chance of defeating the far right. Instead I want the left to be the most realistic and effective strategists against the far right.]
Refocus climate change policy towards mitigation and adaptation, with clear policies to protect/compensate those likely to be hit hardest by the transition from oil/gas.
Here we are increasingly seeing Green parties and NGOs opposing the execution of our Net Zero strategies on the grounds that they “de-risk” private investment, or harm the biosphere, or encroach on green belts. Again, the left of social democracy needs to decide whether to be an echo chamber for Green Nimby-ism and de-growth, or get with the central programme of Net Zero.
Recapture patriotism. The nation state is the default democratic unit and a powerful symbol of universalist values. It is now widely accepted that the left cannot abandon patriotism and its symbols to the far right. But in some countries social democracy is still too shy of associating its own history and past with that of the nation. The task of defining an inclusive, multi-ethnic and modern patriotism falls to social democracy and its liberal allies.
[In the UK there will soon be a major opportunity to do this. The forthcoming Strategic Defence Review looks likely to recommend significantly higher defence spending. This should be funded through borrowing, as in the 1930s, and Labour should make the case for doing this central to its growth/resilience strategy.]
Demonstratively break with the norms of elite politics: agitate among the demos; talk only about the basic issues facing working people; create a shared narrative about the past and future based demotic language and imagery.
Celebrate the resilience of the rules based order and social democracy’s role in creating/maintaining it; show that it is external actors sowing despondency; promote pride in the long-term and historic resilience of our democratic culture.
Name the guilty. The right has enemies — the left must too. Direct the anger the most appropriate targets — speculators, rip-off corporations, asset strippers, organised crime bosses, far-right billionaries; Putin, Iran, China and their proxies.

Embrace a militant democracy

As Karl Lowenstein wrote in the 1930s — democracies are not obliged to facilitate their own overthrow. Where possible, in conjunction with a cross-party alliance of democratic parties, we should:

Strengthen the state’s defences against Orbánisation (judiciary, media etc) in advance of any erosion of democracy. In each country where the far right is rising, we need to map their likely targets for anti-democratic reform and erect constitutional defences in advance.
Urgently strengthen social media regulation, up to and including temporary bans on certain platforms, as considered with TikTok in Romania, and aggressively police social media content for hate speech and incitement.
Criminalise purposeful disinformation.
Strengthen electoral law to prevent foreign and algorithmic manipulation.
Monitor, publish and expose the private racist/ homophobic/ misogynist utterances of the right-wing populist leaders. Expose their lack of decency and disregard for working people. The post-election exposés of Georgiescu show what could have been done before the vote.
Expose, prosecute and disrupt foreign interference operations and force domestic parties who refuse to break their links with foreign powers to register as foreign agents.
Declare war on organised crime, together with a public information campaign about how it works, and what citizens can do to help disrupt it. Name and shame its front organisations and facilitators. Don’t leave that to the right wing press: make it a central theme of the left. That can still be combined with a restorative and rehabilitative criminal justice system, but we must end any illusion that the left is soft on crime.
Implement an Estonian-style single digital identity for every citizen. In the past, progressive parties have baulked at this over concerns about privacy. Assuring the population that everyone is traceable before the law, and entitled to the services they are claiming, would majorly defuse racist conspiracy theories and suspicions spread by the right-wing populists.

Our style of politics has to change

The political style of modern social democracy bears too many remnants of the pre-2008 period. We cannot become a “mirror populism”, but we can adopt the language, narrative tools and media ecosystem appropriate to the challenge. The social-democratic elements within the Nouveau Front Populaire, and the PSOE-Sumar alliance are two examples of successful adaptation.

Since we are now in a fight for democratic survival, we have to become “combat parties” — geared to defeating a political enemy who is ignoring the rules of the old two-party game.

Combining this with the tasks of administration — and with “normal” electoral politics in places where the far right barely exist — is hard, but doable. It means being prepared to operate through swarms, clouds and networks, rather than expecting our entire message to be delivered via hierarchical transmission mechanisms: the last 15 years have shown that networks always defeat hierarchies.

It means trusting your allies and affiliates — for example unions, youth groups, alternative media — to produce strategies, messaging and actions that you may not control. It may also mean creating temporary alliances with non-destructive left and left-nationalist parties — something UK Labour, outside of Wales, has little experience of.

The way to hold this effort together is to create a shared understanding of the objectives between the numerous factions, unions, regional groups etc, and to establish a shared playbook.

It means investing in professional research, analysis and monitoring, and extensive political education, to create a party cadre that can execute the strategy.

Above all it needs social democratic politicians to demonstrate leadership and be unafraid to place themselves among the people.

I am convinced we live in a progressive century, but the scale of the geopolitical and climate threat means we need to take on and defeat the populist right now, before it morphs into something worse.

Finally, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not asking people to abandon their socially liberal beliefs, nor their attachment to specific causes and identities — but to fight for them in a way commensurate with the threat.

I’ll be posting over the holidays — about developments in Ukraine, and the emerging dilemmas of the UK’s SDR — both here and on my Substack newsletter Conflict & Democracy. Stay tuned and Happy Holidays!