FLIRTING WITH DISASTER :

The laptop fascists : Do not dismiss Europe's far-right parties as simply reactionary. They are all the more menacing because, like the Nazis before them, they embrace modernity (John Gray, 27th May 2002, New Statesman)

To think of the far right as merely atavistic is to underestimate it. Whereas between the wars Europe's far right gained strength from poverty and economic crisis, today it thrives on the insecurities of the affluent. Using democracy rather than seeking to overturn it, the far right is redrawing the map of European politics by exploiting the fears of voters in rich countries.

In its economic philosophy, it is the acme of modernity. Most of Europe's far-right parties have abandoned the protectionist programme of the inter-war years. Except in France, where Jean-Marie Le Pen continues the murky traditions of Vichy, the far right is libertarian in its economic outlook. In Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy, it promotes a high-tech economy linked with the world by free trade but insulated from the legions of the poor by a ban on immigration. This is the fascism of laptops, not jackboots. Like the fascist parties of the past, the far right accepts the economic orthodoxies of its time. Today, those are the orthodoxies of the free market. [...]

The far right was a radical modernist movement in the 1930s, and so it is today. Now, as in the past, it appeals to voters for more traditional right-wing parties, but its widening support includes the much larger ranks of those politically disaffected. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Netherlands, where Pim Fortuyn showed the strategy of the far right at its most subtle. An ex-Marxist and former academic, Fortuyn was neo-Thatcherite on the economy and the environment, harping on the evils of regulation and the burdens of taxation. Yet, unlike Thatcherites in Britain, he favoured a strongly liberal regime on sex, euthanasia and drug use. Again, he took a firm pro-Israel line on conflict in the Middle East and does not seem to have been anti-Semitic. But he undoubtedly played the race card, particularly against Muslims, and he did so, at least by his own account, because he believed that further Muslim immigration would threaten Dutch freedoms of lifestyle: he challenged the belief that liberal societies should assimilate immigrants whose values are anti-liberal. In effect, he advocated a policy of liberal cultural protectionism. He failed to explain how such a policy could be implemented in places where--as in the Netherlands and throughout Europe--multiculturalism is an irreversible reality.

You don't want to give these nutbags too much credit for political genius, but, gauging by bloggers' hysterical reaction to the Fortuyn assassination, their exterminationist rhetoric about Arabs, and their worship of technology, this conscious appeal to libertine libertarians seems to be working. That's a pretty frightening development. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 29, 2002 9:08 AM