Right must guard against its lunatic fringe

Alex Jones and Tommy Robinson.

COMMENT

Let’s get Alex Jones out of the way first. When I met the alt-right blogger, he was an incontinent yelling madman who believed that 9/11 was an inside job and that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim. He later added to his repertoire by claiming that school shootings such as Sandy Hook were hoaxes, that their small victims were still alive and that their grieving parents were complicit. Some of these mums and dads were harassed by Jones’s demented followers and had to move house.

I think it was largely because of this last horror that some of the big tech companies decided to turf him off their platforms this week. It’s a problematic decision in my opinion, but then I am something of a free expression nut. What I hadn’t realised was that Nigel Farage was a free expression freak too. He always seemed very relaxed about, say, Russian journalists getting permanently deleted.

But when the news broke about Jones, Mr Farage was like a rat up a drainpipe. “Whether you like Alex Jones or not, he is undeniably the victim today of collusion by the big tech giants. What price free speech?” he demanded on Twitter and then added a link to Jones’s website.

Why? Why would someone like Farage, who is said to be planning another bid to become an MP, take up the cudgels on behalf of such a lunatic outsider? It makes no sense. Or does it? Because for a section of the right, Jones has ceased to be a total outsider. In fact, in the era of Trump, he’s almost a player.

Back in April Farage appeared on Jones’s Infowars website, not to tell Jones that he was a nutter, but to discuss the great Muslim/EU takeover. “They deny absolutely our Judaeo-Christian culture, which are the roots of our nations and our civilisation,” he told Jones, and “Don’t forget, Alex, they also want to abolish the nation state. They want to replace it with the globalist project and the European Union is the prototype for the ‘New World Order’.”

If you think this sounds familiar, then you may have heard it before from Viktor Orban, the recently re-elected anti-migrant prime minister of Hungary, from Marine Le Pen in France, from Matteo Salvini in Italy, from just about any mouthpiece for the Russian government, and increasingly from some intellectuals here. Farage’s Alex Jones moment is a straw in a wind that is blowing sections of even the mainstream right into some very odd corners.

Not so long ago these ethno-nationalist views were outliers. In 2014 Mr Farage, then leader of a party primarily concerned with leaving the EU, eschewed working with Ms Le Pen’s National Front in the European parliament. The Front’s views, he said, were not “consistent with classical liberal democracy”. But by 2017, with the Brexit referendum won, Farage was all over Marine like a rash. “She’s the real deal,” he told one interviewer. It was apparently a compliment.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Picture: AFP

Farage is the clearest example of a trend on the right towards what could be called “Orbanisation” — a belief that the nation state and its indigenous culture are under threat externally from international institutions and internally from migrants, especially Muslims. Something has happened to people who only a short time ago seemed content to go along with policies of international co-operation, free trade and an immigration stance based on controlling numbers, not on culture wars. Since the European refugee crisis of 2015, the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, some mainstream right-wing thinkers and politicians have begun to lean back towards the three bad pre-war isms: isolationism, nativism and protectionism.

British conservatism has, for the main part, remained a non-strident affair. So much so that during the 2016 US election campaign, you were as likely to find young Tories slipping over to America to work for Democrats as for Republicans. In 2012, the year Boris Johnson celebrated diversity at the London Olympics, Republicans were dismayed by David Cameron’s friendship with Barack Obama.

But this year it appears that Johnson has been in contact with Steve Bannon, formerly the right-wing eminence grise of Donald Trump. Bannon is closely associated with the alt-right movement and is trying to create a far-right coalition in Europe, based on an openly ethno-nationalist ideology. Supposedly free market Tory MPs like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Iain Duncan Smith and John Redwood have spoken warmly of Bannon’s former boss, a protectionist American president who happens to believe that Alex Jones is a good guy.

Italian Vice-Premier Matteo Salvini. Picture: MEGA

Meanwhile right-wing think tanks and institutes which used to reflect an engagement with the world have increasingly sought to scare people about Muslims. They fill their websites with stories of migrant crime and subsidies to terrorists. This stuff permeates. As the former Tory minister Lord Pickles warned yesterday about the debate on Muslims wearing the burka, “there’s a degree of hatred out there I’ve not seen for many years”.

Some of this has snuck up on us without people realising how far it has gone. I can now see that a section of the right which used, for example, to believe (as I still do) that democracy was achievable in Muslim nations, has wholly gone over to the fatalistic clash of civilisations model. Commentators like Douglas Murray, associate editor of The Spectator, now argue in effect that Islam is innately incompatible with western culture. His recent best-selling book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam was described by the Times’s reviewer, rightly, as “a diatribe about mass immigration and our continent’s alleged death wish, which is so lurid it often reads like an overheated (far-right news site) Breitbart editorial”.

This fatalistic logic leads even former neo-conservatives to line up with Donald Trump’s view that the task is to keep jobs in, foreigners out and the precious bodily fluids of our culture safe behind a wall. The anti-Muslim street-brawler Tommy Robinson, who in times past would have been shunned entirely, is now spoken of by some on the right who should know better as a rough hero of the new struggle.

Conservatism at its most powerful has been Reagan pulling down walls, Margaret Thatcher espousing single markets, William Hague insisting on human rights or David Cameron bringing in gay marriage. It’s not my creed, but conservatism at its best and most dynamic has long been a marriage of social and economic liberalism. Orbanisation is the death of conservatism.

The Times