why the elites love and fear the far right

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! I’ve lost my voice because apparently if you put hayfever and absolute, constant vaping together then your lungs and throat just tell you to go die in a ditch. It’s actually moderately fun though, I sounded sulky for a while, now I sound consumptive, very excited to see what happens tomorrow.

Anyway - I’ve made today’s newsletter free again and I hope my dear, lovely, wonderful and dare I say quite handsome paying subscribers will forgive me. It’s a topic I feel surprisingly strongly about, and I wanted it to, hopefully, be quite widely read. Rest assured, though, that I’ll do a bunch of newsletters for you guys only after that, so you’ll get some extra bang for your buck very shortly.

In other news, I’ve not actually read a whole lot of interesting stuff on the internet lately, aside from maybe Let Me Fire The Phillie Phanatic's Hot Dog Cannon, a riotously funny little post that does exactly what it says on the tin. Over in the physical world, I’ve been reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha and oh my god it may be a perfect book. It’s short and wonderfully, wonderfully written, which sort of shouldn’t be a surprise as Brooks was a poet but - my apologies to poets - I usually feel like poets turning to fiction end up either being terrific or really, really bad. She was absolutely the former, thankfully. Maud Martha is brilliant. You should read it.

Anyway.

A column

One of the nice things about writing a newsletter instead of, say, a column, is that I can start writing without knowing where I'm planning to end up. I haven't had to pitch my idea to anyone, so I set out on a journey and hope it will lead me somewhere worthwhile. Another advantage is that I can be entirely honest with you. I can, for example, tell you now that I'm not sure if the arguments that follow are correct. They're a hunch I have; a theory. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe I'm right. I'll try to draw out my thinking and we can decide, together, if I'm onto something. You just don't get that in the Times opinion section, do you?

To begin with, though, I think I need to set out the things I really am certain about. The first one is: I believe it was right for Marine Le Pen to be barred from running in the next presidential election. She committed a serious crime, and actions have consequences. Politicians in a healthy, liberal democracy must be treated like everyone else. If a regular person had committed a serious crime and been found guilty in a court of law, they would have to deal with the fallout from that. Marine Le Pen isn't any different.

The second flows quite naturally from the first: I believe newspapers claiming that Le Pen ought to have been allowed to run in the next election despite her criminal conviction are wrong. They annoyed me because a lot of them clearly know very little about French politics, and that's just grating when you're a London-based journalist who would have happily been paid to write about what she does actually know. More than that, though, it really got under my skin.

For a start, it felt intellectually dishonest. Columnists and editorials alike have, for the past few years, often wanged on, endlessly, about restoring trust, faith and integrity in politics. In Britain we had Partygate and the sleaze of the Johnson era, and the expenses scandal still loomed large in the consciousness of the public, and something needed to happen. Westminster needed a deep clean, and perhaps other political spheres did too. That was the message, wasn't it? The populists had started to look appealing because the mainstream political sphere just felt too broken, and icky. In this context, it just doesn't make sense to argue that a convicted criminal should be able to run for office. It's an intellectually absurd point to make.

At heart, what it says is "the far right should be able to get away with whatever they want to get away with, because otherwise they will get even more popular, somehow, and we'll all lose". The reasoning is that the far right should be handled with care, like a precious little child, as otherwise it will explode and we will collectively have to deal with the mess. They can be crooked but that's not their fault. If voters want them in power then that's that, there's nothing at all, whatsoever, we can do about it. Obviously I want to call bullshit on that whole line of reasoning, but I'd also like to try and understand where it comes from, because I find it frustrating, sure, but quite intriguing as well. What are we looking at here?

This is where we get into conjecture territory, by the way. Be advised that what follows is, as we call it in the business, "a chinny reckon". Still, I may be right. You never know. Here goes:

I think our current political elite doesn't want to be held accountable. I think it wants to shun responsibility and, as a result, longs to strip itself of its agency. We have politicians and editors who are refusing to act as gatekeepers because they know that, if they do, then people may look at what lies beyond the gates, dislike what they see, then blame them for it. They are taking "vox populi; vox dei" to its logical, absurd conclusion because being in any way patrician requires being honest about the influence you wield, and they aren't willing to do that anymore.

There was a world, not that long ago, where we recognised that the public did pay attention to elite cues, on what to care about, how to behave, what to expect and - yes, sometimes, what to think. People would watch television and read newspapers and follow politics and, from all of those sources, they would develop their own opinions and beliefs. That didn't make them sheep, and understanding that their thoughts were shaped by external forces wasn't seen as patronising, but merely a fact of life. Humans, as I've written in roughly ten thousand separate columns, are inherently social creatures. No man is an island and we're all creatures of our environment.

My political leanings weren't developed in a vacuum, and neither were yours. We see what happens and we react to it. There is a reason why so much has been made of the Overton window; some opinions can move from the fringes to the mainstream in a matter of years, but it only happens if mainstream political figures are willing to drag them within the frame. Donald Trump imitating and mocking a disabled journalist on stage during the 2016 campaign was shocking; in 2025, it would barely make the headlines for an hour. Attitudes and expectations changed, because the people in power - both in politics and the press - changed their tune first.

This may feel like stating the obvious, but I believe it is now quite a controversial statement, at least to some. If you were to listen to the majority of right-leaning commentators, and some centrist and left-leaning ones, voters shouldn't ever be told anything, or prevented from doing anything. If there is something they want to vote for, no matter how abhorrent or wrong-headed, then we must simply genuflect, bow our heads, and respect their wishes. People want to vote for someone convicted of a serious financial crime? Hell! Let them do it. If we don't, then clearly we don't live in a true democracy. Anything else is tyranny, woke, or both. Oh and also - how dare you assume that you can tell people what they should and shouldn't do? Their demands should be respected, whatever they may be.

This roughly seems to be where we're at. In Britain, it arguably began with Brexit. Over the pond, there are no guesses for what that particular political hurricane was. In France, you could probably argue that Le Pen making it to the second round of the 2017 election was when the shift started. The public surprised the elites by voting for things most of said elites found dangerous and distasteful, and so the elites…retreated. There was and is some occasional fightback, usually from corners of the left, but the real establishment, as I suppose we may call it, decided to smoothly moonwalk out of the room, and intellectually defer to this public they no longer understood.

Because this is a newsletter and not a book, we won't try and unpick why people did vote for all those things back in the mid-2010's. What we can say, however, is that there were reasons why they voted in the way they did. A number of newspapers backed Brexit in Britain; several TV channels and media organisations in France have long had a populist bent; the less is said about the American information ecosystem, the better. People didn't suddenly start voting in the way they did because of some true and deep core lodged within their soul. They reacted to signals, messages, campaigns and events, as they always do, as they always will.

The difference this time, however, is that the elites got worried - they disliked the chaos, naturally, but I do think there was and is something more to it. When you see people talk about the dire inevitability of President Le Pen, Prime Minister Farage, or whatever populist freak continental Europe has on offer this time, you can sometimes spot a glimmer of terrified hope in their eyes. They would hate it if the populists won, but, deep down, I reckon quite a few of them would like to see it too. Why is that? We can go through a few theories.

An obvious one is that some on the right are more radical than they let on, and maybe they would like to see their id being unleashed, just this once. I don't believe that's the case for most of them, though. Another attractive possibility is that they want to be freed of the tyranny of expectations. They want the crooks to win and destroy everything just so they can come back four or five years later and, like a rubbish boyfriend, go "eh, turns out I'm not so bad, right? you missed me when I was gone, didn't you?". They probably wouldn't admit it to themselves, but I do think that's part of it.

It also feels relevant, in this context, to point out that anyone can now yell at all manners of important people and institutions on social media, in a way that they weren't previously able to. In that scenario, it feels pretty easy to picture someone really, really going for that quote arguing that "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard". Oh, you think we're all a bunch of dipshits? Alright, bring in the other lot then, we'll see who'll be laughing in two years' time. You'll come running back.

Would anyone admit that they can see themselves in that train of thought? Probably not, but that doesn't mean that it isn't informing their behaviour in several ways.

On a broader level, my other theory is that many of those elites know, deep down, that they just do not have the answers. There was a political order and a mostly smooth end to the 20th century then there was a financial crisis and nothing has quite been the same since. The centre-right doesn't really have the answers in the way it once did, and neither does the centre-left. Some governments are popular, for a little while, but on some level they know that what they're doing isn't quite satisfactory enough. Jobs that used to be fun, well-paid or both are now often neither; few places are building enough houses; public services have turned into a gawping money pit no-one can fill; let's not even get on the topic of pensions, or the children people would have once birthed but now decide to not to have.

To quote Theresa May - remember her? - a lot of mainstream political parties are Just About Managing, and those JAMs are aware of the fact that the world has changed, but they have so far failed to change with it. There are no big ideas anymore, and the ideologies of the last century so often feel outdated and inadequate. Stripped of a guiding light and an innate sense of confident optimism, those parties and their fellow travellers are left without this sense of conviction which elites need to keep carrying on. As a result, what they yearn for - consciously or unconsciously - is a shock to the system that will either make their well-worn ideas sound comforting again, or finally lead to some new, fresh, exciting ones. In the meantime, they will keep carrying on as usual, while quietly panicking at the inadequacy of the status quo.

This is what brings us back to the beginning: if you're the captain of a ship but unsure where to go, it feels awfully convenient to argue that your crew might as well descend into mutiny, because it would save you from actually making a decision. By actively refusing to portray yourself or others like you as sense-makers and opinion-shapers, you also get to sidestep whatever disaster happens next. It's all out of your hands! You argued, in your speeches and your national columns, that the wishes of the people, no matter how unrealistic, dangerous and spoiled, should be indulged at all costs, meaning that any mistake they make cannot then be pinned on you. They're grown-ups and you're not their parents, and if they want the crook then nothing should stand in their way, because even acting as a barrier could be construed as you having made a choice, and picked a side.

This would, in turn, allow you to be held accountable for your decision, which only works if you're willing to stand by them. Being able to do so requires a certain mental and moral clarity which many members of the elite currently lack. They do not have the answers and they are, if anything, only too aware of that. Instead of trying to find them, they are choosing to let themselves be carried by the current, come what may.

Of course, the problem with all this is that it soon becomes a vicious circle. Left without healthy elite cues but stuck inside a media ecosystem largely run by Silicon Valley ghouls, just about enough people are likely to keep longing for the criminal, the hardman, and whoever promises to burn it all down. It is, in a way, quite acidly ironic, as a polity willing to bet on the eccentric fringe figure is one which clearly has misplaced faith in its democratic institutions. That's the logic behind the people voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party then complaining when their face gets eaten: clearly, on some level, they assumed that things would remain broadly fine, because why wouldn't they?

This ought to show that elites should fight for those very institutions, and against the people seeking to demolish them, but…well, here we are instead. Am I right on this? I both hope and don't that I am, because it feels like quite a comically depressing state of affairs, but I don't know how else to explain it. There are wolves at the door and everywhere, we have these blithe idiots leaving the door wide open for them, because who are we to decide who should or shouldn't get devoured in their own home? Maybe that's what they wanted, and what can we do about that? Having a backbone is just quite passé, you see. We just don't do that anymore.