Old

Demographic-trends-wise, things were looking very bad for the Tories long before Brexit – and they knew it. Lots of the culture war idiocy was just a reaction to the fact that their business model was going out of fashion fast. Maybe Brexit itself could be thought about in the same way (let’s not forget that it was in key ways unplanned – Cameron wanted to play Brexit politics, but had no intention of actually Brexiting). Now that Brexit has happened, and the EU are acting like the adults in the room, other betes noire need to be found.

I’m sure you’re right that Brexit has generated a degree of backlash among the young – but I think it’s just made an existing trend a little bit worse.

@JQ: have you followed the recent vote in Switzerland? Small country but big sensation, at least according to the political press. You’d think it’s a no-brainer: if you can vote yourself a higher pension, who wouldn’t? But a few years ago, a similar initiative failed.

The „populist“ right keeps telling its own voters to ignore their own economic interests and this time they didn’t go along.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-vote-on-higher-pensions-and-retiring-later/73175615

Regarding younger people’s politics, in some countries there is a marked rightward trend among young men, while young women are universally the most progressive demographic group. The hope that the right wing base will just die off sooner or later may be premature.

There is a famous study about “right wing authoritarianism” by the recently deceased Bob Atlemeyer.

In this study, one of the various things that push people towards right wing authoritarianism is a certain fear of change and pessimism about the future.

It seems likely that as people get older they are likely to be personally less optimistic, so this could explain a push towards the right.

“In part, I think this reflects the increasing dominance of culture war issues, where views that were dominant 50 or 60 years ago are now considered unacceptable. Old people whose views haven’t changed in many years are likely to support the right on these issues.”

It is possible – only possible – that experience over decades leads one away from the more tempestuous promises of those further to the left. We might even gain a general agreement around here about the Trotskyist Revolution that all of us supported for at least 15 minutes in our teens. Possibly that extends further as age generates wisdom?

As to the triathlon, good luck with it. I’m an age group lower and could finish the first two easily enough (just forms of exercise I find easy enough). The third part, the running, simply not possible – so as I say, good luck with it.

agree with Kevin, this seems to me not so much a young-old divide as a side effect of the forces that have radicalized the right wing, turning them from conservatives into radical reactionaries. The old tend conservative for many reasons, but these days conservative is translated by the Murdoch (cognate of merde ? murder ? any of these work) apparatus into a radical fantasy. They get dragged along by the zeitgeist, that truly frightening spook.

I freely admit to being old, and I get more left-wing the older I get. We need some old white-haired guys as a countervailing power within the olds.

Good luck on the triathlon. I did the Boulder Peak Olympic tri last year in 60-64 and it was a lot harder than I remembered it being in my frisky fifties..

Back in the bad old days runners over 40 were termed Masters, over 60 got you to Veterans. I like those better than any of the current euphemisms. Swimming still uses Masters for the older competitors.

Differently gemerated? Temporally challenged?

Two thoughts. First, and echoing Tm, I have recently seen stats that concern me much more than the old-young divide, as they show that young men increasingly veer hard right. That is going to cause issues for a lot longer than older people trending right, simply because young men have a lot more decades ahead of them to cast votes. On top of that, if they are right-wing while young women are left-wing, we will see increasingly dysfunctional gender relationships.

Second, while I understand intellectually why older people may tend towards being more conservative, what I struggle with is the intensity of the anger that characterises contemporary right-wingdom. It is one thing to grumble about pronouns and how it was better back in my day, but the intensity of emotion that characterises Trumpism, Brexitism, xenophobia in Germany or the Netherlands, or my Brazilian great-aunt’s fear of politically milquetoast Lula, that just doesn’t click for me.

The cheap response is to say Facebook, Fox News, British tabloids, or whatever your local analog is. But I, for example, am potentially exposed to the same media, and I turn away from them in disgust. Why don’t angry elderly right-wingers do the same? Ultimately, because they are receptive to this, because they decide to latch onto these messages instead of recognising them for the hateful disinformation that they are. And, unless you model them as being completely without agency, that leaves the puzzle intact. Why are they so angry?

They generally aren’t the “left behind”. They tend to be well-off retirees or even business owners, and the things they are so angry about are somewhere on the spectrum from correct in principle but no problem and certainly not affecting them personally in any way (e.g., elderly rural voters angry that large cities they never visit are full of immigrants, or that students they never see or meet have a preference for ‘they/them’) to being completely made up (EU outlawing British apple trees, Obama coming to take the guns away, or the Brazilian Greens causing global warming for the giggles by committing arson in the Amazon). So, whence this anger and complete abdication of common sense?

My best take on this is that we are dealing not with the economically “left behind”, but with the exact opposite: a generation that had it so good for so many decades that it doesn’t actually see politics as something to be taken seriously, as a system for high-stakes decisions that ultimately affect everybody’s prosperity and safety (and potentially very negatively if you get it wrong), but as a game where you can have fun by making the other side cry and, say, raise tariffs and under-invest in infrastructure and pay no taxes and leave a single market without facing any negative downsides for the services and economic activities you rely on, ever. All just a game! Maybe the raging anger and hatred are fanned precisely by never having had real problems and thus no legitimate outlet for emotions that we humans would have, under other circumstances, dealt with when facing failed harvests, war, or serious poverty; the Fox News-fuelled drama as over-compensation for not having had any real issues in their lives?

First of all John I stand in awe of anyone who can do triathlons, and more so for people nearer my age (almost 71). And I’ve tried always to be in good shape all my life and still work out several times a week, and can do most everything I want. That’s a blessing enough for me. But good for you!

Getting older has if anything hardened my liberal leanings, especially post-Trump. He’s the embodiment of everything detestable–and yet he now leads Biden in most all polls. Clearly I’m way out of step with most of my cohorts and fellow Americans. But then again I had a long and rewarding academic career which led to a comfortable retirement, so there’s not much room for resentment about my own life to drive diffuse anger and fear that Trumpsters thrive on. I’m hoping that women’s reproductive issues and a solid economy will suffice to triumph over them next November. Yet I have deep anxiety that with 3rd party candidates and all, we will face the virtual destruction of this country starting next year.

@14: The well-off retirees and businessmen you speak of were probably always that way, only now it’s worse.

Random thoughts: Assuming this really is a trend (after all, the soixante-huitards are getting up there and presumably haven’t gone all Le Pen (?)), at least in the U.S. the divide can be explained because as a group the old simply aren’t highly valued, cf. the whole “hey, they’re going to die anyway soon, we can’t shut all of society down just to save some olds” meme during the pandemic, and the inability of the U.S. government to provide adequately for the old – 80% of the elderly can’t afford assisted living and the Medicare care homes, even the better ones, are not for the squeamish. Most would like to stay at home, but it’s hard to find affordable in-home care.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/health/long-term-care-facilities-costs.html

“We just don’t value elders the way that other countries and other cultures do,” said Dr. Rachel M. Werner, the executive director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. “We don’t have a financing and insurance system for long-term care,” she said. “There isn’t the political will to spend that much money.”

To a degree the old can make their voices heard politically because unlike the youngs they have developed the habit of always voting even if the initiatives and candidates on offer don’t send a thrill up their legs. The younger people who don’t vote still have something of a social safety net in their future because their elders stand in the way of gutting it.

Also, the euphemism of choice for the old in the States (“senior citizen”) came about for the same reasons other such renamings occur – as an attempt to shed designations like “old” and “elderly” that had become to a degree shaming and marginalizing.

engels,
re the point about gender – older women and younger men – what do they have in common – they are less educated!
I’m inclined to think credentialism and the myth of meritocracy (i.e. the people most inclined to support the right and people who see their worth being devalued), might have something to do with this.

@Alex SL, I don’t think it’s a cheap response to say that Fox News, Facebook, et al. have been fanning the flames for a good while now. Before that, we had Rush Limbaugh — I think he was on the radio for hours each day and people (white men, usually) of various ages were driving around all day listening to him. For sure, many of us wouldn’t be drawn toward rightwing agitation. Some of us on the left would rather get angry about other things — US imperialism, for example, or white supremacy or the control that corporations have over public policymaking. (I personally am more prone to dwell on those kinds of things.)

Anyway, I think you can say that Trump is both a symptom and an agent of this most recent rightwingery. The structural skewing of US national politics — the Electoral College, the Senate as a whole, the Supreme Court — makes it easier for someone like Trump to emerge, I think. It certainly makes it harder for anything approaching leftwing policymaking.

I do agree that many of Trump’s supporters are relatively well-off (older?) people who would probably skew conservative in any case. I think there’s been a fair amount of research on this. To the extent that these people feel “left behind,” it has less to do with their personal financial situations and more to do with what I guess we’re calling “culture.” Into which I read a whole lot of white nationalism.

I am 80. I was THERE is the 60’s. Those ideals survive. Tho many boomers have fallen away, the standard remains. I once thot I was a Liberal, but that stance seems to have itself faded Right. While I can understand tradition as important, contemporary conservatives are unaware of the Burkean Tradition. I prefer to think of myself as an anarchist

engels,

Hard to tell on the web, but I assume that was irony? The likely outcome seems to be a downward spiral to the effect of, “women these days don’t want to stay in the kitchen and make me a sandwich anymore”, “make your own sandwich, I have a career now”, “see? radical feminism needs to die!” etc.

mary s,

But we are going in circles. A medium merely existing explains nothing, because the recipient needs to be receptive for it to work. If you were to try to influence me with the narrative that I should be really angry at Chinese immigrants because they are a fifth column that is sneaking in to make Australia communist, I would just roll my eyes and turn it off. Conversely, if you tried to marinate the proverbial angry uncle in media extolling the virtues of tolerance and global citizenship, he would get shouty and turn them off. That uncle has agency, and Fox News would just be a weirdo niche clown show without the likes of him.

Weird. I have, for years understood that the notion that people become more politically conservative as they age was much overblown. See below, which has what looks to me to be a decent list of works cited and complicates my understanding.

The usual caveats about definitions arise. After all, “Keep your hands off my Medicare,” is hardly a rightwing position, unless you’re looking at the signs at a Tea Party demonstration.

I’m a boomer, and I’m inclined to think that what time has done is reveal how conservative young white people (especially men) were back in the late sixties/early seventies. I suspect this is particularly evident with respect to gender issues: it’s one thing to say you’re for women’s rights, another to do the dishes or consistently ask for consent. Similar things can be said about race, I suspect.

The cynical version of this is Vietnam. One way to think about it is that the vast majority of young middle class white men singing “Give Peace a Chance,” weren’t so much anti-war as we were anti-draft. Once we didn’t have worry about conscription, we got to work on our careers, untroubled by the immiseration of the working class from the late seventies on.

I also suspect that you’re a lot more likely to get quoted in the NY Times detailing your move to left to right than the other way around, although that may be pure spleen on my part.

Keep moving, man. It’s the best we can do.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889

John Q
With regard to the AFD in Germany, they don’t really seem to be about policy. They have released a set of policies, but don’t seem prepared to defend them or to be too serious about them. They are basically a troll party, looking for generally disaffected voters. As is the Republican party in the U S.

I am only speculating (and I only know anything about the US), but I think (as somebody said above) it’s primarily got to be the splintering of the media which built on the prior cultivation of a for-profit right-wing noise machine (going all the way back in the US to the rise of direct mail in the 80s), and climaxed with the proliferation of social media platforms. First, these factors created/fostered separate, self-reinforcing realities. Second, the professional right discovered that the attention model can be force multiplied by focusing almost entirely on fostering anger. On so many issues, like the border, there are all these superold, superangray white people who (if questioned quickly reveal) they know almost nothing about the statistics the issues or competing policies. They are just mad. Fox told them to be mad. Now they are mad. Maybe, it makes people alive. I don’t know. Not original, but originality is not always a virtue. There does, I guess, also seem to be a social dominance side to it. I don’t remember in the past ever being approached by (mostly very old looking) strangers who just wanted to challenge my behavior. (“Why are you still wearing that mask?”). Full disclosure: I am old and white and angry about politics, but not a reactionary.

Stephen @25,

To my reading from outside, the idea of many Lexiters was that the EU is neoliberal, and that when freed from EU rules, the UK could be socialist. The wee problem with that was that, first, compared to, say, the USA, Australia, or New Zealand, the EU is a world bastion of worker and consumer protections and, second, it was always clear that if and when Brexit happened, disaster capitalists would be firmly at the steering wheel. There was never any chance whatsoever that Lexiter’s goals could be realised.

So, yes, I am sure that Brexit in blessed theory, unmoored from reality as it is, is compatible with having left-wing views, but in reality as it is, Brexit was always going to result in neoliberal outcomes and stoke xenophobia, and thus Lexiters were at best strategically deluded.

Reason @32,

It seems to me as if the AFD are rather typical of the contemporary far-right ascendant. Is Trump about policy? Not really. He is about himself, and then, like all populists, he repeats what got him roars of assent when he tried shouting it the first time (which simple Pavlovian mechanism then gets called political genius by some pundits). He is about policy only in the sense that the tribe he chose to lead has some non-negotiable shibboleths, especially hatred of minorities and opposition to any environmentalist measures that could ensure survival of our civilisation over the next 200 years. Was Johnson about policy? Not really He famously wrote a piece supporting Brexit and another supporting Remain and then decided on a whim which one to publish.

The AFD seems to function the same way. They have default positions simply because they are right wing – revising tax brackets to benefit the rich and hatred of minorities. And beyond that they have vibes, yes, but that doesn’t mean they are any less about policy than Anglosphere right-wingers.

What Tm and Thimothy Sommers write in some of their last comments fits in with what I speculated about earlier. [Angry white people] “are mad. Maybe, it makes people alive.” Yes, the anger stands in no comprehensible relation to their actual grievances. “The Right however seems to be drawn to the very idea of creating as much havoc as possible as a means to delegitimize the liberal democratic political system and gaining power” – politics as a consequence-free game, perhaps because they never experienced painful consequences so far. There is much ruin in a nation, and thus it takes a long time before the angry white voter realises what they have done, and even then, I guess it is always somebody else’s fault.

That is why, again and again, trying to analyse the contemporary far right in terms of legitimate concerns about being left behind economically or even backlash against neoliberal deregulation seems futile to me. If that was their problem, they would be left-wing. If they were seriously anti-immigration in a way that could be respected at least intellectually, they would elect competent, honest politicians to competently reduce immigration while being transparent and accepting about the consequences that has for service provision and economic growth.

Instead, they are best characterised as self-centered and emotionally immature. They dismiss other people’s feelings and legitimate interests, other people’s expertise and experience, data and evidence, and the reality of trade-offs and consequences. They think that if a sufficiently big man strong leader just pounds the table, they can retain a cake even after having eaten it and never have to compromise with other people. Their political worldview would put the average two year old to shame, but somehow we have to pretend that there are legitimate concerns that we have to respect and address, because curiously, despite understanding that individual people can be evil or crazy, we are collectively hesitant to admit that ten million individual people can all be evil and crazy together. There is sanity in numbers, as the saying goes.

they are best characterised as self-centered and emotionally immature. They dismiss other people’s feelings and legitimate interests, other people’s expertise and experience, data and evidence, and the reality of trade-offs and consequences. They think that if a sufficiently big man strong leader just pounds the table, they can retain a cake even after having eaten it and never have to compromise with other people. Their political worldview would put the average two year old to shame, but somehow we have to pretend that there are legitimate concerns that we have to respect and address, because curiously, despite understanding that individual people can be evil or crazy, we are collectively hesitant to admit that ten million individual people can all be evil and crazy together.

If I (as an educated citizen of a wealthy Western liberal democracy) felt this way about half the citizens of another state I would certainly think twice before moving there.

Alex SL@36

You wrote:
“The Right however seems to be drawn to the very idea of creating as much havoc as possible as a means to delegitimize the liberal democratic political system and gaining power” – politics as a consequence-free game, perhaps because they never experienced painful consequences so far.

Certainly, that’s true of some of the Right. But would you not agree that it’s equally true of some of the Left?

And surely some supporters of Brexit were concerned that the EU had become something very different from a liberal democratic political system; rather, a system in which a democratic national popular vote, or the wishes of a democratically-elected national government, could be ignored (or were attempted to be ignored) by the Commission in Brussels, and in which the elected EU parliament is powerless to propose legislation.

Modern political science tends to place people on a 2 axis map.

Axis 1 is attitude towards the involvement of the State in the economy. Libertarians are well away from median towards Low on this axis, traditional leftists are on the right hand ie high. Think Mrs Thatcher’s acolytes v the Coal Miners and the big traditional industrial trade unions.

Axis 2 is the attitude towards the State’s involvement in personal life and “traditional” morality.

Think the Roman Catholic church as High on this score, alongside traditional right wing parties like the Christian Democrats in postwar Europe. Voters here will score high on Pride in Nation and Flag, overt sense and symbols of national identity, suspicion of immigration and “dilution” of national character, national security and defence, role of religion in personal and public life, law and order especially re capital punishment and long prison sentences for offenders.

Voters who score low on these categories will tend to believe in multicultural and diverse societies, have low respect for traditional symbols of nationalism, be suspicious of police & law enforcement (particularly since “Black Lives Matter”), favour liberalisation of abortion and drug laws, be opposed to capital punishment.

What happened since about 1980 is that Conservative parties went libertarian in their economics. Later on, parties like the Australian Liberals or the American Republicans also made much more overt alliances with right wing social conservatives: evangelical Protestants, devout Roman Catholics, anti gun control, and in the US in particular nearly overtly racist white southerners (but also in the sort of suburbs of the Northeast where white working class voters had moved out of the inner city to: think Trump’s huge support in Long Island, or the county of Essex Tories in Britain).

This was precisely Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority”: blue collar construction workers beating up student anti Vietnam War protesters. Margaret Thatcher’s “One of us” – her and Sir Norman Tebbit’s easy identification with car and home owning voters who shopped in out of town malls, and were 1-2 generations out of the traditional working class. Or think Francoism in Spain for an extreme version, or any of the Latin American dictatorships of the 1960s & 70s.

Simultaneously with the decline of traditional industrial employment and white male dominated trade unions, left wing parties gravitated towards more socially liberal (and younger) voters– in line with increased numbers of citizens with post secondary education. Issues like racial equality, womens’ rights became identified with the left much more strongly.

So you had conservative political parties abandoning, as part of their “neoliberal” economic philosophies, ideas which were actually quite popular with the electorate: universal and adequate state pensions (as opposed to welfare payments: hence the David Cameron rhetoric “the shirkers and the strivers”), universal medical care, etc. Conservative parties became concentrated on policies favouring free markets and low State involvement in the economy.

You had parties on the left which were increasingly low scoring on State involvement in personal liberty, and high scoring on State Involvement in the economy.

This left an obvious open quadrant, which populists have filled. High State involvement in personal life – Orban, Erdogan, Modi (in a developing world context), Berlusconi; at the same time maintaining (or increasing) State involvement in the economy – domination by oligopolies, maintennance of social benefits that “our people” will receive such as healthcare and state pension, farm subsidies etc.

This is what Trump has done – he was well to the left in 2016 of any of his primary challengers. Stephen Harper (a member of an evangelical Pentacostal faith) in Canada tried to do it but he was too much of an austere intellectual (and Justin Trudeau was essentially Canadian political royalty albeit untested in politics). Poilivere will do it if the polls are to be believed. Marine Le Pen will do it in France. Melonia already there in Italy.

And there are key “wedge” issues that can be used as sticks to beat left wing parties. The Australian Liberals did this with coal mining & via climate change denial, and that’s now happening in Europe. Immigration is another. The left has fast lost its traditional working class white voting base, and instead piles up more votes among educated urban liberals– which in Canada, UK or Australia (or the US electoral system) doesn’t give them a path to power.

You can see that Kier Starmer is walking a very fine line.

@Stephen 40

” a system in which a democratic national popular vote, or the wishes of a democratically-elected national government, could be ignored”

Since the EU is composed by 20something national government, it is in the nature of things that when one of these natural governments is in the minority it will be ignored, the opposite would be quite antidemocratic.

Similarly if a country becomes part of the EU it will lose some sovereignty.

These are things that even a kid would understand, the fact that are treated as a big reveal shows that they are fantasies of victimism.

Something is to say that, e.g., the EU had very bad policies for Greece, and something is to say that it is turning in some sort of tiranny. Most north europeans were probably ok with the idea that Greece and others were big spenders who caused their own problems, and the choices made by the EU were probably a reflection of the mayority opinion, so it was a stupid and wrong choice, but not antidemocratic.

John Q@29: one other thing. You refer to Liz Truss as “right-wing authoritarian”. A common definition of authoritarianism would be “a political system characterized by the rejection of democracy and political plurality. It involves the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers and democratic voting.”

I don’t know how politics here seemed from Australia, but I lived through the Truss Tyranny in the UK and noticed none of these things.

“On top of that, if they are right-wing while young women are left-wing, we will see increasingly dysfunctional gender relationships.”

The opposite should also be true. Dating tips from AFD politicians are no accident, just like the less toxic but still often rather disturbing universe of content targeting mostly high educated single young women on social media.

Really just the at this point old story of much higher female education attainment combined with social norms that prohibit women from having a relation downwards in income and education levels, while to some extent even encouraging the same for men.

Alex SL @47

I should perhaps have split my comment into two parts. That some people on the left have been too sheltered to understand consequences is, as you agree, true.

But the main point I meant to make is that some people on the left have been, and are, aiming at “creating as much havoc as possible as a means to delegitimize the liberal democratic political system and gaining power”. You did not respond to that. If you can disagree, your experience of the left must have been very different from mine.

I don’t follow your argument about the undemocratic nature of the EU. You seem to be saying that since there are aspects of the UK constitution you disapprove of, the EU constitution must be all right.

When I wrote of the EU ignoring “the democratic national popular vote, or the wishes of a democratically-elected national government” I did not in fact have Brexit in mind; there the EU did not exactly ignore an unwelcome popular vote. Rather, the examples I was thinking of were the French and Netherlands referenda in 2005 on the Treaty for Establishing a Constitution for Europe, where the popular both in both these not insignificant nations went firmly against the Commission’s proposals. The response was to embody the proposals in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, on which no French or Dutch referenda were allowed.

It was at that time that I began to have doubts about the nature of the EU, which have not been resolved. The Greek referendum in 2015, where the vote went against the EU’s terms but was ignored, didn’t help. See the impeccably left-wing Yanis Varoufakis on that topic.

And then in 2021 Ursula von der Leyen, as EU President, attempted to override the Brexit agreement by unilaterally imposing a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland – something previously denounced as a violation of the Good Friday peace agreement, and likely to renew the NI Troubles – in order to block import of Covid vaccines into the UK. The Irish Government had not been consulted, or even informed before they heard about it on the news. She didn’t get away with it; but can you imagine the never-ending outrage if the UK government had tried something similar to block exports of vaccines to the EU?

Stephen 50 “the examples I was thinking of were the French and Netherlands referenda in 2005 on the Treaty for Establishing a Constitution for Europe, where the popular both in both these not insignificant nations went firmly against the Commission’s proposals. The response was to embody the proposals in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, on which no French or Dutch referenda were allowed.”

You need to complain to the French and Netherlands governments (elected national governments!), who negotiated and approved the Treaty of Lisbon according to their countries’ constitutional requirements, rather than to the EU Commisison. The Treaty of Lisbon was formally approved by each and every member state. Any EU Commisison proposal needs the formal agreement of both the EU Parliament and a supermajority of EU member states. If the EU does suffer from a democratic deficit, it is not that “the wishes of a democratically-elected national government (are) ignored”, rather it is that it is too easy for minorities to block policies that have been approved by democratic majorities. Watch the German FDP, a party currently representing about 1% of the EU population, weakening or blocking already majority approved policies like the EU supply chain directive.

Democratic politics routinely consists of unappetizing backroom sausage making. That is true for every democratic nation state and it’s unsurprisingly also true for the EU. Sorry but your complaints are silly and ignorant.

If you like Hayek, you’ll lurve the EU:
https://iea.org.uk/blog/hayek-would-have-voted-to-remain

Stephen,

But the main point I meant to make is that some people on the left have been, and are, aiming at “creating as much havoc as possible as a means to delegitimize the liberal democratic political system and gaining power”. You did not respond to that. If you can disagree, your experience of the left must have been very different from mine.

Depends on what you mean with the left. If you mean some marginalised, zero influence splinter sects, sure. If you mean somebody with the votes and potential path to power (meaning that it would actually have an impact) of an AFD or even the Republicans, no, I really don’t see it. The pitch of the nominal centre-left is “same as the conservatives on economic policy, but we will be less embarrassing and less mean to minorities”, and a bit further left are the greens, who I also wouldn’t characterise as creating havoc. What else is there? I remember Antifa from my university days, but despite their profound political strategy of throwing bottles at police, it seems unlikely that their few hundred members will rock the foundations of democracy.

You seem to be saying that since there are aspects of the UK constitution you disapprove of, the EU constitution must be all right.

No, I am saying that it is absurd to use democratic legitimacy as an argument for leaving the EU in perhaps the only western European country that has a less democratic system than the EU itself.

engels,

I am a European living in Australia, but at any rate, there are large numbers of proudly ignorant and nasty people in every electorate. (Have you opened a newspaper or social media recently?) My parents have told me that they personally know AFD supporters what want to deport all people from the country who aren’t ethnic Germans. There is a term for that, and it has ‘cleansing’ in it. Does any decent person doubt that this isn’t evil?

My parents have told me that they personally know AFD supporters what want to deport all people from the country who aren’t ethnic Germans.

I agree people like that are beyond reasoned engagement with but I think Republican voters in US include people who are less extreme (as I said I misread your original comment: sorry).

I agree the EU does some good things but it is basically free trade club and is undemocratic by design. I’m not opposed to free trade but I’m favour of democracy. I wasn’t endorsing the IEA/Cato (who are right-wing headbangers) but the parallels with Hayek are accurate imo.

Alex SL @58

You describe yourself as a European living in Australia, and as such seeing the left-wing factions aimed at “creating as much havoc as possible as a means to delegitimize the liberal democratic political system and gaining power” as marginalised, zero influence splinter sects. For thrice-blessed Australia, sure. You don’t say which European country you had previous experience of. For several European countries, including unfortunately the UK in my lifetime, that was not so.

At present, the worst are in abeyance, apart from the Islamists. I don’t know to count them as left or right wing, assuming that such a distinction has any meaning. Right wing in terms of social values, yes; left wing in terms of detesting the US and UK, which is of course neither a necessary nor a sufficient reason for being left wing, but does apply in my experience to a fair few left wingers.