What is the Far Right?
Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters Episode 14
This entry is the fourteenth instalment of my blog ( and eventual podcast) Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. While I have not recorded the audio file yet, this entry was written to be aired in podcast format and as such will (at times) read more like the transcript of a podcast than a traditional blog. So without further ado, here’s the fourteenth episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.
(Chapter Headings: Introduction)
Hello, my name is Matitya and welcome to Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. Today’s topic, what is the Far Right?
(Chapter Headings: Noam Chomsky)
Noam Chomsky has said “for [[Dr. Jordan Peterson]], the Left is anybody to the Left of Attila the Hun. In fact, universities are dominated by the Right. He’s so far on the Right, that that looks like the Left to him.” Chomsky expressed his incredulity at the idea that he should make common cause with Dr. Peterson over their shared support of free speech on the grounds that “there are some issues on which I probably agree with Hitler.” Chomsky’s statement presupposes that Attila was Far Right and implies Hitler to be Far Right as well. It also places Peterson on the Far Right.
(Chapter Headings: Was Attila Far Right?)
Given most of what we know of Atilla’s reign relates to his conquests, it’s difficult to classify him on either the Right or the Left. As far as I can tell, Attila wasn’t right-wing.
(Chapter Headings: Was Hitler Far Right?)
Hitler is a more complicated case. The question of if Hitler were right-wing depends entirely on how you define right-wing, especially on how you define it in relation to Weimar Germany.
Jonah Goldberg has repeatedly made the argument that Fascism is a lot closer to what the Anglo-American tradition calls the Left than to what it calls the Right. Goldberg makes a compelling argument but it’s beyond the scope of this Matitya’s Musing.
(Chapter Headings: Is Jordan Peterson Far Right?)
Per Dorian Lynskey from the Guardian, Jordan Peterson “does not fully endorse the far right, but flirts with their memes and overlaps with them on many issues.” So Lynskey would say that Peterson is not Far Right but is Far Right-adjacent. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the libertarian writer Cathy Young posits that
“Peterson’s ideas are a mixed bag. He says some sensible and insightful things, and he says some things that rightly draw criticism. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Peterson’s critics, who generally cast him as a far-right boogeyman riding the wave of a misogynistic backlash. That’s a mistake.” So is Peterson Far Right or isn’t he? I would say that he isn’t. This leads us to the question ‘what do we mean by Far Right?’
(Chapter Headings: Jason Stanley)
In his book, How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley accuses almost everyone he hates of being a Fascist. He describes a number of the people he vilifies, such as David Horowitz and Rush Limbaugh, as “Far Right”. Stanley never defines the phrase “Far Right”. This is telling considering he paints distrust of academia as a form of fascistic behaviour on the Right. A 2007 survey found that 46 percent of American professors identified themselves as Moderate, 44 percent as Liberal, 9 percent as Conservative and 1 percent as Miscellaneous. What’s more, almost 20 percent of Sociology professors are self-described Marxists. Given that’s the case, it makes a lot of sense that Conservatives complain about Left-wing academic bias. I don’t have a statistic for this but I’m convinced that almost any right-winger you’ll ask will be convinced that academia are dominated by the Left and that that’s a bad thing.
(Chapter Headings: It’s not “far” if it’s mainstream.)
My point is, in the phrase “Far Right”, “far” is an adjective and “Right” is a noun such that the very usage of the phrase “Far Right” presupposes the existence of a Right that is not far because that’s how grammar works. A position that the Right almost universally supports thus cannot be “Far Right.” For instance, if an American Pro-Choicer, who believed that a fetus lacked personhood, were to say “Of course, they’re Far Right. They’re opposed to a woman’s right to choose” then that wouldn’t make sense. The United States has two major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. And, regardless of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims, the Democrats are considered the Left and the Republicans are considered the Right. Since the Republicans almost universally support legislation against abortion, said legislation is not “Far Right” but a mainstream right-wing position.
(Chapter Headings: Who will you denounce? Part One David Duke)
Given I defined Far Left as left-wingers that the mainstream Left repudiates , it makes sense to have a similar definition for Far Right. Thus we must look to the mainstream American Right to know what the American Far Right is. This is an issue considering the kinds of people Republican leaders like George H.W. Bush readily denounced ( such as David Duke and his ilk) are the kinds of people that Donald Trump has repeatedly struggled to denounce without equivocation.
Okay let’s be fair here. In the early 1990s, Trump (rightly) denounced David Duke for Duke’s racist beliefs while Duke was running for governor of Louisiana. And in 2001, Trump relinquished his membership of the Reform Party in protest of its continued inclusion of white supremacists and Nazi apologists like Duke and Pat Buchanan. In 2015, Duke refused to endorse Trump’s political campaign on the grounds that “Trump has made it very clear that he’s 1,000 percent dedicated to Israel, so how much is left over for America?” Since then Duke changed his tune saying that he disagreed with Trump “on Israel and other issues involving the Jews” but that he would vote for him nonetheless.
It was then that Jake Tapper asked Trump in an interview if he would disavow Duke and his ilk and say that he didn’t want their vote. Trump responded ““Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” When Tapper tried to tell Trump that Duke was the retired Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump responded
“I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don’t know. I don’t know — did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.”
Considering Trump rightly denounced Duke in the early 90s and early 2000s, he almost certainly knew who Duke was. That said, people do forget things such that it’s possible (though unlikely) that Trump genuinely didn’t recall. Even so, I’m reluctant to be that generous to Trump here given Tapper told him who Duke was in the very same interview. Senator Marco Rubio rightly blasted Trump for his disastrous response. Three days later Trump denounced Duke.
I find Trump’s disavowal to be too little, too late considering even when he issued it he claimed a faulty earpiece kept him from knowing what Tapper was asking him about. Considering Trump said “I know nothing about David Duke” he clearly heard Tapper say Duke’s name and considering he said “I know nothing about white supremacists” Trump clearly knew that Duke was one. That said, Trump’s distancing himself from Duke, as insufficient as it was, still qualifies Duke as on the Far Right.
(Chapter Headings: Who will you denounce Part Two: The Alt-Right)
Trump has also denounced a white supremacist neo-Fascist movement called The Alt-Right. Trump never actually said that people on the Alt-Right were “very fine people.” Dr. Sam Harris, who is vehemently anti-Trump, wrote a piece debunking this claim about Trump. Dr. Harris calls it “the lie that will not die.” To be abundantly clear, I’m not denying that Trump repeatedly struggled to denounce the Alt-Right without equivocation, since Trump did exactly that, but he never described the Alt-Right as “very fine people.” Of course, Trump’s denunciation of the Alt-Right was largely undermined by his continued employment of an Alt-Right apologist named Steve Bannon as his chief strategist. And when Trump ultimately fired Bannon, his decision had absolutely nothing to do with Bannon’s Alt-Right apologetics. That said, Trump denounced the Alt-Right on several occasions since then. Of course, Trump having Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos as his guests at Mar-a-Lago renders it difficult to take his repudiations of the Alt-Right at face value. Nevertheless, Trump has verbally denounced the Alt-Right. As such the Alt-Right would qualify as Far Right within the American context.
(Chapter Headings: Final Thoughts)
What the “Far Right” is, is difficult to define. That said, for the sake of simplicity and consistency, I will define it as “those on the Right that the mainstream Right, for ideological reasons, considers worthy of repudiation excluding those who are repudiated for not being right-wing enough.” Of course, that raises the question of what I think “the Right” is but that’s another topic for another time. (To be clear, I don’t currently have a Matitya’s Musing on that matter planned.)
My name is Matitya and this has been an episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.
