Liberal democracies in crisis: racism as a lifeline?

Far from being a ‘great equaliser’, the Covid-19 pandemic has awoken many of the privileged amongst us to the persistence of racial, gender and class inequalities; and, to recall Ruth Gilmore’s definition of racism, to the reality of groupdifferentiated vulnerability to premature deaths. And although 2020 has kept most of us busy fighting for our health and our jobs, many in our political classes found some time still to worry about the ‘integrity’ of our nations, the loss of our ‘values’, and things like ‘cancel culture’ or ‘anti-white racism’. With the Confederate flag raised by white supremacists in the US Capitol as police forces stood by in early 2021, evidence of the merging of ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ racisms seems today more abundant than ever. 

The relation between ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ racisms, and their role in the entanglement of racism and liberal democracies, is precisely what is explored in Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream, published in April 2020. In distinguishing ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ racisms, they show how, although racism has played an integral part in the historical constitution of liberal orders, the relocation of racism to the far-right has allowed to ‘other’ racism and to assert liberalism as the force of progress in the modern world (Chapter Two). In the 1990s, with the ‘end’ of colonialism, the Civil Rights Act, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Mandela presidency in South Africa, the myth of the ‘end of history’ met that of ‘race’ and made racism ‘a thing’ of the past (p. 9). What Mondon and Winter call ‘illiberal racism’ was then associated, for most of the past thirty years, with pathologic remnants of past movements and ideologies which can be contained through tailored responses to sick individuals (Chapter One). In the authors’ words, illiberal racism is “a contingent and functional” form “that allows liberal societies to represent themselves as post-racist” (p. 49). 

Yet today, in a context of deep social, economic and political crises, the rise of far-right parties is shedding light over the intersections of liberal and illiberal racisms. In Chapter Four, Mondon and Winter problematise the uses and abuses of the concept of ‘populism’. The vague and ahistorical accounts of populism circulating in pundit circles – ‘populists’ would be pitting a ‘pure’ people against a corrupt elite – have enabled and contributed to the far right’s popularity, and to legitimise their diagnosis of the crisis. Rebranded as populists, the far-right raised its profile as representative of the ‘ordinary’ people, a ‘white working class’ left behind by multicultural elites. What the authors importantly demonstrate is that this rebranding of the far-right as the alternative to the status quo is not an isolated move from these parties: ‘the mainstream’ has actively enabled this. The readiness of liberalism’s partisans to embrace explanations of crisis that promote ‘racial concerns’ is telling of the racism grounding our social orders; and of the uses of racism to deflect attention from the failures of capitalism. In all three cases covered in the book, Trump in the US (p. 123), the Front National in France (p. 131), and Brexit in the UK (p. 137), concerns about immigration and the loss of national ‘values’ have been designated as key causes of the crisis, and have been ‘mainstreamed’ as priority policy areas (Chapter Three). 

If this critique of the uses of populism is much needed, the equation lacks one element: the actual threat to established liberal orders coming from various emancipatory struggles on the Left. In other words, the mainstreaming of the far-right is not only a coping mechanism to mask the liberal mainstream’s failures to solve the crisis, but is also a response to the presence of counter-hegemonic articulations directed at the contradictions of liberal orders, including their attachments to patriarchy, racism, and to any exploitative and oppressive structures ensuring the smooth operations of capitalism. 

Although the conclusion does call to explore radical alternatives (p. 207), the argument defended throughout the book would arguably gain in explanatory and normative power by further defining the ‘mainstream’ in its relation with such struggles. This would contribute to an understanding of racism as key to the repression of socialism (see on this Lentin 2020). 

The lack of attention to such emancipatory movements can also lead the authors’ definition of democracy as anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-classist, and their argument that any less than this ‘is cowardly’ and ‘reactionary’ (p. 209), to limit our grasp of and engagement with popular struggles that might not tick all boxes. Yet, the hegemonic and discursive framework Mondon and Winter adopt allows us to understand democracy as engaged in struggle, and that democratic struggles will not be perfect in a context in which ‘the mainstream’ and the far-right partly come together to counter such struggles and rearticulate them in reactionary ways. 

To take part in this struggle, the authors outline a series of steps we – those with access to public discourse and to the production of ‘knowledge’ – can take (pp. 199-210). Among them: stop hyping the far-right; understand that racism evolves and adapts; and give more attention to radical alternatives. We can then add to this the importance to explore the various ways in which such alternatives are actively repressed – the ‘mainstreaming of the far-right’ being brilliantly demonstrated in this book as one of them. 

References 

Lentin, A. (2020). Why Race Still Matters. Polity.