From the Tea Party to UKIP, the Right Is Rising - The New Yorker

Some disturbing political news from across the pond: in two by-elections on Thursday, the xenophobic U.K. Independence Party won its first seat in the House of Commons and almost won a second. The victory came in a formerly Conservative-held seat in Clacton, east of London, where the party’s representative thrashed the Tory candidate, delivering a humiliating rebuke to Prime Minister David Cameron. The near-miss came in Heywood and Middleton, a Labour stronghold in Greater Manchester, where the UKIP candidate was just six hundred votes short of winning.

These blows to the two major parties come just months before a general election, which has to be held by May of next year. On Friday morning, Cameron warned that a strong UKIP showing, especially in Tory seats, could throw the election to Labour by splitting the Conservative vote: “What last night demonstrates is that if you see a big UKIP vote you will end up with Ed Miliband as Prime Minister, Ed Balls as Chancellor, and Labour in power.”

The scenario that Cameron described is perfectly plausible. But the larger story goes well beyond the Westminster horse race and, indeed, beyond the shores of the United Kingdom. The rise of UKIP demonstrates, once again, that the politics of protest have shifted. From the French Revolution to the Great Depression and beyond, hard times tended to benefit progressive and left-wing parties, which critiqued the extant economic and political systems and offered blueprints for reforming or replacing them. These days, the primary beneficiaries of economic slumps are often right-wing groups, such as the Tea Party, the French National Front, and UKIP

Wrapping themselves in the flag and excoriating what they view as a corrupt élite, these protest parties attract the support of alienated voters from across the political spectrum. By channelling economic distress and cultural alienation into resentment of foreigners, welfare beneficiaries, and government officials, they come to drive the political agenda. Meanwhile, avowedly left-wing parties, where they still exist, hardly get a look-in. And moderate progressive parties, far from being presented with an opportunity to enact an egalitarian agenda, are forced to back up and defend basic institutions of social democracy, such as progressive taxation and a universal social-safety net.

In the United States, the Obama Administration, to its credit, has offered this defense. By getting the Affordable Care Act enacted, it even managed to fill a big gap in the safety net. In Britain, by contrast, the Conservative–Liberal coalition, working under the banner of austerity, is steadily chipping away at the welfare state, cutting the level of benefits, tightening qualification requirements, and forcing students to pay more. But even that agenda isn’t tough enough for UKIP, which, in addition to bashing immigrants and Eurocrats, makes a fetish of targeting “scroungers” who subsist at the taxpayers’ expense.

Of course, I am generalizing—there are exceptions that go both ways. Acute economic distress led to the New Deal and to the creation of the welfare state, but it also aided the rise of Fascism. Back then, though, the right didn’t have it all its own way, not even in Weimar Germany. (In the 1930 general election, the Nazis got eighteen per cent of the vote, setting them on the road to power, but the Communist Party, with thirteen per cent of the vote, also saw a surge in support.) Today, things are different. Greece and Spain are about the only places where the radical left, in the form of the SYRIZA and Podemos parties, has benefitted from the great financial crisis and its aftermath. (Jonathan Blitzer wrote about Podemos on Tuesday.) But, even in those places, there is no immediate prospect of a genuinely left-wing government taking power.

Here at home, the Tea Party has lately suffered some setbacks, and, of course, President Obama successfully secured reëlection in 2012. Two years on, though, the backlash against his decidedly non-radical policies continues—policies that have produced a modest but strengthening economic recovery. In many parts of the country, Obama is so unpopular that Democrats facing midterm elections don’t want him anywhere near them. To be sure, some progressive politicians, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, have built up dedicated followings. But where is the national groundswell of support for a leftward tilt? (Some on the left would say that it exists but is submerged in an ocean of corporate money.)

In Europe, German ordoliberalism, which is another word for hair-shirt economics, rules supreme, even as much of the continent is trapped in a seemingly endless slump and Germany itself, Europe’s mightiest economy, flirts with recession. In Holland, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom has consolidated its position as a Dutch version of UKIP In France, perish the thought, it is no longer beyond the bounds of possibility that Marine Le Pen could become President.*

To be sure, we’re just talking about two by-elections. Come the general election, protest parties tend to fall back—UKIP may conform to that pattern. For now, though, Farage is setting the political agenda, and some of the other parties, particularly the Conservatives, are pandering to him. Cameron has already promised a referendum on Britain’s continued membership in the E.U. Last week, at the annual Conservative-party conference, he announced that, even before the referendum takes place, his government will scrap the Human Rights Act of 1998, which enshrined the principles of the European Court of Human Rights into British law. But that announcement wasn’t enough to check the progress of UKIP

And where is the equivalent of Farage on the left? Nowhere to be found.

*Correction: An earlier version of this post referred to Jean-Marie Le Pen as a contender in France’s upcoming Presidential election; the likely candidate is his daughter, Marine.