It is the fear of loss – not the experience of it – that activates the authoritarian reflex. That sense of decline has become pervasive
In The Authoritarian Personality, the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno and his co-authors built a scale for measuring susceptibility to authoritarian ideas.
They identified a personality type – characterised by rigid conventionalism, submission to authority, aggression towards outsiders, and cynicism about human nature – which they traced to disciplinarian upbringing.
The methodology has been criticised, but the core insight endures: such personalities are overrepresented in far-right movements, which are in the ascendancy across Europe. What it cannot explain is why those movements suddenly win mass support. For that, we need political economy.
The National Rally did not surge because millions of French voters acquired authoritarian personalities overnight. It surged because its message – fear of the outsider, respect for hierarchy, suspicion of others – became more compelling. And that message becomes compelling under conditions of real or perceived scarcity. The fear of hardship, and the loss of status that accompanies it, pushes people into survival mode: more selfish, less tolerant, quicker to see outsiders as threats.
The link between scarcity, fear, and intolerance is what explains why fascist movements are often able to command mass support during conditions of economic decline. Decline, not absolute poverty, is the key metric. It is the fear of loss – not the experience of it – that activates the authoritarian reflex. And that sense of decline has become pervasive across Europe since 2008.
The financial crisis was the catalyst. Drawing on 140 years of data across twenty countries, one study found the far-right vote share rises by around 30% in the years after a crash. Then came austerity, which led to a decade of stagnation and decline across much of Europe.
Just as the austerity years appeared to be coming to an end the pandemic hit, after which Europe experienced an unprecedented inflationary crisis that turned a long-simmering sense of decline into an acute one. Across the Eurozone, real wages fell sharply; the average household lost around 4% of its disposable income – more than in a typical recession.
The far right offered a familiar culprit: the outsider. Migrants were driving down wages, driving up rents, draining the state. The narrative inverted the causation – the same global shocks that squeezed European households had displaced millions across the global South, many of whom were forced to flee to Europe. But it was an easy story that played to the feelings of fear and insecurity spreading across European households.
Mainstream parties failed to contest this narrative. Instead they aped it, hardening their own border rhetoric. A 2023 study found that when mainstream parties drift right on migration, they strengthen the radical right rather than neutralise it found that when mainstream parties drift right on migration, they strengthen the radical right rather than neutralise it.
There is another explanation for Europe’s lost decade: migrants didn’t cause the economic turmoil of the financial crisis, austerity, and the cost-of-living crisis; they certainly didn’t cause the wars that have multiplied in this era of stagnation and uncertainty; and the money working people lost during these crises did not vanish into thin air. It was redistributed upwards.
The 2008 crash was caused by the greed of the finance sector, which was bailed out by the state before demanding the imposition of austerity on the taxpayers who saved them. The pandemic was not capital’s doing, but capital profited handsomely – cheap money inflated asset prices and swelled the fortunes of those who already owned things.
Then came the cost-of-living crisis – or, more accurately, the cost-of-greed crisis. As energy and input costs rose, large firms did not merely pass them on; they widened their margins under cover of the chaos. The IMF found that larger corporate profits accounted for almost half of Eurozone inflation in 2022, and the ECB reached a similar conclusion.
The sense of economic decline that drives support for the far-right is real. But it is not caused by migrants. It is caused by the greed of capital. The far right cannot abide this narrative. Its respect for order and hierarchy forbids an attack on perceived social betters – and, more prosaically, its parties are frequently bankrolled by the wealthy. Mainstream parties, captured by the same interests, will not name it either.
Only the left has both the political will and the financial independence to point at capital rather than migrants. Where the left is weak or fractured – as it is across much of Europe – the far right automatically leverages the anger caused by falling living standards. The same is true across many European countries.
In her recent book, Anti-Fascist Economics, economist Isabella Weber puts forward a policy agenda that could bring the left together and help it win back voters from the far right. Weber argues that defeating the far right requires developing policies that centre affordability – rather than abstract notions of economic growth or efficiency. As well as advocating strategic price controls to tackle the cost of living crisis, she argues for a broader democratisation of the economy to tackle corporate power and place the needs of ordinary people at the centre of policymaking.
The far right is winning because people are scared for the future. The left has to combat this fear head on by showing that decline is not inevitable. Another future is possible – but only if we can take on the vested interests that have captured our political institutions and build an economy that works for people and planet, not just profit.
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