The Spanish talk about right because they believe there are many; we sudacas say right because perhaps we suspect that they are all one. But the political meaning of the word comes from Paris and turned 235 years ago weeks ago: “On August 29 we began to recognize each other: those who defended their religion and their king gathered to the right of the president to avoid the shouting, the insults. and the indecencies that occurred on the opposite side, to his left,” wrote Baron de Gauville, deputy of the nobility in the Assembly of the French Revolution, in his memoirs. It was the birth of the most effective political definition of recent centuries: the left, the right.
It worked, it held up: it was very clear, very graphic and so arbitrary that, although it may seem strange now, those gentlemen could have stood backwards and we would have said it backwards and it would be the same. In any case we continue talking about right and left, their nuances. For years the right wanted to disguise themselves as centers. But they saw that the lefts were doing better and had to throw themselves to their right. so now Those that are most popular call themselves “extreme right” or “ultra right.”
We are impressed because the “extreme right” was resurrected when we thought it was dead. For decades it was the label that almost everyone avoided; Now, on the contrary, it is one that many search for, even when it is not very clear what it means, what they want to say. What is true is that they sell us the illusion of a unified global movement —“The extreme right advances in the world”— when the differences between them are considerable.
Sometimes it seems that saying “far right” is as vague as saying “populist”. Lazy, I say, in the sense of lazy, careless. It is a concession we make to them and we should stop making them. Defining all these dispersed opportunists as part of the same thing gives them power, makes them bigger—and, therefore, it is worth digging in and highlighting their differences.
There are so many of them: some are statists, others want to destroy the State; some are nationalist, others are pure globalization; Some die for the market, others distrust it; some respond to old fascist traditions, others have just been invented; many are very Christian, others rather superstitious; several are very homophobic, others a little more so. And they usually are antisemites like their elders but they have invented a new way of being: supporting their comrade in Israel.
They are united, if anything, by their way of taking advantage of the prevailing frustration and offering those frustrated the expectation of “social change.” It is curious: in several countries these rights have managed to appear as the only reaction against a status quo that everyone else supposedly represents. And so they turn others into “conservatives” who want to maintain democracy, these societies where so many do not live the lives they deserve.
Now that is a change: the right was always defined by conservation, by fighting so that nothing changed because any change was worse, it destroyed order. You couldn’t be right-wing without a religion, which guaranteed that everything would remain the same because it was the will of a god. You couldn’t even be right-wing without some money because the right existed to guarantee that the poor wouldn’t “steal” it from you. Nor could it be done without clinging to the old traditions and the old rules. Now, however, many of the right-wing voters are workers who fear being replaced by migrants, losing the privileges they should have for having been born closer. These new rights express and express the fear of being different like no one else.
But the goal that really unifies them all is the one they silence: improving the lives of the rich. They do it in many ways. The fiscal mess is one of their favorites: it is little noticed and benefits them a lot. And so they fulfill their old objective with renewed efficiency: if there is something that these new rights have in common, it is their ability to get the poor to vote for them to defend the interests of the rich. They discovered that these new ultras masks can give a modern look and sexy to the usual policies, and they try to put them on. Using the dissatisfied to improve the situation of the happier is the oldest trick in the manual and, for this reason, it changes its commercial name from time to time: it is now called extreme right when it should be called the great right, the traditional government of the powerful of lifetime. Or simply straight, which is what it is and has been since that day when all the nobles who defended the king decided to gather on one side of the room—and entrench themselves there.
