You far-Right extremist, you

The English lexicon of abuse isn’t a patch on its Russian equivalent, but it’s certainly fit for most purposes as it is, without crying out for expansion.

It also varies from country to country, although our globalised media are pushing English, including this aspect of it, towards uniformity. Still, an irate Briton is less likely than an American to imply an oedipal relationship between a man and his mother. Then an American typically invokes a certain part of the female anatomy only metonymically, to denigrate a woman; while a Briton is more likely to use it metaphorically, to denigrate a man.

Yet both nations have seen fit to augment their arsenal of swearing with the blunderbuss of perhaps the most stigmatising term of all: ‘far-Right extremist’. This is used indiscriminately to demonise anyone who deviates one iota from the ‘liberal’ agenda of today.

The agenda is set by the ‘liberal’ media, which misnomer describes most newspapers and almost all TV channels. The goalposts are moveable: for example, a generation ago a putative far-Right extremist denied that the world would freeze to death; today, he denies that the world will fry to death.

Now, we all of us abhor discrimination in the widespread, strictly pejorative, sense of the word. Yet the word has its inoffensive side: simply denoting recognition of the difference between one thing and another.

In that capacity, discrimination is an indispensable asset, enabling people to tell good from bad, beautiful from ugly, sinful from virtuous and – germane to my today’s subject – precise from imprecise. Such categories are vital to language because it thrives on precision and withers by vagueness.

Unless words are used in their strict meaning, the same for all, any communication between two speakers may turn into a game of Chinese whispers. This is especially true of the political vocabulary, where words don’t just denote things or concepts. They also communicate prejudices, emotions and ideologies.

Those foreign implants have proved so virile that political terms nowadays communicate only prejudices, emotions and ideologies. Since these differ from one man to another, most communication turns into miscommunication. ‘Far-Right’ is a case in point.

It can mean so much that it ends up meaning nothing. For example, I’ve seen this term used to describe both Adolph Hitler and Margaret Thatcher, which implies commonality where there was none. And I do mean none: there existed not a single policy advocated by both.

This is the lexical confusion that Stephen Glover commendably set out to put straight in today’s article. He rebuked, correctly and deservedly, irresponsible hacks who attach that stigmatising tag to anyone whose view of life or any of its aspects isn’t identical to that of the BBC and The Guardian.

However, sensing that his assault would be defanged in the absence of his own, correct, definition, Mr Glover dug a hole for himself. He tried to make the term more precise, only succeeding in making it less precise. This is what he wrote:

“Let’s define what the expression means. There’s a large overlap with fascism. Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were of the far-Right. They were undemocratic, totalitarian and oppressive. They outlawed free speech and a free Press. In almost all respects, their policies were identical to those of far-Left tyrants such as Stalin.”

If I understand Mr Glover correctly, the far-Right is, “in almost all respects”, the same as the far-Left. That invalidates both terms so much that they can be safely deleted from the dictionary. Rather than clarifying the issue, Mr Glover obscured it.

Also, he left the economic aspect out of it, an omission I usually welcome because I think the economy as the prime mover of society is these days overrated by the Right, Left and Centre alike. That’s what I call ‘totalitarian economism’, which intellectual trend is too simplistic to be valid.

However, recognition that the economy isn’t everything doesn’t mean it’s nothing. While economic freedom doesn’t always produce political liberty, political liberty always produces economic freedom. That alone should make the economy worth considering even before we look at the history of social discontent caused by economic ills.

Socialism in its different guises ultimately boils down to a triumph of centralism over localism, and of the state over the individual. In that sense, the economies of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Soviet Union were similar, though not identical.

They were all socialist, which has to mean Left-wing. Yet I wouldn’t lump them together – it’s that discrimination business again, let’s not push it aside.

Of the three economies, Stalin’s was the most radical. Although some artisans and small cooperatives were allowed to operate, the Soviet economy conformed to Marx’s idea of the state owning “the means of production”.

Hitler’s economy, on the other hand, was corporatist, not unvarnished Marxist. There was no wholesale, Soviet-style nationalisation. Messrs Krupp, Thyssen and Porsche retained the ownership of their concerns, but de facto those owners were turned into managers.

The state told them what products to manufacture and in what quantities, how much to charge for them and how much to pay the workers. The state controlled, but it didn’t own, which was the corporatist version of socialism.

Mussolini practised yet another version. Unlike Hitler, he had been an ideological socialist before he became a fascist dictator. In both capacities, he advocated state control, which made him closer to Stalin and Hitler than, say, to Margaret Thatcher.

Yet Mussolini’s view of the economy was formed not only by the Marxist Georges Sorel, but also by the libertarian Alberto di Stefani. His attempt to split the difference is generally known as syndicalism, which was more Sorel than di Stefani, but not really like Stalin.

While the Bolsheviks talked about workers’ control without meaning it, Mussolini tried to practise the idea by transferring some real power to the labour unions. In that sense, he wasn’t a million miles away from our Labour politicians from the 1950s.

Yet Stalin’s radicalism, Hitler’s corporatism and Mussolini’s syndicalism were all aspects of socialism, which is many awful things, but being far-Right certainly isn’t one of them.

Franco, on the other hand, wasn’t a fascist at all, although he aligned himself with the fascist, Mussolini-like Falange to win the Civil War. Nor was Franco a totalitarian, although he was indeed oppressive and undemocratic. However, lumping him together with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin betokens either lazy thinking or shabby education.

It took Franco some 10-20 years to heal the bleeding wounds of the internecine Civil War, during which period he did rule with a heavy hand. But his economics steadily moved from the macro to the micro end. That tendency culminated in the 1959 Stabilisation and Liberalisation Plan, ushering in free-market reforms.

In parallel, Spain moved closer to Western liberties, and towards the end of Franco’s rule she wasn’t substantially different from other European nations. He was never Left-wing in the sense in which the other three rulers were. At his most oppressive Franco most resembled the traditional Western autocratic ruler. One tell-tale sign of that affiliation is that Franco was a pious Catholic working hand in hand with the Church, not a militant atheist like the other three.

In short, Mr Glover failed to straighten out the taxonomic mess he so correctly identified. Yet the fault lies not with him but with the inadequacy of modern taxonomy, going back, like so many modern perversions, to France circa 1789.

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ first appeared when members of the country’s National Assembly divided into supporters of l’ancien régime to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. Since then, the two terms have been inflated like helium balloons to a point where they burst, leaving a terminological mess behind them.

In my book How the West Was Lost I proposed a different taxonomy, based on the subject’s relationship to Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom. The two broad categories I suggested were Westman and Modman, each with sub-categories.

Without going into lengthy detail, of the three rulers Mr Glover described as far-Right, Hitler and Mussolini (along with Stalin) would in my system be described as ‘nihilist Modmen’, whereas Messrs Sunak, Biden and Macron are ‘philistine Modmen’. Franco, on the other hand, would be ‘authoritarian Westman’.

This taxonomy is far from perfect, but then in this life we are seldom blessed with perfection. Yet I think it describes political realities more accurately than the current distinction between Right and Left.

It also knocks the verbal weapon of ‘far-Right extremist’ out of the hands of people who aren’t fit to bear lexical arms. That’s worth having.