Chetan Bhatt in The Ideas Letter:
Across the West, the far right represents a fully transformative ambition: the desire to profoundly change the social, political, and cultural dimensions of European and North American societies. Any approach to countering it must be informed by this far-reaching ambition. The far right is now an entrenched aspect of Western politics, and its power is relatively independent of electoral cycles. Democracy seems to be in a “doom spiral.”
The rise of the far right reflects, axiomatically, the failures of the political left, especially its political parties but also the institutional left represented by NGOs and the liberal public and corporate sector. Some of these failures are structural: the political terrain is formidably hostile, the right has vast institutional and financial resources, and right-wing politics is empowered by social media platforms and insurmountable forms of disinformation. At the same time, centrist parties have purged their left but are unwilling to challenge the far right, as in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
But the failures of the left—from the inability of mass movements to build durable institutions to the fissiparousness of identitarianism and political sectarianism—are not solely the result of external aggression. Indeed, these identitarian and sectarian tendencies are implicated in the rise of the political forces the left now finds itself struggling to oppose.
These tendencies indicate a fraying of historic associations between morality, knowledge, and emancipation that informed much of the postwar Western left. Those associations have been insufficiently examined to the detriment of the left as a whole. But thinking about how the left exercises morality, and how its moral judgments rely on certain understandings of knowledge, may give a perspective on its state and why it seems incapable of meeting the challenge it currently faces.
Morality is an uneasy idea for the Western left.
More here.
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