Politics, before it is about anything else, is about emotion. We all base our judgments about the world – the state of the country we live in, for instance, and what we’d like to do about it – on a mix of rational calculation and instinct. But for these judgments to be shaped into a political programme whose ideals are shared by millions of people, and for us to place our trust in leaders who promise to realise those goals, we really have to feel it. What, then, might be the particular set of feelings evoked by the following?
“The Britain that I love is being ripped apart by diversity, equality and inclusion.”
Suella Braverman, former home secretary, February 2026
“It’s not just Britain that is being invaded, it’s not just Britain that is being raped. Every single western nation faces the same problem: an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens is happening.”
Tommy Robinson, far-right influencer, September 2025
“We need to … explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life.”
Matthew Goodwin, media personality, November 2024
“Britain is lurching towards civil war, and nobody knows how to stop it.”
Daily Telegraph, April 2025
“This is now about the future of western civilisation. Do we believe in a Judeo-Christian culture? Do we believe that the family is a unit for good? Do we believe in free speech? … This is how high the stakes are.”
Nigel Farage, founder of Reform UK, September 2022
“A political revolution is under way in Britain! Britain is turning against the establishment.”
GB News, September 2025
“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them … If that makes me racist, so be it.”
Lucy Connolly, childminder from Northampton, July 2024
Look around, and you will see versions of these feelings, expressed with varying degrees of strength, wherever the far right is present. A sense of impending doom, of humiliation, of victimhood and decline. A sense that there needs to be an insurrection, perhaps even a violent one, to defend a beleaguered majority. A confusion between whether what’s required is a “revolution” or the restoration of an old order. Far-right figureheads encourage these feelings – some openly, others with a nudge and a wink.
At other times, it seems as if these feelings bubble up from below. If you have read up on the history of fascism – the murderous, reactionary mass movement that disfigured Europe in the mid-20th century – this might sound familiar. The historian Robert Paxton, one of the world’s leading experts on fascism, stressed how fascists relied heavily on an appeal to the emotions. Paxton called these “mobilising passions”. Among them were a sense of overwhelming crisis, a fear of the dominant group’s decline, a lust for purity and authority, and a glorification of violence.
Today, as far-right populists prosper at the ballot box and extremists attract huge followings, a question hangs over us: is this fascism? There are certainly things that remind us of fascism, if we look abroad. The BJP, the party of India’s far-right prime minister Narendra Modi, has links with a paramilitary street movement, the RSS, which has been involved in anti-Muslim pogroms. What is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if not a legalised mob, given weapons and badges and sent by the president to terrorise parts of his own country’s population?
Does Britain’s far right, in its various guises, mark the return of fascism? The short answer is no – with a but. We are not seeing a rerun of the 20th century. Today’s far right has a life and momentum of its own, and must be seen as unique to our time. Recognising that is essential if we are to understand its causes, its weaknesses and the specific way it threatens our freedom – because it does pose a threat to our freedom. In its most extreme guises, it is openly violent. Even in its milder forms it seeks to roll back the progress we have made towards equality and make our societies less democratic.
Fascism emerged in the 20th century, amid societies that were scarred by the violence of the first world war and the instability, hunger and mass unemployment that trailed in its wake and where a growing workers’ movement threatened to wrest power from traditional governing elites. In response to a feeling of national humiliation or betrayal, fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home, and imperial conquest abroad, in return for abandoning democracy. Its base lay among the frustrated lower middle classes, but it rapidly gained cross-class support. Its supporters were organised into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what Paxton called an “uneasy but effective collaboration” with traditional governing elites, for whom fascism was a way to maintain order and crush the left. (Those elites were wrong: they saw fascism as their attack dog, but it ate them alive.)
That doesn’t sound much like a description of our own time. In the west, for instance, we have – at least until recently – lived through an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. There is little organised left to speak of, at least not one that threatens revolution or even radical reform in the way communist and socialist movements did in the early 20th century. Nor, despite much grumbling, is there any real appetite to do away with democracy. In fact, today’s most prominent far-right movements make a lot of noise about their commitment to it: they are more democratic than their opponents, they contend.
Yet there is a crucial overlap between the fascism of interwar Europe and today’s far right, which goes back to that question of emotion. Ultimately, the two movements share the same underlying exhortation: purify your community. They tell their supporters that pride, security and success are to be ensured by attacking the enemies of the nation. They claim those enemies are being enabled by elite conspiracies. They promise radical change that will reinforce the social order, rather than tear it down and rebuild it more equitably.
This is an impossible promise. As Paxton tells us, for the fascists of 20th-century Europe it either led to entropy – a movement failing to deliver and collapsing – or to increasing radicalisation. In Germany and Italy in particular, fascist leaders raced to keep up with the expectations of their followers, making it up as they went along and initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and, ultimately, the destruction of the very people who had put their faith in them.
Today, the far right is once again making a version of that impossible promise. Like their political forebears, its figureheads are not fully in control of the forces they seek to unleash. That is why they are so dangerous – but it is also why they can be stopped.
“Far right” is a contested term. Nobody would use it to describe their own politics. But it’s useful nonetheless. We often treat “far right” as synonymous with “fascist”, “Nazi” or “violent racist thug”. It may well mean those things, but it’s also something broader. Cas Mudde, a political scientist who is one of the leading experts on this subject, defines the far right as a collection of rightwing nationalist movements that are hostile to our liberal democratic political system. Mudde divides the far right into two parts. One is the extreme right, which rejects the essence of democracy. That would include fascism – which replaces democracy with dictatorship – as well as groups and individuals that rely on violence to advance their cause.
The other is the radical right, which accepts the essence of democracy but opposes fundamental elements of our current system. Liberal democracy combines representative government – voting – with a set of checks and balances intended to protect individual freedom as well as the freedom of minority groups. Independent courts, constitutional and human rights laws, and a free media are all examples of those checks and balances. But the radical right often attacks these things, accusing them of standing in the way of its version of democracy – which is essentially that so long as the radical right wins an election, once in power it should be able to do whatever it wants.
In our time, the dominant form of far-right politics has come from the radical right, through parties using a political style known as populism. That’s another contested term, but populism, simply put, is an approach to politics where a party or individual claims to be the only true representative of the people, in opposition to an elite that is either corrupt or out of touch. It’s neither inherently leftwing or rightwing, and sometimes populists have a point. We do have elites, and they can be corrupt or out of touch. But populism is often a way of asking voters for permission to make radical changes to society – so the nature of those changes matters hugely.
The changes that far-right populism seeks to make are ones that threaten our freedom. And the longer we fail to properly challenge this movement, the greater the risk we run of something even more extreme following in its wake.
Since the mid-2010s, far-right populists have won national elections in places as varied as India, the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, Italy, the US, Brazil and Argentina, among others. In many European parliaments they have a significant foothold, poised in some cases to form the likely next government. In the past few years, rising energy costs and food prices have given far-right populists a further boost, as voters grow frustrated with their governments.
At the start of the 2010s, these movements were almost all on the margins of politics. So what changed? In the west, the answer is often immigration. In the past few decades, immigration to wealthy countries has been growing, and far-right populists in western Europe and North America usually make anti-immigration politics a central part of their platform. But they have also prospered in places where immigration has barely featured in campaigning: in 2015, Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party won parliamentary elections when it was mainly a country of emigration. Rodrigo Duterte, the far-right populist former leader of the Philippines, ran on a promise to revive struggling urban areas.
This tells us that before we get to the specific causes of far-right populism in our part of the world, we need to look at what’s going on more widely. What the places mentioned above all share is a political system – liberal democracy – and an economic one: capitalism. It is an awkward combination. Liberal democracies promise equal rights for all, but capitalism is necessarily an unequal system, in that to stay alive the vast majority of us must work to produce profits for our employers. We do not receive an equal share of those profits; instead, we are promised better standards of living. We choose, by voting, between the different options for achieving this goal: by redistributing wealth through the tax system, for instance, or by encouraging banks to loan money to people who want to set up their own businesses, or by keeping taxes low and relying on the generosity of wealthy philanthropists.
Since the 1990s, the world has pursued an especially unrestrained form of capitalism. It has brought great benefits: millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. But it has also brought much greater inequality. India, for instance, is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, but also one of the most unequal countries, where the top 10% of the population holds 65% of the national wealth. Even when times are good, inequality can breed frustration and resentment among people who feel they’re not getting a fair share of the wealth. Modi, for instance, is popular among India’s Hindu middle classes partly because he promises to send more prosperity their way.
When times are bad, the problems stack up. In our era, particularly in the west, the 2008 global financial crisis casts a long shadow over our politics. Every so often, capitalism’s ability to generate profits falters to such an extent that it causes a crisis. Established governing elites struggle to find a way to revive the economy, while sections of the public grow increasingly unhappy and start to explore more radical political alternatives. These alternatives come from the left and the right. But in times of prolonged crisis, right-wing nationalism seems appealing to many people. One study of elections in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters have tended to respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right benefiting the most. Sections of the governing elite may be tempted to latch on to these rightwing solutions, as a way to shore up their position, or to push through economic reforms they know would be unpopular were they not clothed in patriotic garb.
It is nearly two decades since a housing bubble in the US burst, rippling through the global banking system and causing it to almost collapse. But the effects of the financial crisis were particularly long-lasting in the west. North America and Europe experienced a severe recession, followed by a painfully slow recovery. In the UK, the economy shrank by more than 6% between 2008 and 2009. It took five years to grow back and the value of wages – how much we can buy with the money we earn – has essentially never recovered.
In situations like this, people are understandably angry.
That anger does not automatically lead to far-right politics. Just think, for instance, how many protest movements emerged in the years following the financial crisis, and how varied their demands were: the Occupy protests in the US and UK, which targeted the banking system itself; the anti-austerity movements of southern Europe; uprisings for greater democracy in the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine; mass protests against corruption and the cost of living in Brazil; Black Lives Matter and its demand for racial equality. According to one survey, mass protests rose 36% globally between 2008 and 2019.
Yet most of these movements failed to achieve their stated goals. Increasingly, far-right populism – which presents itself as an alternative to the old, established elites – is what we have ended up with. So what do the far-right populists have to offer that others don’t?
The political theorist Richard Seymour has a name for what far-right populists offer voters: “disaster nationalism”. It has a surface-level component, which is largely economic – and a deeper, more powerful appeal, which is emotional.
On the surface, far-right populists promise national revival by taking bold, perhaps even law-breaking, measures on the economy. Argentina’s president Javier Milei poses on stage with a chainsaw, to symbolise how he will slash away at wasteful state spending. Donald Trump’s tariff regime will make Americans feel like winners again. Yet the actual economic benefits of far-right populism are far from clear. In 2024, Trump promised Americans cheaper groceries if they voted for him. It hasn’t happened yet. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has boosted employment, but most new jobs are part-time or low paid. In Brazil, under Jair Bolsonaro, average incomes fell.
On the face of it, the economic measures offered by far-right populism seem mild in comparison with, say, 20th-century fascism, which promised to transcend class divisions and bring nation, state and leader together in a single body – the “corporate state”, as Mussolini called it. But Seymour suggests the true payoff is psychological: disaster nationalism says that in order to feel like a winner, someone else has to lose, and lose badly.
Without exception, far-right populists promise to punish certain groups of people on behalf of the majority, in order to make the majority feel like winners again. Many promise to restrict the rights of minority groups. In Italy, the Meloni government has ordered councils to only register biological parents on birth certificates, excluding same-sex partners. Just as often, they promise to restore traditional, hierarchical social roles: in Brazil, Bolsonaro was elected president with the support of evangelical Christians who had declared war on “gender ideology”: their label for a collection of feminist, pro-LGBTQ+ and pro-choice ideas. They embark on grand social engineering projects such as in India, where Modi’s prosperity doctrine is accompanied by an effort to recast a historically multi-faith country as exclusively Hindu, with Muslims in particular framed as dangerous interlopers.
That’s because the common thread uniting far-right populists the world over is the claim that the nation – their own nation, to be more precise – is under dire threat. They see disaster around every corner. What’s more, they say, this peril is caused by specific national enemies who can be named, blamed and punished. The particular targets might vary according to context, and might on the face of it have nothing to do with one another. But they share a common logic. The national peril is always the fault of a dangerous underclass, combined with the actions of a treacherous elite.
The nature of the threat, when you really get down to it, is always about sex, birth, death or a combination of the three. Think, for instance, how often the European far right seeks to paint refugees as rapists and murderers, or how India’s Hindu nationalists accuse Muslim men of “love jihad”, a conspiracy theory that claims ordinary inter-faith marriages are the result of a sinister plot.
Far-right populists pose as saviours of the nation. But there is a contradiction between what they offer on the surface – security and prosperity – and the means they propose to carry it out. Far-right populists seem driven as much by an urge to bring on disaster as to save their people from it. They accuse elites of corruption, yet often make a brazen display of corruption when they gain power for themselves. When it comes to a genuine existential threat, the climate crisis, far-right populists seem caught between outright denial and a perverse, gleeful wish to hasten it. As Trump says about fossil fuels: drill, baby, drill.
What they really offer, says Seymour, is something profoundly destructive: revenge. India’s frustrated Hindu middle classes will reap the benefits of growth if life is made intolerable for their Muslim neighbours; men in the Americas will become winners again when traditional gender roles are restored; economically depressed regions of Europe will be revived by the mass deportation of refugees.
The endgame, says Seymour, is to channel the resentments of a population into a “revolt against liberal civilisation”. Far-right populism has already shown a potential to be profoundly violent. When Duterte took office in the Philippines in 2016, he urged the murder of drug addicts and dealers. It is estimated that as many as 30,000 people were killed, some by vigilante groups, in the space of six years. In Israel, the far right’s eliminationist rhetoric has provided the drumbeat to the genocidal violence meted out to Palestinians in Gaza since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, as well as settler rampages in the West Bank. India, too, is periodically racked by outbursts of Hindu nationalist mob violence.
In Europe, far-right populists might distance themselves from such violence. But the message of national peril – and the focus on sex, birth and death – is pervasive.
It’s important to recognise that not everybody who votes for far-right populists will agree with their underlying message. Like other political movements, successful far-right populists build a coalition of support, tapping into everyday concerns that are shared more widely: inflation, unemployment and so on. Yet some people do buy into the underlying message of far-right populism – and without it, far-right movements wouldn’t even get off the ground.
Far-right populists play on a contradictory mix of emotions. On the one hand they promise a greater sense of community, for instance through an emphasis on a homogenous national culture – and on the other, they offer a way to burn it all down.
There are several reasons why just such a mix might have thrived in recent years. The first, at least in the west, is linked to the economic and political system we’ve been living under. After the economic crisis of the 1970s, governments embarked on a new approach to managing capitalism, known as neoliberalism. This was both a particular set of economic policies and a wider philosophy about how governments should behave and how people should relate to one another in a society.
Broadly speaking, the economic policies have involved shifting power and resources away from democratic control and towards big business, particularly the financial markets. Money and wealth are allowed to move around the world with fewer restrictions, as are goods and certain approved categories of people. A typical neoliberal policy is the privatisation of England’s water industry, which took place in 1989. Since private companies have been allowed to run this vital service for profit, their shareholders have made £85bn, according to the campaign group We Own It, from a service those of us in England pay for with our bills and taxes.
Under neoliberalism, mainstream parties in the west converged on similar sets of policies and became dominated by a class of professionals who saw their job as to ensure the smooth running of the system, using the state to prop up big business when needed, but not to intervene too strongly. (“There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher put it.) Today, England’s rivers and beaches are full of sewage because private water companies have regarded making money for their shareholders as a greater priority than investing in infrastructure. Yet successive governments have ruled out taking water, a resource we need in order to live, back into public ownership.
A system like this is not one that breeds solidarity. It might make us more likely to see our neighbours as potential competitors rather than allies; or to see welfare recipients as freeloaders, politicians as corrupt and public services as a waste of our hard-earned taxes. It is a recipe for resentment and distrust. In Britain, social trust plummeted between the 1980s and the 2000s, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. (It has improved somewhat in recent years, although loneliness remains widespread.)
Toxic emotions aren’t an inevitable result. We might well respond to a lack of community by trying to find more of it. But our responses are also shaped by the tools at our disposal. Social media offers a new way to connect with one another, but it also has addictive, compulsive qualities that play on our worst instincts – particularly when social media platforms seek to leverage these qualities to keep us online, in order to maximise their advertising revenue.
Social media has also proved a remarkably efficient conduit for conspiracy theories, a central feature of the far-right worldview, and nurtured the most extreme subcultures such as neo-nazism and the misogynist “incel” scene. It has even turned “lone wolf” terrorism – in which resentful individuals, almost always men, take out their anger on the world in spectacular acts of violence – into a sort of gruesome meme. In 2019, a gunman in Halle, Germany, livestreamed his attack on a synagogue on the gaming platform Twitch; in 2016, the perpetrator of a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, checked Facebook midway through his assault.
Seymour suggests we see today’s far-right figureheads less as traditional political activists, and more like celebrities, surfing this wave of potentially violent resentment. It’s why far-right populists have invested so much time and effort in their online activities. Bolsonaro had a gabinete do ódio (office of hate), a group of advisers who planned his social media strategy; Modi rewards his most virulent supporters on X by discreetly following them back; Trump is the man with the world’s largest megaphone.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt memorably described fascism as a type of “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite”. One of the biggest differences between 20th-century fascism and today’s far right is that fascism required mass, militarised political parties to cement that alliance. Few such parties exist today. But in the worst instances, social media allows a similar relationship.
This type of far-right politics is fleeting and unstable and it can spiral dangerously out of control. But it can also fizzle out – especially if convincingly challenged.
This is an edited extract from If We Tolerate This by Daniel Trilling (Pan Macmillan, £14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.