It's not the policies of the far Right that should keep us awake. It's their autocractic itch

Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative US President, offers a scary glimpse into a second Trump presidency

Politics as usual is out of time: 2024 will be a year of stark choices. Democracy’s mettle and the advantages it confers for stable, serious government will be tested to the limit in the UK, Europe and the US.

Keir Starmer’s seemingly unstoppable march to power on July 4 may look like a normal swing of the pendulum after 14 years of Tory-led miscalculation, incompetence and scandal: Britain moving left as the rest of Europe shifts to the right. As a social democrat I’d like to think so.

But this feels more like politics in the last chance saloon: one final chance to prevent a great fragmentation: a big bang that resets the political landscape, not in the sense of Boris Johnson’s flimsy Red Wall/Blue Wall coalition but something altogether more fundamental.

Europe is already in the throws of an upheaval. In the US Donald Trump flies the Republican ensign. But, in truth, he’s a freebooter riding on a wave of discontent which he exploits for his own gain with perplexing success.

The collapse of the centre and the rise of the Right has been a long time coming. The 2008 crash and the more recent pandemic have left entire populations across the industrialised world gasping for air, struggling to make ends meet.

Voters in large numbers have become disaffected, perhaps terminally, with a system that promises to do better but repeatedly fails to meet their needs let alone their dreams. Who can blame them? Hope can’t put food on the table. The mould has been broken which should come as no surprise except to incurable optimists.

It's not hard to see why. Traditional politics have become unmoored from popular sentiment. The political class, to quote John Gray, the New Statesman’s contrarian columnist, no longer understands those it rules. The stories they tell no longer chime with people’s lived experience. Others, with a more compelling tale and more seductive endings have stepped into the void.

Trump and his backers learnt one big lesson from his first term: governing is time-consuming and not everybody is a pushover.

What seemed like a surefire win for Johnson – Brexit and the 2019 election Brexit bounce– turned out to be the Tory party’s undoing. Brexit sounded like a good story: free at last from Europe’s shackles to fulfil our destiny. But it turned out to be a false prospectus.

Meanwhile the heart of moderate Conservatism – the accumulated experience of traditional Tory acumen which instinctively adapts to the world as it changes - was ripped out to satisfy one man’s overweening ambition. The rump, a deeply unimpressive cabal, lacks the wisdom or the courage to pull back from the brink.

In France Emmanuel Macron is betting the farm on a general election that could see Marine le Pen’s RN capture the lower house and with it the levers of the economy. The centre has collapsed, The Left is hopelessly divided. The centre Right – the party of General de Gaulle - a shadow of its former self. A le Pen presidency in 2027 is no longer unthinkable.

The temptation for centrists is to dismiss these wild swings as a passing storm and the emerging political Right as lightweight insurgents. A case can be made for that point of view. Stay tuned. Normal service will be resumed. But that’s a mistake.

The fragmentation and in some cases the virtual disappearance of parties which have dominated the industrialised West since WWII is rooted in something fundamental: disillusion at a market-led economic model which, instead of levelling up, to coin a phrase, has merely entrenched a two-tier wealth system.

Most of us are reliant on the post-war formula of weighing and parsing, trimming and tacking, upping or lowering taxes a bit, spending less or borrowing more from a finite pot. Aspiration faces depressingly stubborn headwinds. Making ends meet is what most can aspire to.

And then there’s those who have defied gravity. The world’s billionaires, with the help of their political buddies, have increased their wealth by an estimated £2.6 trillion since the pandemic. The rest, whether poor, temporarily poor or just managing, have lost money. Mr and Mrs Average live in a state of perpetual insecurity. That’s the driving force.

Which brings us to the question: what do these insurgent parties have to offer? And are they here to stay or will it business as usual in the next round?

It’s tempting to dismiss the far Right as one-trick ponies: immigration, immigration, immigration. There’s some truth to that. Migration is the topic that pushes most buttons. But that too would be a mistake.

The far Right, like the far Left, has a world view articulated better by some than others. This differs from country to country but, essentially, it pivots around the idea of the nation (and the family) as the sancrosanct bedrock of everything.

As usual, America sets the pace. A seminal document touted as a blueprint for a Trump second term sets out, in remarkable detail, a vision of how Republicans can ‘take their country back’ from the ‘ruling elite’.  

Project 2025 A Mandate for Leadership is worth paying attention to. Nigel Farage, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orban, Marine le Pen and Trump may not be carbon copies of each other. But the same causes, the same impulses and, often, the same solutions drive them.

Here’s a sample: “Defang and defund woke warriors” (federal civil servants, teachers, unions, the military) who have infiltrated every American institution. Slash green policies. Resume full-throttle gas and oil extraction. End diversity and inclusion policies. Regulate LGBTQ, trans-gender and sex education in schools. Make abortion very, very difficult. Seal America’s borders. Withdraw from the IMF and the World Bank.

Trump and his backers, both in and out of government, learnt one big lesson from his first term: governing is time-consuming and not everybody is a pushover. There’s a whole ‘elite’ out there waiting to scupper his best intentions. Johnson’s ‘blob’, Liz Truss’s ‘deep state’.

The answer, at least in America’s case say the authors, is simple: reset how the country is governed. Redefine its cardinal doctrine, the separation of powers between the executive, Congress and the judiciary. Make the President first among equals with extraordinary powers.

This is what should keep us awake at night: not the policies which are arguable but the urge, which has deep roots, of all parties at either end of the spectrum to short-circuit democracy with authoritarian fixes.

The ultimate fate of our political institutions and parties on what used to be called the radical fringe will not be decided at any of this year’s elections. It will be decided by the generation that has just turned old enough to vote: Gen Z .

In Britain over eight million young people who could not vote in 2019 are now eligible. How many will is an open question. Starmer says he intends to reduce the voting age to 16. They and how their lives turn out will decide who governs the industrialised West in future.  

Can western economies plagued by falling investment, insufficient productivity and social tensions be re-engineered to generate growth, jobs and functioning public services? Can enough houses be built to allow Gen Z to become homeowners and feel they have a stake in their future?

These questions, not the phoney culture wars that have become the far Right’s marching tune, will determine what the political landscape looks like. Our leaders need to pull their fingers out.