Salami-slicing and the untouchables of the far-right
There’s a notable difference between the political left and right in how they treat the far-left and far-right respectively. Both left and right have have their horrendous authoritarian failure modes, but since 1945 the centre right has maintained a strict demarcation between itself and far- variant. I’ve thus far thought of this as being to the right’s credit: Whilst being nationalist and traditionalist, they nonetheless take a principled stand against the pathological manifestations of nationalism and traditionalism, even at the cost of alienating their potential allies.
The term cordon sanitaire was introduced into Belgian politics in the 1980’s to describe the specific policy of not going into coalition with certain far-right parties, but it’s also useful as a broader term describing how the far-right are treated generally. Being seen as part of the far-right exiles a person to a caste of untouchables for which, rather than engaging with and refuting their arguments, they should instead be shunned outright.
The left, meanwhile, maintains no such principle.
Every so often people on the right try to point out the extreme left positions of their opponents. And if you’ve studied the history of communism then it is shocking to see a British politician addressing a crowd of hammer and sickle flags. But beyond a few right wing history nerds, pointing this out has basically no effect whatsoever. A conservative politician being seen addressing a crowd with swastika flags, on the other hand, would be career-ending.
The controversy that blew up when Enoch Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 is a demonstration of this. Tony Benn said of him: “The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.” And, despite the overwhelming popularity of Powell’s position on immigration, this positioning of him as beyond the pale was ultimately successful. He still has not been rehabilitated to this day. “Rivers of Blood” became a byword for racism. By making him untouchable, that speech created a clear line that other conservatives knew not to cross. The Conservative Party has been unable to implement effective immigration restrictions ever since, even as they’ve continued to promise lower numbers at every election. Instead they have recently overseen an immigration policy that has led to a wildly unprecedented number of arrivals.
There’s a modern parable that does the rounds every so often:
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
This parable is frequently invoked by the sorts of people who like to talk about the “paradox of tolerance” (frequently while demonstrating no actual tolerance whatsoever). And while you’re free to police your own bar however you like, there’s an interesting point here: Notice how it’s important not to listen to the polite Nazi’s arguments, like Odysseus plugging the ears of his sailors. Even just to hear the siren-song is dangerous. They are “terrible, awful people”, irredeemable and untouchable.
I first encountered the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight maybe at the end of the 90’s or in the early 2000’s as a fan of certain music genres that attracted their attention. I was struck immediately by how unimpressive their epistemic standards were. The typical Searchlight article, so far as I could make out, consisted of the claim, “Person X is a fascist. We know they’re a fascist because they are friends with Person Y.” Naturally, you might wonder how they’d concluded that Person Y was a fascist, but fortunately there would be another article saying, “well, Y is friends with X, and we’ve already established that X is a fascist.” In addition to the obvious circularity of these arguments, I described the reasoning at a rationalist meetup once and someone there jokingly referred it as the “transitive property of fascism”. Obviously being friends with a muslim doesn’t make you a muslim. Being friends with a socialist doesn’t make you a socialist. Why should being friends with a fascist make you a fascist?
It’s always easier to see what is present rather than to notice what is missing. But once you do notice what’s missing, its absence can be glaring. In Searchlight there is no investigation into what any of their targets actually believes. You might have thought that if you want to know whether someone is a Nazi, one of the first questions would be whether they have Nazi beliefs. But Searchlight was always much happier with vague insinuations rather than any sort of concrete analysis.
Eventually I’ve come to realise that they’re not actually interested in what people believe. That’s almost entirely beside the point. The central question for Searchlight is whether you choose them or us. If you choose them, then you’re a Nazi and outside of polite society. You become an untouchable. This is the case regardless of what you actually believe.
And once you understand that the principle is “with us or against us” and that it is a question of purity, avoiding the question of belief in favour of the question of association starts to make sense. Of course they need a stick with which to enforce the separation, and it just so happens that the accusation of being far-right – much like the accusation of being a witch in the 17th century – is conveniently vague and hard to disprove.
From Dominic Cummings newsletter last week:
There’s a lot of talk now about Rogan but also many misconceptions. 8 years ago Rogan was for Bernie. But when Bernie went on Rogan many DEMs shrieked ‘don’t engage with fascists and transphobes, these people need to be marginalised’. (When Ezra Klein, high status in the NYT priestly caste, suggested engaging with Rogan, he was attacked by his fellow DEMs.) There were various attempts to cancel Rogan, have Spotify cancel him etc. As Elon said, ‘message received’! Rogan realised he’d been defined as an enemy even though it was puzzling WHY. So a lot of people say ‘who’s OUR Rogan?’ But the answer was ‘Rogan was with you but your extremism alienated him and millions like him.’
By my model, this is not puzzling. The integrity of the boundaries has to be maintained, regardless of Rogan’s actual beliefs. Rogan talked to people who are supposed to be deplatformed, the untouchables. What he actually believes doesn’t matter. He is now contaminated.
Even Vox can acknowledge that the idea that he is far-right is implausible:
In fact, one of the things that makes Joe Rogan so popular among his millions of fans is that his politics are so difficult to pin down. Rather than simply and easily slotting into a box labeled “conservative,” “liberal,” or even “reactionary,” he mainly holds both the far right and the far left in contempt; depending on which day you check in, he’s either a left-leaning centrist or a right-leaning libertarian. But his contrarian tendencies lead him to embrace and toy with lots of ideas, including those from the fringe.
But it is that fringe that is the problem. The rule is that you have to maintain the boundary, choose them or us. And if you have contact with the untouchables then you are yourself one of the untouchables.
This only came together in my head after reading Walt Bismarck’s How the Alt Right Won. I’m sure that nothing I’m saying here would be new to Bismarck, but I’m slow on the uptake sometimes. He describes one of his goals circa 2015:
Convince conservatives to stop ceding moral authority to liberals and allowing them to determine who on the Right is verboten or beyond the pale. Make it unacceptable among conservatives to “punch Right” or purge people for wrongthink.
“Don’t punch right” became one of the key mottos of the alt-right movement. It is notable that it was always difficult to pin down exactly what the alt-right was, and this was deliberate: by not enforcing boundaries, and instead, by actively aiming for a broad spectrum of conservative views with no limit on how far to the right their participants could be, they created a situation in which anyone on the right could see themselves as being in or at least adjacent to the alt-right. And so when Hillary Clinton made her disastrous “basket of deplorables” comment, it left everyone who was considering voting for Trump thinking, “does she mean me?”
Ceding authority to your enemies should never be expected to work out well for you, and that is effectively what the right has done. By conceding that the far-right is beyond the pale, it’s now possible for the left to salami-slice off people from the right by claiming that they’re far-right. And of course there’s always someone on the right of the Overton window. As soon as the rightmost is gone, the next rightmost becomes the target. This ends up significantly encroaching on the centre-right who find themselves constrained and unable to put forward what would actually be popular policies.
If you allow yourself to be shamed for being too extreme then you will always be at the mercy of your enemies who will salami-slice away your most consistent and principled allies. So it was with Enoch Powell and with any effective attempt to limit immigration. If it seems like no one in the Conservative Party believes anything these days, perhaps that’s because they don’t. Holding actual beliefs would just be a liability in this environment. Better to be able to change tack to avoid being caught at the rightmost. They do not want to become an untouchable.
Once you start to notice how it operates, this principled position turns out not to be principled at all. It operates on innuendo and guilt by association. It was cowardice, not principle, and the desire to ingratiate themselves at middle-class dinner parties that caused the Conservative Party to distance themselves from the “Rivers of Blood” speech. And the consequence of that cowardice has been decades in which the left has had carte blanche to curtail the right by salami-slicing away people and policies by declaring them far-right. It has been a disaster for conservatism.