How Trump and the new right came to ‘own’ the future – while apparently exploiting the past | Jonathan White
The centre left’s failure has left a vacuum that’s been filled by those offering hope, rather than a technocratic status quo
- Jonathan White is professor of politics at the LSE
At first glance, today’s politicians appear to have shifted their eyes from the future to the present and the past. The way to win power, it seems, is to make Maga-style appeals to the glories of yesteryear, while the best hope of keeping it is to pursue the short-term gains that will emerge before the next election. Observers of democracy have long said such patterns are inbuilt: for the 19th-century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, “It is this clear perception of the future, founded on enlightenment and experience, that democracy will often lack. The people feel much more than they reason.” Yet today’s politicians, rather than being oblivious to the future, seem increasingly obsessed with it.
The ascendant far right in North America, Europe, Israel and beyond finds much of its appeal in stories about what lies ahead. Nativist desires to protect the west from cultural decline and demographic “replacement”, while ostensibly backward-looking, find their urgency in anxieties that it will soon be too late to change course, mixed with hopes of a political showdown. For the true believers, the future is a source of impending collapse, one that will sharpen identities, hierarchies and boundaries, something to accelerate towards. Today’s identitarian new right is concerned less with the warm glow of the imagined past than with new possibilities that lie in store in “the aftermath of the chaos”, as the French new right activist Guillaume Faye described it.
Jonathan White is professor of politics at LSE. His latest book is In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (Profile).
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