Hard Left/Right or Far Left/Right?
Two of the most controversial ideological borders in contemporary politics
By Tyler Merbler from USA - DSC09523-2, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98637510
What is the difference between the “hard left” and the “far left”? Or between the “hard right” and the “far right”? This week’s essay will try to tease out a definition from what I call an institutionalist perspective.
Institutionalism means looking for common themes across the centre left, the centre and the centre right of the horseshoe, so non-aligned voters can deal with the corruptive nature of power by positioning ourselves as floating voters. As the name implies, institutionalists mostly seek to work within actually existing institutions (which evolved to protect pluralism), with some reforms here and there, rather than smashing our evolved institutions and going back to the drawing board.
From this perspective, I believe that the difference between the far left and the hard left is particularly clear. The far left is explicitly revolutionary. Members of the far left want to destroy a markets-based economy and the institutions of liberal democracy to bring in a dictatorial post-markets utopia, despite the poor track record of these experiments. Members of the hard left share many of the same attitudes, including populism (defined as anti-pluralism) and hostility to markets, but explicitly commit to working within the institutions of liberal democracy to achieve their goals.
We can see a clear example with Eurocommunism, which involved members of the far left in countries like Spain, Italy and France rejecting the influence of the Soviet Union and deciding to work within democratic institutions from the 1970s. One of the seven “fathers” of the Spanish Constitution of 1978, Jordi Solé Tura, was a Eurocommunist, who helped establish his country’s democratic framework. As such, he should clearly be seen as hard left rather than far left. Many of the communist-led populist projects that Spain has seen in the last decade should also be seen as hard left rather than far left as they seek to work within a parliamentary context while leaving any revolutionary aspirations on a backburner.
We can see something similar on the right. The far right will always be authoritarian, nationalistic (or fascistic) and dictatorial, with a big dose of conspiratorialism to boot. A mob in Rotherham in the UK, which set fire to a hotel housing refugees earlier this month, is a clear example of the far right. The hard right shares many of the underlying attitudes, particularly a populist obsession with identity politics and hatred of the welfare state and immigration, but its members have decided to work within the institutions of liberal democracy to achieve their goals. Its members tend to be less likely to murder innocent refugees.
In recent years, we have seen some movement between the two main populist camps on the right of the horseshoe. For example, Giorgia Meloni of Italy began her career on the far right when she joined a neo-fascist party in the 1990s. Since becoming prime minister of Italy in 2022, though, she has governed more or less pragmatically as a member of the hard right.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump of the US has gone in the opposite direction. When he came down a golden escalator in 2015 to announce a run at the White House, he positioned himself as a member of the hard right. He flirted with the far right during his first campaign for office, his time as US President and his unsuccessful second campaign, but finally crossed the line when he became openly insurrectionist after losing the 2020 election.
Trump might not have put it in these terms, but he clearly felt drastic measures had become necessary to stop his white Protestant base from losing its cultural hegemony (the use of ideas and norms to protect a privileged position in society). Something similar happened in Catalonia in 2017, when the right-wing regional government convoked an illegal referendum. It clearly hoped that the Catalan-speaking minority would show up in force while the Spanish-speaking majority would stay at home - a last desperate attempt to lock in one side's cultural hegemony as the demographics slowly changed the facts on the ground.
If you accept my point, we can see that there is a subtle but important difference between the hard right and the far right (and between the far left and the hard left). There are a handful of difficult issues that we need to tease out in the rest of this essay, including borderline cases; sincerity; similarities and differences between left and right; centrist populism in general; and anti-populist populism in particular.
First of all, how should we classify politicians like Jean-Luc Mélenchon (populist left in France) and Santiago Abascal (populist right in Spain), who both want a radically different constitution for their countries, but seek to achieve the new framework by democratic means? I feel that they can be characterised as hard left and hard right, respectively, but they are both edging close to the border with the far left and the far right. We probably need to invent some new terminology. How about ultra-hard left or ultra-hard right?
We also have a second problem. As we have discussed, many of the underlying attitudes across both ideological borders remain the same. This leads us to possibly the most pressing question in politics today; how can we be sure that members or the hard right (or the hard left) are acting in good faith? Is there not a risk that a member of the far right (or the far left) might just be pretending to be democrats? Can mainstream politicians trust them with power-sharing deals?
Luckily, cognitive dissonance - an uncomfortable feeling we all experience when faced with contradiction - can help. Politicians are as susceptible to cognitive dissonance as anyone else. An insurrectionist politician who starts making grand speeches about the importance of the peaceful transition of power after elections will feel increasingly uncomfortable every time associates make explicit plans about the revolution. Psychologists will tell us that he or she is significantly more likely to double down on his or her public views rather than any private ones.
Cognitive dissonance can work in the other direction too. Artur Mas, a mainstream nationalist politician in Catalonia, was troubled by the rise of populism during a long recession in Spain generally and his region specifically. In response, he cynically adopted a self-consciously populist slogan towards the end of 2012 (“the will of a people”). Wearing a suit and tie to show his loyalty to his establishment roots, he held out four fingers on each hand in a knowing reference to origin legends about the Catalan flag. However, cognitive dissonance is a harsh mistress. Mas’ movement soon went full populist, with its new leaders leaving him behind in the dust as they took increasingly bad decisions, many of which involved smashing actually existing democratic institutions.
Reflecting on the power of cognitive dissonance and public statements shouldn’t be taken as a glowing endorsement of either the hard right or the hard left. A lukewarm commitment to democracy is almost certainly better than an explicitly revolutionary approach, but politicians who find themselves towards the ends of the horseshoe will often have populist instincts. They will think that their simplified black-and-white narratives map perfectly onto the real world; and anyone who disagrees is either stupid or corrupt. As a result, they will tend to misread opposition as disloyalty; and will often erode the institutions that are meant to hold back the executive branch of government, including a fiercely independent press.
There is also a third issue. It is worth mentioning that members of the hard left, the far left, the hard right and the far right will always be populists, with some surprising similarities across the left and the right (see Trump slamming “fake news” and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez talking about the media’s “mud-slinging machine”).
There are often differences too. Populists are always troubled by pluralism, but these concerns can take different forms. Right-wing populists worry about immigrants and their descendants, as well as people who diverge from stereotypical gender roles allegedly established in nostalgic visions of the past; while left-wing populists worry about permissionless innovation and people who find a way to become successful in a market society. Both groups think the opposition is always acting in bad faith, but disagree on where exactly the problem lies. Meanwhile, the populist right will often question cultural elites, while the populist left will often question economic elites.
It is worth noting that although the ends of the horseshoe are always populist, anti-pluralism can appear anywhere. Let’s take a few examples from Spain to make the point. In many ways, the country’s Socialist prime minister Sánchez remains a member of the mainstream centre-left rather than the hard left. However, he has also become a left-wing populist, as this blog has argued. His controversial proposal to curb critical elements in the press is an obvious recent example of this tendency.
Meanwhile, Madrid’s conservative president Isabel Díaz Ayuso has a strong populist edge to her discourse, despite being a member of the mainstream centre-right, who is particularly interested in attracting investment to the Spanish region. And a failed liberal politician called Albert Rivera also edged closer to populism as he fought populist nationalism in Catalonia from the middle of the horseshoe.
Finally, Rivera’s case shows us the dangers of anti-populist populism. The same is true to a lesser extent of Sánchez (who opposes Vox’s populism) and Ayuso and Vox (who have positioned themselves against Sánchez’s growing populism). How can we fight vigorously against populism without questioning other people’s right to defend populist positions? It is a difficult question.
Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance from the 1940s offers us one possible answer. The liberal philosopher argued that in order to maintain a tolerant society, we must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance. Letting intolerant politicians gain power will always tend to destroy a tolerant society.
My 21st century reply to Popper’s 20th century insight is this: how much intolerance of intolerance can we have before we undermine a generally tolerant society? We should clearly be intolerant of the insurrectional impulses of both the far left and the far right, which will often be illegal anyway. To what extent should this translate into intolerance of the hard left and the hard right if their members commit to working within institutions that evolved to defend pluralism? I’m afraid I can offer no easy answers to this issue today.
The comments are closed, as always when I deal with prickly populists. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Institutionalism and its enemies
The changing demographics of Catalonia
Sánchez (part one and part two), Ayuso and Rivera
Further Reading
Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory by Joel M. Cooper
What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
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