What is ‘far-right’? With the progress of Marine Le Pen to France’s presidential run-off, the term has been liberally used — as it has been over recent years across the West. Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, and the Sweden Democrats are all said to be far-right, to name but three.
The fact that the first two of those groups engage in intimidation, racism and overt displays of political violence would ordinarily distinguish them from a peaceful democratic party opposed to mass immigration like the Sweden Democrats. Yet everywhere there is the same name creep. The website Breitbart is frequently called far-right, as is the administration of Donald Trump. So too is Richard Spencer, a self-proclaimed white supremacist who last year whipped up a crowd of supporters doing Hitler salutes. Is nobody interested in the differences?
Douglas Murray and David Goodhart consider the realities of the ‘far-right’:
There was a time when the term acted as a useful cordon sanitaire, marking off actual fascists and neo-Nazis from the legitimate political ‘right’.
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