The Center won't beat Fascism

Photo by Gabe Pierce on Unsplash

Race riots conducted by lynch mobs are rocking England. A Muslim woman was attacked with acid by a far-right mob, another mob burned down a library, and fascists roam the streets attacking Africans, Muslims, and anyone they believe to be an immigrant. The men who constitute these mobs are not just random white Brits, many are organized into far-right gangs that kicked off this weekend of violence and terror. These Islamophobic anti-immigrant organizations promote hatred and fascism and have a history of street violence, somewhat like the Proud Boys and other U.S. organizations. And now they’ve compounded their ability to recruit, mobilize, and terrorize through social media, as well as local fascist organizing.

These roving men spent their entire weekend assaulting and harassing their neighbors, targeting isolated people of color, and going after hotels and libraries and other places where immigrants get help or other people in need receive services. The new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has condemned what he described as "far-right thuggery" and said perpetrators would face the full force of the law. But just one month ago the Labour Party, centrists who just beat the center-right in the UK elections, were talking about their plan to “smash the criminal boat gangs.” These “gangs” of course referring to the people who make money transporting migrants, and often refugees, get across the English channel. Leading up to the recent election Starmer also discussed plans to deport 'people coming from countries like Bangladesh' and to “make sure we actually secure our borders.”

This language, these plans, helped fuel the fire burning in England right now. When relatively more liberal parties demonize migrants and the migration process, instead of offering an alternative that would focus on helping people in need and meaningfully addressing the factors that cause people to migrate, it shows the far-right that the center doesn’t fundamentally oppose them when it comes to the treatment of immigrants. We in the U.S. can see a devastatingly similar pattern. The right has spent decades demonizing people seeking refuge in this country, only for the Democratic Party to turn and try to outflank the Republicans on ‘border security.’

Outflanking efforts of this sort are both a moral and political disaster. When voters see one party try to move towards the position of the other, which happens to consistently look like rightward movement from the major party claiming to oppose the right, it makes the liberals look weak. This process makes it look, justifiably, like the center of gravity is on the right, and is one reason why a recent major study of European politics determined that shifting right doesn’t help center or left-wing parties win votes.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

But, far beyond that political failure, there’s a much bigger issue playing out right now. Legitimizing the right’s vile anti-immigrant views by trying to co-opt their positions enables the far-right vilification of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants. Failing to present a strong alternative to the right’s violent vision of deportations and destabilization ushers in their perspective as the dominant narrative. And that dehumanizing viewpoint has consequences. We’re seeing it in the UK, and we’re seeing it in America. Fascism has risen and has been legitimized in the eyes of far, far too many people. And the process I’m describing here has been instrumental to that far-right ascendence.

This is not limited to the way the right, and center, speak and think and act on immigration. Take homelessness. One month ago the Supreme Court legalized the criminalization of homelessness in their Grants Pass ruling. California’s Governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, has already signed an executive order using the ruling to enable mass homeless sweeps across the state. San Francisco mayor London Breed says that she plans to launch a “very aggressive” crackdown on homeless encampments in the city this month. “The problem is not going to be solved by building more housing,” she added as she made her announcement, “Thank goodness for the Supreme Court decision.”

Here is the problem distilled down to its essence. What would solve the homelessness crisis? Housing, of course. Both a reduction in the cost of housing and simply providing housing for those in need. It’s both the ethical and the cost-effective solution, rather than paying for expensive sweeps accompanied by police, which then happen again and again because the people displaced from homeless encampments don’t, of course, have anywhere to go. So they set up another encampment. And now, in the wake of this Supreme Court ruling, we’re likely to see more legal fees and the sky-high cost of jailing and imprisoning people who cannot pay those fees, and so on and so forth.

But instead of solutions we’re seeing the systemic criminalization of, and attack on, homeless people in the United States. This approach would not be possible without rhetoric and logic that supports treating struggling human beings as failures, as less than, as disposable. That logic currently proliferates on the right, but it is also widespread in the center, where far too many people would rather have homeless people removed from their line of sight than have the underlying problem of people living without housing removed from the world. This sort of thinking, this idea that humans can and should be disposed of, enables the fascist movement. It’s the same line of thinking that underpins white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia and supremecist thinking of all forms.

Folks in the center appear unaware of how the degradation of immigrants and the homeless are part and parcel of this same school of thought, and of how the right uses these issues. But we’re seeing that reality play out in the emboldening of the right, whose once-fringe ideas, their once-fringe dehumanization of immigrants or the homeless or trans people or other groups, are now all too normalized. And that is immensely dangerous, because the scenes coming out of England, for example, speak to just how much confidence the far-right now has. This sort of confidence leads them to go around attacking people and targeting government and community buildings.

The center has not held. The center has given way and given in to the right’s rhetoric and way of thinking on far too many issues, not just the ones discussed so far in this piece. There are more factors than can be named here, but the billionaire ownership of media, the massive and growing influence of wealth in politics, the center’s refusal to move an inch to the left even when fascists loom to their right – all of these and more have brought us to where we are today. The logic that homelessness will not be solved with housing, for example, should be laughable on its face. And yet it’s the logic that dominates centrist thinking across the West, and of course the right agrees. This line of thought blames the poor for being poor, blames the homeless for being homeless, and blames the individual for everything that befalls them in a society where larger forces and massive systems act on us and place countless people in immensely vulnerable positions. This is what you get when capitalism can do no wrong – the individual is always to blame, and the conditions that the individual struggles within are never questioned.

So the profit motive in the housing market can’t be blamed; the person who got fired or had a health emergency must be to blame for losing their housing. The center has ceded all of this to the right, if it was ever contested, and so homeless people are “swept,” meaning violently moved around as their belongings are repeatedly destroyed. Meanwhile, two numbers go up and up: the number of homeless people and the profits of rental companies and developers. Similarly, migrants are to blame for seeking a better life, according to the right and center. The destabilization of their home countries must be ignored, the neoliberal economics that devastate job markets and wreck the ecosystems of entire countries can’t be questioned. International economic policy in this late capitalist period must be taken for granted, and even ignored, because the decisions that individual people make to migrate in search of a better life might start to make sense within context.

So here we are, with the price of rent and the cost of buying a home rising and rising. Here we are, with laws that make existing in public more and more difficult. Public space is being eaten up and commodified, and new laws that criminalize homelessness are already being weaponized even against people with homes, because how can cops or mall security tell if you’re unhoused or just engaged in the devious behavior of hanging out in public space? In the UK race riots continue as lynch mobs look for anyone who could be ‘foreign’ to attack, while the people actually driving up the cost of living and ruining communities sit back and relax, and, in fact, fund the scapegoating of oppressed groups.

Rhetoric that demonizes the vulnerable has real, material consequences. It enables race riots and allows billionaires to jack up the cost of housing while people are busy dehumanizing those who can’t afford a place to sleep. It leads to attacks on trans folks, queer people, women, and others. And the logic that permits it all has spread far beyond its origins in far-right circles. The center is unequipped, and mostly uninterested, in combating fascists and their twisted arguments. Instead the center concedes and concedes and even tries to outflank the right. That approach only serves to legitimize ideas that should instead be thoroughly defeated.

And we can defeat these ideas. We can offer compelling alternatives as we organize to make those alternatives real. We do not, for example, need to give one inch on the idea that some people simply don’t deserve housing, and are beneath us for their inability to secure a place to live in this difficult system. Instead we can clearly and unflinchingly put forward the idea that shelter is a right, that we can house everyone, and that we have an obligation to do so. The exact same approach is true for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. There is the space, the resources, and the wealth to go around. It just so happens that a few people are hoarding those resources, and those same few people are immensely invested in none of us turning to examine them, to examine why the few have so much while the many have so little. 

So whether it’s immigration, housing, or any number of issues, those few people desperately want us to not get down to the root, to not look at why this world is set up to extract wealth from everyone around the globe and funnel it into their bank accounts. Africa, Latin America, the Middle East: people would not be leaving these regions to come to the U.S., England, and Europe if the ultra-rich hadn’t destabilized dozens of nations with war and economic extraction. And in the West those same people and their same systems destabilize families and communities, forcing people out of their homes and into the streets.

But while they have the riches, we have the numbers. We have the people, and if we collectively set our sights on the systems that oppress and wear out and hurt all of us around the globe, we can end untold amounts of suffering. It’s on us to organize and to message in such a way that it undercuts the right, the center, and the billionaires. This isn’t an easy task, but it’s the work that lies before us. And more and more people are ready. We can all feel the instability, the exhaustion, the tension and pain proliferating across the world. Now it’s time to engage in the long-term, transformative work that can end that suffering, and see the dawn of a new day.