Wages don’t rise, jobs are scarcer, and young adults still live with their parents because they can’t afford not to. The richest of us live lives free of worry while the rest struggle, we sink, and not one voice amongst the ruling class speaks up. And because none of them speak, nothing changes. People die without access to healthcare, nothing changes. The gap between the rich and the poor widens, and nothing changes. No wonder, then, that people are angry, no wonder our moment is so volatile. Justice has escaped us. For as long as many of us can remember we have been seen as votes on two legs instead of living, breathing humans. We are angry, and we have every right to be.
It’s a sign of wilful ignorance when our institutions expect us to accept suffering without resistance. People are angry at the injustice they see, and that anger is proof that the public is nowhere near as stupid as our establishments like to think we are. If we were stupid, we wouldn’t be angry. People realise that they are being screwed over, so they do what any person would do and they go looking for answers.
Answers, though, are hard to come by, even if our phones are not. We carry a world of almost limitless information around with us, almost constantly. And because, in theory, everyone on the internet is given an equal share, we can be exposed to as many opinions and ideas as there are people with a wifi connection.
But opinions and ideas are not the same as answers, and with so many conflicting accounts based on conflicting information, how do we arrive at any answer at all? Humans need closure, the security of knowledge. If we can’t rationalise the world around us into a narrative, then we can’t make sense of so much information and injustice.
The far-right, including the “alt-right,” has grasped that need for narrative and wrung it for all it’s worth. Their narrative has power; it takes hold of people’s anger and directs it at something, immigrants, people of colour, LGBT+ people, whoever they may be. It wraps up an answer in a neat little bow. But those answers are never real answers, they never point at real problems. Rather than focus on the broken economic system, focus on immigrants stealing your job. It’s not automation and profit-oriented outsourcing which makes you redundant, it’s affirmative action. For some reason it is easier to fear the powerless, so who better to pin the blame on for everything in the world? It’s simple, time-tested politics.
And that’s the great stumbling block of the left when it comes to a narrative, that it really isn’t that simple. But we have to realise that the far-right pokes and prods at insecurity because they have nothing else. They might have a narrative, but that’s about all they have.
The far-right is reactive; it treats tactics born from fear as if they were ends in themselves. There is no plan for what comes after expelling all immigrants and non-white people, crushing liberation movements, and stamping out dissidence. If you really think about it even just for a moment, it suddenly makes no sense.
Because what happens after the change? When white working people go back to strawberry picking for minimum wage after all the immigrants are gone, what then? When the working day is still long even with no women or gays in the office, when poor and working class people still have to pay what they can’t afford, what has really changed? The country’s face has no more brown in it, but people still suffer and injustice still exists.
The right may give voice to frustration, but it is never in its interest to give adequate answers. That is part of the reason why it so easily slipped into the mainstream. Besides a concerted effort from the far-right to normalize fascist ideology, there is also the fact that it never really challenges mainstream politics. Capitalism evolves, it adapts, and the far-right is a symptom, not the cause.
The anger people feel is not new by any means, only more vicious. It is the anger towards exploitation when our lives are worth so much more. The way that anger is formed and who it affects is different today than it was 150 years ago, it may even be a different kind of anger, but it knits us together against injustice. That anger validates our humanity. It shows us what we are worth.
Now more than ever we must realise the humanity of black people and other people of colour at risk from police violence, transgender women at risk of abuse and murder, a multiracial working class subject to poverty and disease, and recognise that across humanity, injustice is always met with outrage. We must ask ourselves, do we have more in common with those who fight against injustice, or those who pursue it?
The left takes anger and asks us to share it, to work together against those who exploit us and in doing so, overcome it. And there is our response to the far-right narrative. The left has failed to come up with anything nearly as stirring as the vapid statements of the far-right, but that isn’t the way it has to be. They have a narrative of hope in the way they organise and the change they fight for, all that is left to do is to get it out there. It is now the job of the left to inspire, inform, and create, in that order.
