Ages ago I considered the idea of researching and writing a history of the political ‘Right’ in Britain, following on from my works on ‘imperialism’ and its enemies. I’ve still got notes on this, in a file somewhere back in the UK; but they never came to anything. One of my reasons for abandoning the project was that by then – the 1970s – most people assumed that Right-wing ideas had lost their contemporary relevance, in the face of the social democratic tide that had engulfed Britain and most of continental Europe, and appeared to be the most likely path to be followed – soon, we hoped – by the rest of the world. The Right had come to be widely mocked and satirised, as old-fashioned, stupid, invalidated, nasty, or even simply ‘silly’; so that any research I might do into it would be merely historical, and of little or no relevance to the (then) present day. Rightists were dinosaurs; still surviving in one or two places (Peterhouse Cambridge was one; Enoch Powell’s West Midlands another), but with no future ahead of them, in the bright liberal-progressive climate that had emerged from the War. Researching the Right might be interesting – I personally have always been fascinated by the genus; but of no practical use or interest to anyone.

I’m not sure that I completely shared this assumption – I’ve always been reluctant to risk predictions based on history; but to the extent that I did, the 1980s soon disabused me. In Britain, the Right came storming back with Thatcher; in America I guess with Reagan; and within a few years ‘reaction’, as we Leftists saw it, became the new ‘progressive’ trend of the time. It even spread to the Soviet Union, the lodestar for (some) Leftists ever since 1917; whose counter-revolution in and after 1989 left Russia as economically reactionary (i.e. capitalist) as any country, and rather more totalitarian than most. Political liberalism, as we understood it, was in retreat.

Recent events in the USA – the ‘shining city on the hill’ for many liberals in the past – have compounded this. We’re all aware of the rapid lurch to the Right that America took immediately after Donald Trump began his second Presidency in January this year, and which is continuing helter-skelter as I write. ‘Fascist’ used to be a word only used by the far Left to describe this, and dismissed as paranoia by reasonable folk; but now it’s a common way of characterising Trump and his approach to government. Political preferment is restricted to those who are loyal to the ‘leader’; crude nationalism is favoured over internationalism (‘Make America Great’); immigrants are subjected to mass deportations; foreign students expelled for supporting the Palestinians (Netanyahu, another wannabe dictator, must have had a hand in this); books are banned; universities are bullied into conformity; liberal (‘woke’) ideas are mocked and even censored; truth is blatantly distorted (‘alternative facts’); government (‘bureaucracy’) is cauterized; racism and toxic masculinity celebrated; anti-intellectualism encouraged; violence, in the ‘right cause’, tolerated or celebrated; public protest for other causes criminalised; billionaire oligarchs brought into government; imperialistic projects openly floated (Greenland, Gaza, Panama, Canada); – and all this done by mere executive fiat – ‘dictat’ may be a better word for it – in clear contravention of America’s much vaunted Constitution, and in particular its ‘separation of powers’: the ‘checks and balances’ that were supposed to keep the Executive branch (the President) in check. This America isn’t any longer the one whose history I studied at university in the sixties, and experienced first-hand when I lived there; which of course had many flaws (as every nation does), but none of them so ‘Fascistic’ as those that Trump is bestowing on it today.

Of course America, in common with everywhere else, has always harboured the seeds of Fascism. There was an overt Nazi movement there in the thirties, for example; and then there were slavery, segregation, lynching, eugenics, genocide, McCarthyism, and of course the glorification of violence in ‘Western’ movies, and guns. You can see a fascist potential there, clearly, a historical back-story; but it’s Trump who is now bringing that to fruition. The process is not yet completed, and might never be, if the Democrats, perhaps, or even old-fashioned decent Republicans, can grow some cojones. (Is there much popular resistance to Trump in the USA? From where I’m based – Sweden, presently – it’s difficult to see any; but that may be because of the width of the Atlantic, and the noise and confusion created by the MAGA mob.)

Clearly this situation doesn’t only affect America, but the rest of the world too. For a start it must encourage Rightist and dictatorial movements everywhere, including in Europe and the Middle East, where authoritarian, illiberal and reactionary movements have in any case been growing recently, and now have America’s example to encourage them. Trump has admirers in Britain, where Nigel Farage is one of his leading fans. The Right is now confidently surfing this new historical tide, leaving Left-‘progressive’ forces uncertain how to counter it; especially now that it’s allied to what is called ‘populism’, which makes it appear more ‘democratic’.

But there are diplomatic and geopolitical aspects to it as well. America used to be regarded, and to regard herself, as the guarantor of democratic and liberal values throughout the world, either unilaterally or via NATO and other international agencies. Now that guarantee has lapsed. Trump wants to abandon NATO. As a result Western Europe can no longer depend on the USA to defend her against – presently – Russian expansionism; which is why Britain and other democracies are rapidly re-arming: to be able to defend Ukraine initially (and after that, Finland and the Baltic States?); and also why Ukraine’s own situation now looks so fragile. For America is no longer basing her foreign policy on principle – ‘freedom’ (however you define it); but on Realpolitik: the politics and morality in this case of the property developer, which is all that Trump was and essentially still is; based on the ‘deals’ you can make with the ‘cards’ in your hand, and nothing more principled. This is what happens when you elect a real estate capitalist to be in charge of things.

The global event that took ‘principle’ out of the equation for American leaders was of course the fall of communism in Russia and eastern Europe; which back in the ‘Cold War’ years had been considered – not unreasonably – to be an ideological and domestic threat to the West, as well as a military one. It was also one that could spread, infecting and engulfing other nations – and even America herself – if not staunched. That was what incentivised all post-war American Presidents to employ their military power, in America’s own interests, to defend other ‘free’ countries as well as their own. When the communist threat collapsed, it left America and Russia with nothing ideological to separate them, with both sides now playing on the same realpolitikal pitch. It is this that has brought Trump and Putin together, with the former admitting to admiring the latter more than he could have done in communist times, as someone he could ‘deal’ with, to use his favourite property-developer’s word. Hence his betrayal of Ukraine, which is simply a pawn (or a bit-player) in his game; and also of the Palestinians in Gaza, whom he sees not only as ‘losers’, with Israel holding all the ‘cards’, and so not worth rescuing; but even as a winner for him personally, if he can turn it into another prime development for rich Americans. (You’ve seen the video: https://bernardjporter.com/2025/02/26/satire/.)

Where does all this leave Europe: now flanked by two autocracies (or at least one and a half), in place of the autocracy to the east and the friend to the west: the pattern that had dominated the European diplomatic map for half a century? With American leaders like JD Vance and Pete Hegseth now expressing their disdain for and even ‘hatred’ of Europe, supposedly because of the latter’s ‘wokeishness’ and ‘pathetic free-loading’ off the USA (https://www.politico.eu/article/freeloader-john-healey-pete-hegseth-europe-uk-defense/), it is clear that we (here in Europe) can no longer trust America to come to our aid if Russia – or any other power – threatens; which is of course why we are hastily building up our own military capacity. More generally, liberal and social democracy as most of us in Europe understand it, together with Canada and many (not all) of Britain’s other ex-colonies (why I wonder are they so much less Trumpian than the ones that gained their freedom in 1783?), are now under threat from both sides – both of them autocracies if Trump gets his way. That adds an ideological and cultural element to the picture.

In 1992 the Chicago political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, which people took as predicting that  present-day liberal capitalism was the last stage or climax of human progress; leading to a kind of stable utopia, with no more ‘historical’ development to follow. So far that theory has not worn well, and in particular the ‘liberal’ part of it. Capitalism does indeed seem to be progressing strongly; but now in highly illiberal clothes. It has become – in both America and Russia, and also in China, which may soon overtake them both – almost the opposite of ‘liberal’ in that word’s political and social (as distinct from economic) sense; obeying another once oft-touted theory of historical progress, which saw it in neo-Darwinian terms: natural selection; survival of the fittest, or strongest, or in the present context the richest and the most techno-savvy; with ‘moral’ (human, ethical, social) considerations of little account. That may be our future.

Unless, that is, American true democracy can get its act together. Until then it’s Europe (and its ex-colonial offshoots) on whom we must rely to keep social-liberalism – or ‘genuine’ democracy – alive. No wonder that it’s there that Trump, Vance and the world-wide Right are presently training their rhetorical guns.

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(Obviously I shouldn’t have abandoned my ‘history of the Right’ project when I did. But then others have taken it up.)