Читать книгу The Radical Right During Crisis - Группа авторов - Страница 12

The radical right indulges in the erasure from their narrative of inconvenient or unwelcome facts from the accepted knowledge base of history and science. For example, protagonists pretend that the vast body of knowledge on the complexity of problems and issues relating to society, science, economics, health, social reforms, human rights, foreign relations, and governance in general, as developed over the past half century, is irrelevant, or is fake science, or never even existed. The radical right policies, narratives and actions of the Trump administration provide stark in extremis examples of such revisionism on many fronts and in various forms.

The radical right seeks to regress to the “simple truths and values” of an imaginary past world of the 1960s and earlier, when relatively simple mechanistic, biological or economic “explanations” provided a comforting illusion of order, certainty, neatly stacked “problems-and-solutions”, and simplistic salvation models and “programs” for correcting deviations from their dogma and their assertions of what constitutes the correct normative order. Critiques,4 of the “fallacy of predetermination” and other reductionist fallacies, and critiques5 of the poor predictability of non-holistic programmatic change, have no currency in the radical right world, since these expose their inherent flaws.

Examples of radical right salvation “cure-alls” range from Trump’s Mexican wall and Orbán’s anti-Muslim border controls, to the palingenetic ultranationalist ethno-religious and political cleansing demanded by the extreme right, to radical right advocacy of, or sympathy with, discredited eugenics theories of inferiority of certain races. As allegedly inferior races will be an unacceptable drain on society and the economy, eugenics advocates argue that they should be “dealt with” (echoing the Nazi Rassenhygiene laws and Eugen Fischer’s infamous Aktion T4 extermination program in Hitler’s Germany). For example, Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to apologize for, or dismiss, a policy adviser who suggested publicly that discriminatory policies based on eugenics were warranted.6

Complexity theory regards real-world problems and issues as “messes”, i.e. systems of problems that defy resolution simply by picking off component problems one-by-one or even in groups, because in doing so the “mess” simply adapts itself and survives in a modified and unresolved form. Messes require the systemic whole to be tackled holistically. Despite the overwhelming trend over the past fourty-five years among governments, policy research groups, and academia towards adopting holistic approaches, the radical right have persisted with their reductionist and revisionist worldview. For example, as I’ve noted,7 some of the radical right (e.g. Reisman) seriously argue for reintroduction of minimalist social, employment and environmental policies similar to those of Victorian times, and the wholesale removal of protective legislation for work people. Nevertheless, because radical right propaganda overall offers a seductive “salvation” model, as the 21st century has progressed, radical right salvation ideas have gained widespread populist support among weary and fearful societies demanding “solutions”. Moreover, there has also been a resurgence of reductionist theories and arguments in some areas of academia, e.g., recent scientific papers that airbrush out the body of knowledge on complexity and advocate rehashed reductionist theories on scientific management and salvationist programmatic change models from the 1960s.