Читать книгу The Radical Right During Crisis - Группа авторов - Страница 15

Radical right leaders and supporters persistently lie in order to advance their political ideology, persuade the public of their righteousness, and to cover up their own bad conduct. For example, according to the Washington Post,9 by October 2019 President Trump had made 13,435 false or misleading statements since taking office. By 10 December 2019, that number had risen to 15,413.10 While it may be anticipated that all politicians “stretch the truth” to their advantage, and some brazenly lie from time to time, the scale of Trump’s mendacity is exceptional and unprecedented. Trump, his administration and the radical right establishment have turned amoral calculation, lying, and dissemination of false facts and fake news into a central plank of official policy rather than just used as an ad hoc convenience.

Radical right reductionism has played well to a populist audience looking for some kind of salvation from perceived problems and threats. The radical right has been skilful in weaving into its narrative an artful rhetoric and imagery concerning problems and threats that are in some cases real but mixed up with far more that are exaggerated or invented. Playing on populist fears, the radical right then proposes itself and its policies as their only salvation. This populist support, based on psychological dependence, may work for a time if the promise of salvation seems plausible and realistic. However, ultimately support is likely to wane as enacted radical right policies fail in the face of real-world complexity.

Dr Alan Waring is a Policy and Practitioner Fellow at CARR and adjunct professor at the Centre for Risk and Decision Sciences (CERIDES) at the European University Cyprus.

1 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “The History and Status of General Systems Theory,” Academy of Management Journal 15 no. 4 (1972): 407-26.

2 Peter Checkland, Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-year Retrospective (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

3 Alan Waring, Practical Systems Thinking (Aldershot, UK: Thomson/Cengage, 1996), 62-4.

4 Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners (New York: Free Press, 1994); Henry Mintzberg, “Rethinking Strategic Planning, Part 1: Pitfalls and Fallacies,” Long Range Planning 27 no. 3 (1994): 12-21.

5 Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat, and Bert Spector, “Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change,” Harvard Business Review 68 no. 6 (1990): 158-166.

6 “Andrew Sabisky, No 10 Adviser Resigns Over Alleged Race Comments,” BBC News, February 18, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51538493.

7 Alan Waring, “The Five Pillars of Occupational Safety and Health in a Climate of Authoritarian Socio-political Climates,” Safety Science 117 (2019): 152-63.

8 Alan Waring, “The Alt-Right, Environmental Issues, and Global Warming,” in The New Authoritarianism Vol 1: A Risk Analysis of the US Alt-Right Phenomenon, ed. A. Waring (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2018), 273-301.

9 Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made False or Misleading Statements Over Days,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/14/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/.

10 Nancy LeTourneau, “The Magnitude of Trump’s Lies,” The Washington Monthly, December 12, 2019, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/12/17/the-magnitude-of-trumps-lies/.