Far-Right Capture

It has been eight years. Eight years between a “rally” and a flurry of executive orders.

In eight years, the U.S. has gone from the “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville and then first-term President Trump declaring there were “good people on both sides,” to the second-term President Trump declaring he will be deploying National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. where they will have authority over local police. He (and his speechwriters) explain this authoritarian action in the racist rhetoric we have come to expect in discussions of cities when “urban" has become code for Black, Muslim, Immigrant, Other: “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” In fact, crime is down in DC and across the U.S. in every category, but none of this is fact-based and we all know that.

This is a far-right capture of the U.S. government. It’s not to say that we didn’t have overt white supremacists in office before this, but there is something different to this turn. The short span of eight years from an “extremist rally” to a sitting president issuing an authoritarian take over of a city suggests the alacrity with which this has taken place. The far-right capture means that we can no longer speak meaningfully about “extremism” because they, the “extremists,” have seized the power of the federal government with help from millions who voted for this. This far-right capture is happening elsewhere, outside the U.S., too.

As English novelist Mark Chadbourn, noted recently about the global rise of the far right:

This wasn’t about America at all. It certainly wasn’t about Trump. It was happening everywhere, in virtually the same form, across the entirety of what we used to call the Western World.

When you look at the profile of those who support MAGA, or Reform in the UK, or the AfD in Germany and Rassemblement National in France, they’re the same people. Low, often very low, educational attainment, usually white, and emerging from those post-industrial landscapes.

It’s a global tribe.

Part of his argument is that this ‘global tribe’ is about class. Specifically, the deindustrialization (away from coal mining globally) and lots of people perceiving themselves as on the losing side of the rise of the information economy (hence, the resentment toward higher education as “elites”). Fair point. However, the class story of this far-right capture is more complicated than the tale of some disgruntled would-be coal miners.

It’s the billionaire class that wants to use jurisdiction shopping between nation-states - or the proposed “Freedom Cities” - where their preferred version of capitalism is running for their benefit and where they aren’t required to pay taxes. For example, tech companies have long used tax-avoidance schemes like the Double Irish, where they avoid paying taxes by relocating (at least part of) their company’s office. The billionaire class of a tiny few individuals now controls most of the money on the planet. The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour— while nearly five billion people have been made poorer, according to a 2024 report. The levels of inequality are at (or approaching) the same proportions as France just before 1789.

The other important element in the current far-right capture has to do with another technological innovation: the birth control pill. This, and related technologies, have effectively separated "sex" from "reproduction" for much of the world's population. While it’s important to acknowledge the racist practices of those who developed this technology, it also launched another set of social consequences. The pill made possible the movement for gender equality (“women’s liberation”) and for LGBTQ rights.

This is epic, world-historic shit. Seriously, no woman in my family could have ever imagined a life for themselves outside the limits of what their reproductive lives allowed. For example, one distant relative of mine (my paternal great-x4-grandmother), was Sarah Hammond (1753-1804). She was the daughter of an immigrant who’d come over from Lincolnshire, England. At 19, Sarah married Thomas Riggs, and over the next decade and a half, she had 10 children. That means that from the age of 19 to 34 years old, Sarah was always pregnant and/or nursing. She died, perhaps of exhaustion, at age 51. This breed-and-die life of my long ago ancestor is precisely what far-right figures like Elon Musk imagine for women who are “built to be traded” or, as Pete Hegseth suggested, shouldn’t be allowed to vote. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade by this Supreme Court is another bit of evidence for the far-right capture we’re experiencing.

But here’s the thing.

Their capture of the government is, in many ways, the case of the dog catching the car. The people in power have no interest in, much less capacity for, governing. They are having a tantrum. A really big, ugly one in which a lot of people are going to get hurt, but they will not succeed in their goal of authoritarian rule over all of us. They just can’t do it, logistically. It’s a big place. Have you ever driven across the U.S.? It’s H-U-G-E. It makes it hard to control in the way that fascists fantasize about.

So, here’s the other thing.

We, collectively, are not going back to some nostalgic world that never existed. We are not going to sign on to some version of being “baby machines,” suitable only for domestic life no matter how much "trad wife" propaganda gets pushed onto our feeds.

We, collectively, will build a better world that will outlast these terrible men, this awful moment. Their downfall is on its way. Then, we will have to decide what accountability looks like for those who have orchestrated this far-right capture and while people are fantasizing about The Hague or a new set of "Nuremberg Trials,” I wonder if we might have gone past where such institutions could impose anything like accountability.

The good news is that out of their failure, out of their absolutely relentless cruelty, and out of the wreckage of their far-right capture, we can create something different, a society that works for everyone instead of just a few. And that transformation is the very thing that will make the far right irrelevant…if we want it.