What Is Behind The Rise Of Support For Far Right Political Parties?
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A little thing called the Internet. Social media platforms on smart phones and their algorithms are winding folk up. Most things you watch on your feeds are slanted toward generating outrage. Video makers want eyeballs on their product so they title them with words designed to shock. Click bait rules the online realm. It is a perfect storm of influences directing folk down the rabbit hole. You might start out exploring a topic and before you know it you are knee deep in bile. This is what is behind the rise of support for far right political parties.
Online Outrage Campaigns & Social Media
The political parties themselves want to attract your attention and support for their campaigns. They go looking for causes likely to drum up ill feeling toward scapegoats that society likes to blame. Perennial scapegoats like immigrants, gay people, and those groups who don’t fit in with the dominant cohort. Blaming others for our own problems acts like a safety valve to some degree. It is not an admirable thing by any means but has been around for a very long time. Political parties, especially those on the right, find the blame game to be a rich vein for their campaign strategists.
Blame It On The Immigrant & Other Minorities
What is behind the rise of support for far right political parties? If there are problems in the economy they can be blamed on immigration – new arrivals taking the jobs off the rest of us. If it is the LGBTQI community, then, it is wasteful programmes taking our hard earned tax dollars. A favourite target for right wing parties at the moment is trans people. Despite there being very few trans people relative to our tens of millions in population this emotive topic drums up the outrage of those who do not think that these people should exist at all. There are hardline religious groups against them and they are campaigning for their right to shun these outliers from their institutions. This is called religious freedom. The conservative parties are running campaigns which invite members of the socially dominant cohort – white folk in the main – to get behind policies designed to limit any special accommodations for groups like Indigenous peoples.
Right Wing Parties & The Blame Game
What is behind the rise of support for far right political parties? It is popular now for white people who feel aggrieved at their own lack of success to blame this on the special treatment supposedly doled out to dark skinned people living on the fringes of our societies. This convenient catchcry allows these folk to duck responsibility for their own contribution to their own lack of material success. Sure, they might have dropped out of school and didn’t bother to study hard but that is not why they failed, it was somebody else’s fault. Yeah sure, they might drink too much and have a bad attitude, more generally, but that is not their fault.
No, the far right welcome these, let’s not call them losers, these aggrieved human beings, and tells them that they have been robbed of opportunity by these Indigenous people’s getting an easy ride in life. Despite the fact that this is contradicted by the economic evidence of just who is further down the food chain, this downward envy plays well for right wing political parties.
Looking Out For Easy Answers To Complex Issues
Too many people want easy answers to complex societal problems. Youth crime? Lock them up! The digital age is all about push button solutions. Convenience is king and if something is wrong in your life it must be this scapegoat at fault. No political party is going to tell folk it is their own responsibility. Pissing in pockets is about buttering up support by passing the buck onto a socially acceptable target. Invariably it will be weaker groups that cannot readily defend themselves. Soft targets like women used to be. Refugees are socially isolated and without economic muscle, which makes them low hanging fruit for suburban Australia. Trans people are somewhat in a similar position. Who can be the punching bag for suburban whites under pressure economically from their home loans and high interest rates? The right wing party will dial up a few ripe candidates. Youth crime? Adult crime, adult time. A catchy slogan to take to the election. Nobody seems to be asking the question why these kids are breaking the law. Too hard for a political party only interested in expediency. Channel 7 click bait on YouTube – youth crime porn for oldies.
Some shocking misinformation on social media will kick things off. Lies about refugees. Lies about trans people. The Internet is full of this stuff. The blame game on steroids.
“Social media posts that promote outrage and sensationalism – which are often prioritised by current algorithms due to high engagement levels – can exacerbate societal divisions and decrease capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges, argue researchers Luke Thorburn, PhD researcher from the Department of Informatics, King’s College London, and Aviv Ovadya, an affiliate at Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and visiting scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge.”
There are no easy answers folks. Youth crime is a community problem and that involves you and me. Why are these kids running amok? Could it be that their parents are locked up in gaol. Could it be a neglect issue? A racial issue? Oh no, of course not, Australia is not a racist nation. Right wing folk keep telling us that . Deny defend depose. Â
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom.
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