Let neither our reflexive anti-American sentiment nor our democracy-sausage-fuelled smugness fool us. It could happen to us. It could happen to me and my community, where I live in France. It could happen to you and your community in Australia. Some of it already has.
The rise of the far right is the defining story of our century so far. The voters of the United States have elected a rapist, a racist with deep ties to fascism, a convicted criminal who tried to steal the previous election. They’ve also elected his dead-eyed running mate, a conduit for the most despicable thinking on offer from the hyper-networked international far right.
Donald Trump and JD Vance are not alone. They have political homologues in elected office in Argentina in the form of Javier Milei; in Hungary’s Viktor Orbán; in Italy’s Giorgia Meloni; in Austria; in the Netherlands; in India. Do not ask what Trumpism means for the rest of the world. Trumpism is already there.
Ukraine’s future is in doubt with Trump promising he can solve the conflict “in a day”, presumably by forcing capitulations to Vladimir Putin. Europe can no longer rely on the US as a reliable defence partner. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has already reached out to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to discuss just how the EU is going to deal with Trump 2.0. Macron likes to see himself as a Trump-whisperer, having plied his US counterpart with military fly-overs and brass bands playing Daft Punk during their first terms.
But Macron today has been hobbled by an ascendant far right at home, which finished first in European elections and the first round of parliamentary elections this summer, only to be eventually defeated by a tenuous electoral pact between the centrists and the left. Today, a right-wing government serves at the pleasure of Marine Le Pen, who can cause it to tumble in an instant by withdrawing her support. In Germany, meanwhile, the ever-rising Alternative for Germany has plotted mass deportations based on racist criteria, just as Trump has promised to do.
Around the world, far-right agitators are nourished by the weapons-grade, blood-and-soil misogyny of the international manosphere, the same animus that drives race riots and violent attacks on asylum seekers in the UK, neo-Nazi rallies on the streets of Melbourne, and incel gun massacres in the US. They are influenced by the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which was born in France and holds that white people will be replaced by non-white migrants in the Western world.
This is a theory that promotes white nuclear families out-reproducing people of colour. It is thus a theory that relies on women’s reproductive rights being snatched away, and the erasure of gender-diverse and LGBTQIA+ people as well as the violent “deterrence” of migrants. It is behind the attacks on trans and gender-expansive people from the right — a major feature of the Trump campaign’s final days — aided by the delusional, transphobic strand of feminism that exists predominantly in the UK but seeks footholds elsewhere. It was a theory embraced by Brenton Tarrant, the Australian man who gunned down 51 people in two Christchurch mosques during Trump’s last presidency; by Robert Gregory Bowers, who massacred 11 worshippers in a Pittsburg synagogue; by Patrick Wood Crusius, who murdered 23 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo.
One of Trump’s first acts in office will be to reinstate the Global Gag Rule, which strips USAID funding from NGOs and charities worldwide that mention abortion as part of reproductive healthcare. That international attack on women’s rights will echo the decimation of reproductive rights in the US. Despite some small victories on abortion via ballot measures in Tuesday’s election, the US today is a place where teenagers die of sepsis because doctors decline to intervene when a pregnancy has gone catastrophically wrong, fearful of being prosecuted under abortion bans.
The same fundamentalist religious groups who have twice elevated Trump to power and whose five-decade-long attacks on abortion rights led to the fall of Roe v Wade in 2022 are now funding anti-rights movements in Africa, including in Uganda, which passed legislation punishing homosexuality with death in 2023. Similar groups fund anti-abortion movements throughout Europe, promoting misinformation and disinformation about abortion via bogus “crisis pregnancy centres”, which aim to talk desperate women out of ending unwanted or unviable pregnancies.
None of this is a one-way street. While the US far right wields enormous power worldwide, it is in fact in a symbiotic relationship with fascistic and extreme-right groups elsewhere. An unnamed French billionaire put his thumb on the scales in betting prediction markets ahead of Tuesday’s vote, while the German Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis has been happily hosting crypto-conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in her castle. Alito penned the court’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade and has flown the flags of the January 6 insurrectionists at his holiday home.
The United States of America has always been a bogeyman for those of us who pride ourselves on living in what we see as superior democracies, in which extremists and billionaires have not captured major institutions. But our relief not to live in a country where, to name one example, women are second-class citizens, should not mask the fact that the tentacular reach of the far right, boosted by unregulated, billionaire-owned social platforms, touches all of us, everywhere. We would do better to address the rising tide of far-right, neo-Nazi and fascist movements sprouting up in our own backyards than to pat ourselves on the back right now.
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