Some years ago, I happened to meet a survivalist and conspiracy theorist. He told me he had weapons stashed inside the walls of his house, was ready to use them in defence of “English” women and children, and believed that the BBC was covering up a vast Muslim paedophile ring. It seems uncontroversial to describe this as a “far right” belief system. But the event that first led him to abandon his faith in liberal democracy had nothing to do with the traditional concerns of the right: it was the Iraq war. The internet and Tommy Robinson did the rest.
There is a well-known “horseshoe” theory of political sentiment, which suggests that as ideologies become more polarised along a left-right axis, so they become more alike on a liberal-authoritarian one. This was a useful prop for centrists of the mid-20th century, who sought to portray themselves as the first line of defence against the gulag.
