If you missed it at the time (as I did*), a good place to start for your Easter reading would be this article from a few weeks ago in the Conversation by Aurelien Mondon and Alex Yates: “The word ‘populism’ is a gift to the far right – four reasons why we should stop using it.” It argues a point that I’ve made a number of times here in the past.
Mondon and Yates put it this way:
[F]ar-right politicians are infringing on democratic ideals across the world. If we are serious about meeting the challenge they pose, we must stop treating them as legitimate, democratic actors and instead see them as the threat they really are.
A very big part of this effort is also quite a simple step. We must stop referring to far-right politics as “populist”.
… [T]he populist element of any given movement comes second to politics and ideology. Parties of the left and right may both use populist rhetoric, but this tells us little about how they actually govern.
They go on to explain that the “populism” usage both masks the threat from the far right and exaggerates its strength. It also has serious policy consequences, as, in their words, it is “now common to see mainstream parties absorbing the politics of the far right on the flawed assumption that these ideas are ‘what the people want’.” And the terminological point stands regardless of whether or not you think (as they evidently do not) that it’s possible for far-right parties to be tamed and become respectable democratic actors.
Mondon and Yates also say that “we must be honest about the decisions that have led us to this reactionary moment.” I’ve made the same point myself, about the guilt of supposedly mainstream centre-right parties (although we may well have different decisions in mind), but I think it’s more important to look to the future. Whatever the past sins of parties or individuals, we need the centre-right as part of a broad front to defend democracy.
For a current example of the terminological confusion, see this appalling report from last week of the BBC having actually apologised for referring to the far-right party Reform UK (founded by Brexit leader Nigel Farage), as, you guessed it, “far right”. Perhaps driven in part by Britain’s insane libel laws, the media are abandoning accurate reporting to avoid hurting people’s feelings. And if more precise terms are ruled out, they’re increasingly likely to fall back on “populist”.
While we’re talking about the far right, the other day while looking for something else in the archive I came across an interesting sequence of posts from the middle of 2016. It was a disturbing time; Britain had just voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump had just secured the Republican presidential nomination. Over about three weeks, these consecutive stories touched on those and other topics, trying to understand how the world got to such a place.
Much as we might have hoped they would, the issues concerned have not gone away. I modestly suggest that they’re well worth re-reading:
Spain, eighty years on
Spain marks another anniversary, but the lessons of the civil war have a special resonance this year for the rest of the world as well.
Race and the Republicans
The history of the last fifty years in the Republican party shows how the conservative movement sowed the seeds of its own destruction. It’s not clear how it can ever be rebuilt.
How UKIP saved the world (sort of)
Another way of looking at the Trump-Brexit analogy.
Racism and the Republicans
Decisions on voting rights provide further evidence for the centrality of race to the Republican identity.
Two lectures, or how libertarians lost the plot
The rise of Donald Trump shows why we can’t rely on libertarians to defend liberty.
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* Thanks to Jo Waite for drawing it to my attention.
The World is Not Enough 
Confused by what you mean by populism or far right. But if it wasn’t for some parties labelled “far right” then what you call the “centre” wouldn’t be the centre, it would be the far right. This obsession with putting everything on a spectrum absurd. People and movements aren’t “right” because of where they sit on a spectrum, but what they promote. It seems that what was the centre 30 years ago is now the “far right”, but that doesn’t make them wrong because the spectrum has shifted.
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If ‘right’ and ‘left’ mean anything at all (and of course they do at least some of the time), then they can only mean ‘right of this’ and ‘left of that’. That’s obviously true of them in the earlier spatial sense (at this moment I’m to the right of the drawers and to the left of the mouse) and it’s also true of them in the political sense. The political positions which were on the right and on the left of politics in France when those terms were first used in a political sense were on the right and on the left relative to each other; those specific positions are not relevant to contemporary French politics, but in contemporary French politics there’s still a left and a right. (That doesn’t mean that every country’s politics has a left and a right; like other concepts, it’s meaningful in some contexts and not in others.)
So, yes, as time passes it’s possible that a position which was once found on what was then the left, the centre, or the right of French politics (or the politics of any other country that is under discussion) may now be found in a different position, just as things can move (or be moved) spatially from right to left or from left to right.
I don’t know which are the particular positions which you think have shifted (or been shifted, as the spectrum changed) from being in the centre to being on the far right, but I agree that shift (if it actually has happened) isn’t definitive of whether they are good or bad, correct or incorrect, desirable or undesirable. If they were good positions (for whatever reasons) thirty years ago, then they may still be good positions for much the same reasons; if they were bad positions (for whatever reasons) thirty years ago, then they may still be bad positions for much the same reasons. It’s hard to judge if you won’t tell us what those positions are.
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“People and movements aren’t ‘right’ because of where they sit on a spectrum, but what they promote.” Well, it’s both, but it’s other things as well. A party system is a complex beast. Far-right parties (just as an example; much the same could be said about far-left parties) form an identifiable family; you look at the policies they advocate, but also at the way they relate to other parties, at the links they have with similar parties in other countries, at their history and at how they present their history.
So no, if a far-right party in some system just suddenly disappeared, what was previously a centre-right party wouldn’t suddenly become far-right. It might in the longer term, but being a centre-right party isn’t just about your relative position on the spectrum; it’s about behaving in a certain way. being mainstream in both policies and identity. Some countries have no far-right party to speak of; others (of which Australia is one) have no far-left party.
Of course there are borderline cases – no-one pretends the terminology is precise or that its application is always uncontroversial. But it’s the best we’ve got.
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