There’s always a narrative. This year, it’s that 2016 saw a massive surge for the reactionary far-right. The world, we are told, has suddenly become very suspicious of itself: millions gnaw their way down into the soil to blot out everything around them.

Reaction and nativism are on the rise everywhere. There was Brexit, there was Trump. Kalashnikov-brandishing Salafists left bodies and wreckage across the Mediterranean from Syria to the Côte d’Azur. There were the petty micro-tyrannies of French mayors ordering Muslim women to strip off at the beach. Then there were the vaster, more sprawling macro-tyrannies, as nominally democratic systems from Turkey to the Philippines started to crumble under the stomping weight of strong men.

All this is true, but it’s not the complete picture. This is not, entirely, a surge for the right wing. What we saw in 2016 were the consequences of a political order that’s done everything it can to exclude the left.

As some liberals never tire of pointing out, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Trump’s victory did not, on the level of the American public itself, mark a sudden swing to the right. Republicans voted for their candidate, just as they always do. And while Trump received more votes than Mitt Romney had four years earlier, Trump won – and Clinton lost – because the people Democrats usually count on failed to vote for them.



They didn’t vote because the Democrats didn’t really have anything to offer: Clinton’s platform was maniacally sane and aggressively centrist, insisting against all the evidence that America was already great, that all it needed to do was to stay on its current course towards the distant cliffs.

It was pitched to the “moderate Republican”, a chimerical creature living somewhere in Arlington, Virginia, some respectable bore in a two-storey house, reading the papers but mostly indifferent to the suffering outside its walls. It didn’t work. Those people all still voted for Trump. All it did was alienate the working-class people of all races screaming for something different.

It’s common for people to put the blame on the non-voters here. They shirked their duty: to vote for the status quo, even if it’s slowly killing them. This complaint is usually unpleasantly whiny. The fact that these people feel entitled to make it points to exactly why they keep on losing.



In The Implosion of Meaning in the Media, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes this kind of voter alienation as a tactic. The demand political systems make of us – “of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding” – are in their own way an exercise of power. In these conditions, resistance takes the form of the refusal to do so: “the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning – precisely the practices of the masses”.

For decades, centrist figures such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair encouraged us to approach politics as atomised individuals: not through any kind of collective struggle, not by making mass demands. They tried to get rid of the conditions that allowed radical mass movements to flourish. And the response of the masses has been to fall silent, and not engage.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a wave of reactionary populism overwhelming the stable democracies of the west. All the terrifying monsters of this new era – racism, nationalism, the ruthless dispossession of the poor, the chiliastic frenzy of a white male subject under constant imagined threat – were already there. They’ve been part of the fabric of western society for a very long time.

What’s happened is that political centrists have deliberately blocked any engagement from those who could keep a lid on them. Things like the welfare state and anti-racist solidarity – the things keeping liberal societies from collapsing into pure bigotry and pure exploitation – were always the products of radical anti-capitalist struggles.

Without their influence, capitalism has been left to spiral lopsidedly into its own idiocy, to droop and moisten until it congeals again into the smirking face of Donald Trump. Fascism is just capitalism that’s been left out in the sun for a week.

It doesn’t look like 2017 will be much better. The far-right Marine Le Pen looks certain to make it into the final round of the French presidential election. In 2002, the last time a Le Pen got this far, millions of leftwing voters turned out to vote against her father and for the lesser evil, the conservative Jacques Chirac.

This time her opponent will most likely be François Fillon, a desiccated free-market Thatcherite peddling anti-Muslim bigotry only a touch lighter than Le Pen’s, someone who knows he has nothing to offer the left, and doesn’t seem to care. It’s getting harder to imagine a repeat of Chirac’s victory.

In the US, mainstream liberals are announcing their “Resistance” to a 2017 that’s smashing into the end of December with all the dumb force of a Trump presidency – but their ideas mostly consist of giving money to the Democrats.



Whatever form resistance does take, it won’t be that. Politics will boil over in its own resentment – and who would want to help it, when it’s done nothing to help us?