The dots have been joined. The seeds of Australian housing unaffordability are now blossoming into noxious hard-right political weeds. Our failure to nip them in the bud could have dire consequences for our nation.
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Many younger Australians “ … are going to see they are never going to afford a home. If they do, it’s going to be in the middle of nowhere. They are going to be spending two hours in traffic to get to work in some dead-end job [that they] had to go to university for four years [to get]. They are in all this debt. The whole thing is geared against them. Probably not until they get to 40 can they even afford a family, so they can’t even breed.”
Hmmm, sounds reasonable but a hint as to the author is in the last word; “breed”.
The quote concludes, “So can we continue (sic) white people existing in this country if we don’t have the economics geared for us to breed?”
Cited by Lydia Khalil in her 2022 paper “The rise of the extreme right: the new global extremism and the threat to democracy”, the author of this quote was Thomas Sewell, a leader in Australia’s neo-Nazi movement, who also participated in that movement’s recent march outside the NSW Parliament House.
Rise of hard-right
Khalil has studied and advised law enforcement agencies on the rise of the far-right in the US and Australia over many years.
Noting that the term encompasses a constellation of ideas and manifestations, she detects consistent themes, most notably attitudes to immigration. “(O)ne of the most consequential predictors of support for right-wing extremism is a person’s stance on immigration…”.
In the example above, a solution to the housing crisis is to restrict immigration, based on the plausible but false claim that too many “non-whites” have caused demand and prices to spike. Here, the housing crisis serves as Trojan horse to promote darker hard-right messages.
Housing affordability has already been alloyed with immigration by the hard-right and daily sharpened with resentment and deployed to infect and attack our parliamentary democracy.
Khalil also charts the common strategies employed by hard-right proselytisers, including the use of internet forums to recruit, targeting the young, stoking resentment, and through appeals to free speech, attempts to shift popular political narratives rightwards by insinuating hard-right ideas into main-stream political discourse.
Yet the end goal of the hard-right remains the same: the dismantling of states and overthrow of democracy and replacement by a kind of pre-Enlightenment medievalist society.
Hard-right is fuelled by resentment
Grounded in lurid conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory (non-white empowerment by “woke” elites at the expense of whites), the hard-right seeks to generate deep resentment and rage; the animating fuel of the far-right.
Its proselytising technique entails laminating right-wing obsessions (like concerns for race) to contemporary grievances, like housing un-affordability, repeated frequently enough to become normalised – “flooding the zone” as the hard-right influencer, Steve Bannon, puts it.
When combined with contemporary grievances, authentically experienced by target audiences, hard-right policy positions then appear plausible; reasonable even.
The success of these methods can now be observed in the Liberal Party, which is flirting with unsavoury immigration policies to appeal to more extreme One Nation Party voters.
(An aside: another feature is a fondness of violence as legitimate political expression.)
The shocking scenes of US government migration officers killing lawful protestors in Minneapolis were disturbingly echoed in Sydney during the recent protests against the visiting Israeli president.
Though all these events await sober considered analyses of responsibility, they all shared premature endorsement by hard-right figures of official violence that appeared to be contradicted by videos of those incidents.
Democracy is harmed by resentment arising from persistent deep policy contradictions
Khalid observes that “democracies are in decline … (because) none of the structural issues ailing our democracies, including inequality, have been resolved or meaningfully addressed”.
Of the many contemporary inequalities, slavery is perhaps most likely to generate the deepest resentment.
Lives burdened by persistent housing inequalities are not improved by arcane discussions of economic supply and demand.
Lives burdened by persistent housing inequalities are not improved by arcane discussions of economic supply and demand. Instead, sufferers look for direct practical political solutions where plainly they should exist. If those solutions are not forthcoming hard-right alternative begins to look attractive.
The title image of George Washington and one of his slaves illustrates that the freedom from tyranny defined in the declaration of independence – that all men are created equal – was not meant in the literal sense.
Recently screened on SBS, Ken Burns’ The American Revolution reminds us that its achievements were accompanied by deep contradictions that have not yet been wholly resolved over the last 250 years – consider the recent Black Lives Matter movement and its opposition.
In his rollicking read, “Homo Criminalis: how crime organises the world”, Mark Galeotti explores slavery a little further. Compared to its Washingtonian form, defined by commercial property rights, contemporary slavery has (like many aspects of modern life) become more specialised and defined more by the particular conditions of its dominant activity.
Thus, sex slavery differs from domestic slavery. The dismantling of industrial scale cyber-crime outfits in Myanmar has revealed the slave-like conditions that criminals held cyber-workers to swindle targets worldwide.
The International Labour Organisation defines slavery thus: “In most cases, people subjected to slavery will find themselves in a situation of psychological, economic and social dependence. They have no option than work for their “master” and will fall under the definition of forced labour”.
This description is a little too close to the experience of far too many renters in large cities who must devote the majority of their income to the twin masters of landlords and food purveyors, (refer also the opening quote).
It is no wonder that those experiencing housing stress are a fruitful cohort for hard-right recruitment; already ripe with deep seated resentment that requires no further nourishment.
Be warned…
Some readers may balk at the relevance of exploring housing affordability and hard-right political extremism in the same context, preferring instead to examine urban policy minutiae in comfortable isolation.
However, two reasons for doing so immediately spring to mind.
The first is that housing affordability has already been alloyed with immigration by the hard-right and daily sharpened with resentment and deployed to infect and attack our parliamentary democracy.
The second is that the lived experience of those adversely affected by urban policy pathologies is not so easily compartmentalised.
Lives burdened by persistent housing inequalities are not improved by arcane discussions of economic supply and demand.
Instead, sufferers look for direct practical political solutions where plainly they should exist. If those solutions are not forthcoming hard-right alternative begins to look attractive.
However, this would be a mistake.
For the many suffering its most extreme depredations, the persistence of the housing crisis is unforgivable, but the hard-right’s putrid policy idiocies offer no real solutions.
Delivering meaningful, urgent, plausible and accountable improvement in housing affordability, thereby breaking the hard-right’s policy co-option of the issue, is the only real remedy to these threats.
Khalil again; “To counter right-wing extremism, we cannot rely on counter-terrorism operations…(we) need to address democratic decline and renew our commitment to upholding multicultural, liberal, egalitarian societies”.
The American lesson
Over the last year, America has vividly reminded us what unaddressed “democratic decline” looks like.
America seems to have entirely forgotten the very costly lessons learned from its pivotal role in eliminating the fascist scourge 80 years ago.
It will now celebrate its 250th anniversary by reverting to a pre-enlightenment medievalist authoritarianism, abandoning what its founding fathers fought so hard to obtain.
Khalil again; “To counter right-wing extremism, we cannot rely on counter-terrorism operations … (we) need to address democratic decline and renew our commitment to upholding multicultural, liberal, egalitarian societies”.
At a more personal level, as European political and business leaders resign because of past links to an American paedophile, his former long-term American friend, a self-confessed pussy-grabber, faces no opprobrium and continues unfettered to wreak national and global havoc.
It is to the enduring shame of all Americans that they have twice inflicted such an odious and harmful administration on both themselves and the rest of the world, and have done so little to remedy the error since. Even if reversed in the next few years, the national reputational damage will likely endure for decades.
The clear lesson is – to employ the scatological phrasing beloved by its ridiculous leader – if you elect fascist “turds” expect national enshitification (see cartoon below).
