You can’t say that!

The beatings will continue until the discourse improves.

Another week, another shockingly strong election performance for a right-wing candidate once thought outside the bounds of respectability. We Europeans should be used to it by now, in concept if not in Trumpian scale.

Many factors are behind these wild swings to the right, but the more interesting phenomenon is our routine failure to predict them. Cultural elites and the old media struggle even to articulate the views held by insurgent voters and their leaders.

The reason, I think, is a selective stifling of speech in polite society. Culturally right-wing views are frequently deemed ‘offensive’ and so respectable people are less likely to express them publicly. An opinion concealed is an opinion confirmed, and the likes of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen offer vindication at the ballot box.

This is a subjective observation and, by definition, difficult to quantify. But I can’t think of many leftist views that are widely regarded as not only wrong but offensive – views that, even if carefully and politely expressed, might put someone’s career or social standing in jeopardy. On the right, there are more examples than one can reasonably count.

The ‘culture war’ has laid out two distinct, mutually hostile sets of beliefs. There are dull people on both sides, amplified by social media and talk shows, who take these views as a package deal: Tell me what they think about gender, and I can tell you precisely what they will say about climate or colonial history.

But most of us are not like that. Most of us have a range of political opinions based on our own values, learning and experiences. The particulars vary from person to person but, professional agitators aside, I know very few people who subscribe fully to either side in the culture war.

I am privileged to have trusted friends with whom I can openly discuss pretty much any topic, safely making mistakes and learning by discourse. Our views are diverse but we all understand the need, in these sensitive times, to take care with certain topics outside that circle of trust.

What’s remarkable is that almost all of these danger zones are on the right.

A free pass

A few months ago, I was at a dinner with a half-dozen people – not from my close circle – who work in the mainstream of EU politics. Somebody offhandedly mentioned the “genocide in Gaza” and I, concerned as I am about the creeping vilification of Israel on the left, asked him to justify his language.

He took the conversation back to the 1948 war, the ‘original sin’ that displaced Palestinians from their land. I replied that a large Jewish community had also lived on that land for millennia, and that the migration of European Jews should be seen in the context of the Holocaust, a uniquely tragic event in world history. To emphasise the point, I said something like “nothing even remotely like it has ever happened.”

“Except what the Israelis are doing now,” he said, smirking as if he’d caught me in a rhetorical trap.

It takes a lot to upset me, but that did it. Opposing the war in Gaza is reasonable, but comparing it to the Holocaust is either extremely naïve or deliberately antisemitic. Either you’re ignorant of the Holocaust, unaware of the general horror of war, and unable to distinguish the two; or you’re stealing the Jewish people’s grief to defame the only country they can call their own.

When respectable people say such things, it encourages mobs to go on pogroms. And yet this man didn’t hesitate to say it in front of his colleagues, and none of them called him out for it. If anything, the table turned against me for pressing the argument rather than letting it slide.

The group seemed reflexively to have decided that the man was glib rather than racist. Assuming good intent in others is a fine way to go through life; but if that man’s questionable views had come from the right rather than the left, I don’t think he would have been given such an easy pass.

Nasty and nice

There’s a deep-seated idea in Western society that the extreme right is evil, whereas the extreme left is merely misguided. It might date back to the Second World War, when we allied with a murderous communist regime to defeat an even more murderous fascist regime. That moral compromise, correct though it was, may have had a generational impact on our psyche.

Or it may be that left-wing views are simply ‘nicer’. The foundation of leftism, best expressed by John Lennon in Imagine, is that the world is fundamentally nice, and will revert to being nice once we strip away the oppressive structures of colonialism, patriarchy, consumerism and so on.

The foundational view of the right, by contrast, is that the world is by nature chaotic and brutish, and civilisation can advance only through the imposition of order and hierarchy. Ick.

These first principles colour our response to concrete positions. Most opinions on the cultural left can be expressed most simply as “let’s all be kind to one another”. That may be naïve in some cases and it may lead to disastrous outcomes, but it’s coming from a place of optimism and love; it’s hard to be offended by it.

On the right, most positions boil down to “one group of people must exert power over another”. If someone expresses that idea and you disagree, it’s harder to accept that their intentions might be good.

Think twice

This explains why right-wing views are so often seen as more offensive than views on the left – and also more essentialist. Naivety is transient: You can be wrong about some things but right and reasonable about others, and your blind spots can educated away. Nastiness by contrast exposes a deeper rot in a person’s soul.

This is evident in the labelling of political parties. No matter how left-wing its economic policies, any party that takes a hard line on migration is universally described as ‘far-right’. The idea that Europe should be unwelcoming to certain categories of people is so jarring, so nasty, that it overrides all else.

Individuals face the same experience. Take J.K. Rowling, whose books express a feminist and generally left-of-centre view of the world. She has often taken public positions on the left, whether by supporting a black adaptation of a character she originally coded as white, or by calling out Donald Trump’s sexism. These events made news but then passed without much bother.

From about 2017, however, she tentatively began expressing the opinion that biological men can never fully become women – a position generally seen as being on the right. The first couple of times, she backed down after a backlash, but obviously felt strongly enough to return to the theme. As a result, she is insulted by lawmakers and her view on the trans issue has come to dominate her entire public persona.

Here, encapsulated neatly in one woman, is the difference between revealing opinions on the left and on the right. The left is generally safe ground, but any expression of right-wing thought risks being more trouble than it’s worth. It’s no wonder many people keep those views to themselves – until it’s time to vote.