The Radical Right as seen from Bruges

I'm sitting in a class on European parties discussing far-right movements in the European Parliament. Our Italian-Canadian colleague has given us an introduction into Alessandra Mussolini and her likes, and we're currently exploring voter behaviour and the over-representation of young, uneducated men amongst Mussolini's voters. Although her looks, she's a former Playmate, is a plausible argument for voting for her if you're 16 and hormonal, but at 25 it is no longer. Mussolini and her lot occupies around 8% of the seats in the 2004-2009 EP, and there's no reason to see them as a threat, although our Italian house-communist disagrees.

The voters we're talking about are not amongst my colleagues here in Bruges, nor did I meet them at the Hill in Bergen. Not comparing Frp with Mussolini, they are the closest we come in Norway to a right-wing populist party flirting with nationalism and xenophobia, you don't find anyone who will openly support them amongst the students at the Faculty of Social Sciences. The same is the case here. You don't study any form of social science and support a far-right wing party. It is just not acceptable. Being a blood-red communist believing in state-centrism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, so-called "democratic" or "social" ownership of the means of production is fully acceptable, but do not even dream about claiming that any for of right-wing authoritarianism could be desirable (unless you argue by quoting Plato and Machiavelli) or that Muslims and globalisation represents a threat to our society.

That being said, I have no problems with the far-right being seen and treated as pariahs. What bothers me in this respect is more that flirting with the far-left and claiming that the Communist Utopia is something we should strive for. Is it something we should have learned from the 20th Century, in particular here in Europe, it is that totalitarian ideologies, whether they be to the Right or the Left, promising Salvation and a Utopian future, represents exactly the opposite; any ideology that claims to present and represent the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (so help me, God), who promises to set us free and pretends to be the way to something bigger, is in the end, whatever the good intentions, bound to bind us and lead us to serfdom.

I've gone off on a whim here, intending to focus on modern-day populist right-wing parties. It is a sad fact that while the far-right is being dominated by pulp, low-brow, angry young men, modernisation losers, under-educated unemployed victims of globalisation and modernisation, the contemporary radical left has the credibility of being represented by high-fly academics and other May-68 anachronisms, and low-educated voters on the left often vote moderately social-democratic. To specify, I am sorry for the fate of the former, but I am more scared by the choices of the latter.