Forward to the past: Zombie forms

Part 1 described the hard Right, in its many appearances in different countries today, as populist backward projection.

- MARIAN PASTOR ROCES

This Right longs for the past. Its nostalgia is steeped in an old, imperial, white supremacism.

So much grievance. Power was wrested — unfairly, they think — by hordes of colored people taking up white space for domination; notably, in Europe’s version as fear of being overwhelmed by migrants. And although a slightly different story, Britain’s Brexit also pivoted on anxiety over new waves of desperate foreigners, mostly non-white.

US President Donald Trump's version also idealizes return to an economic order built on manufacturing, which is to say, a 19th Century Industrial Revolution idea. An idea whose time is gone. As gone, supposedly, as racism. Which, as it turns out, is by no means in the dustbin of history. Yet.

The Trumpian coup d’etat against democracy takes energy from a racism palpable, as well, in the turns-to-the-Right in Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. Racism is less discernible in Erdoğan’s Turkey and Modi’s India in their respective turns to conservative Islam and conservative Hinduism. But the democracy-corrosive bias deserves scrutiny.

Fundamentalism is by definition uncongenial to diversity — the obvious example being the racist and fundamentalist Southern Baptist Christians (“Born Again”) denominations in the US, that are the backbone of MAGA. These folks inherit a history of upholding slavery as divine fiat.

While the Philippines’ swing to President Rodrigo Duterte’s version of a hard Right does not seem powered by race-bound supremacism, its anti-poor thrust barely hides the racial shadow of class politics in this country. And now, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s rewriting of his father’s dictatorship as a golden age, a mestizaje wonderworld, vintage Imelda, the fair-skinned embodiment of autocracy.