The far right’s global tidal wave will break. Here’s why.

Ordinary people can unite against the handful of globe-striding, monopolising, tax-dodging, worker-crushing oligarchs that are driving the far-right surge.

Elon Musk addresses Alternative für Deutschland ahead of German election

By Nicholas Shaxson

I am confident we will soon reach the high water mark of the global far right movement. Its fault lines are so profound and intractable that this global tide of anti-democratic bile and division will, with a little luck and encouragement, ebb and fade in the coming years - possibly sooner.

I know this might sound fanciful in the current climate. A few weeks ago, I was at a rally against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Berlin where the overwhelming emotions among those I met were not only of solidarity – but also of dread.

Hanging over the rally was the menacing speech of US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference a couple of days earlier: a violent attack on western unity and European values. On the sidelines of the conference, Vance met the leader of the AfD, which went on to double its vote share, to 20 percent, in last Sunday’s German election.

People are, understandably, freaking out. But there is a different, more optimistic view.

At the Berlin rally, I felt something was missing. Nearly all the slogans and placards focused on ‘rights’, ‘democracy’, and ‘society’. These fights matter, tremendously. But the far right seems to weaponise and draw strength from these contests.

The key to defeating these malign forces lies in the economic domain. Here, the far right is sitting on deep volcanic fissures that are already bubbling, and that they can never close or control.

The first faultline, the most obvious, is that millions of people, who hate nasty global economic forces and oligarchic billionaires and tax-dodging monopolists, find themselves sharing the same far-right big tent with those very same oligarchs and billionaires.

Already, this fissure is in ferment. Most famously, Steve Bannon publicly accused Elon Musk of pushing an agenda that is “really about the implementation of techno-feudalism on a global scale.”

Bannon and Musk are both peddlers of disinformation, but on this point the former is right. And millions of far right supporters loathe the billionaires bankrolling their leaders.

A second faultline is international. People in the United States might like being an imperial power, but nobody else wants to live in, to cite the title of Angus Hanton’s recent book about the UK-US relationship, a ‘Vassal State.’

Hanton estimates that US firms pay dividends from their UK operations back to the U.S. worth £2,100 per household. Much if not most of this is in the form of excess profits: that is, not the reasonable product of sales of useful goods and services, but from unproductive and predatory extraction via monopolisation, offshore tax-dodging or financial chicanery.

Now, Trump wants to put this extraction on steroids. Just look at how they are weaponising Ukraine’s current distress to try and extract its mineral wealth. They want to do that more subtly to the UK and other countries, by bullying our governments to deregulate to make life more comfortable for US multinationals.

But outside of the US, to be pro-Trump is increasingly to be unpatriotic. In Canada, the Musk-backed far-right leader Pierre Poilievre who once enjoyed a longstanding 20-point poll lead over the ruling Liberals is now trailing, after Trump threatened to use ‘economic force’ against the country.

This is part of a broader problem that prevents the emergence of a ‘Nationalist International’. As Janan Ganesh pointed out in the Financial Times recently “the desire of Strongman X to push his tech companies into foreign markets rubs against Strongman Y’s security paranoia and amour propre.”

These fissures on the right are now breaking out in the UK, too. The Make it Fair campaign against content being given away for free to AI firms has shown how opposition to monopolists can create alliances across the political spectrum: when Daily Mail columnist Andrew Neil is warning about US companies committing the “theft of the century” you know something is up.

Starmer’s government is consulting on proposals - that it appears to favour - to create an ‘exception’ to UK copyright laws, allowing US big tech firms such as Google, Meta or OpenAI, to ‘scrape’ online content from UK publishers and artists for free to power their AI models, unless the users specifically opt out. They will likely then regurgitate these scrapings as profitable content that will then compete with British creatives – harming publishers (like this one.)

As Neil wrote in the Mail, “the British Government is also abasing itself before some of the US's biggest companies in a desperate effort to ingratiate itself with them too.”

Why would a UK government want this, as he put it, “wholesale larceny of our creative crown jewels”? It is, above all, down to a self-abasing ideology of ‘national competitiveness’, which holds that we must attract international investors through tax cuts and loopholes, removing consumer protections, cutting wages and labour protections, and deregulating for big tech: effectively, transferring resources from other parts of the economy to them, in the hope that they will ‘invest.’

As music campaigner Tom Gray eloquently put it, in a different but related context: “The British political class have been convinced by the major labels – let’s be clear: foreign-based multinational companies – that they are the great driver of British music. When in fact British musicians are the driver of British music.”

It is here, in the economic and corporate domains, where we can build the real - and in my view ultimately indomitable - alliances against the far right. From a European perspective, we must refrain from framing this as a fight between ‘Europe’ and ‘the United States’, or even between ‘left’ and ‘right’. Instead, we must see this for what it really is: a fight that pits hundreds of millions of ordinary people and smaller businesses in the United States and Europe, standing shoulder to shoulder against a few globe-striding, monopolising, tax-dodging, worker-crushing oligarchs.

The tip of the spear for US multinationals in Europe and the UK is corporate power – and the richest pickings for corporate America lie in pulling down our anti-monopoly protections. (As Starmer’s deregulatory race to the bottom is doing.)

Make no mistake: rough times are ahead, for years to come, not least for the betrayed people of Ukraine. And victory is far from sure.

The core tactic that the billionaires and big tech firms will use to distract from their looting activities is the age-old playbook of distraction: sow hate and division, and blame ‘others’, particularly immigrants and minorities. That tactic, alongside the awesome reach of divisive social media platforms, and the sheer financial power of billionaires, is a fearsome adversary.

Who knows what horrors they will try to unleash. We must organise, for what comes next, and focus on our adversaries’ great weaknesses: the economic realm. As US civil rights leader Carolyn Fredrickson explained in the Atlantic recently: “By focusing on civil liberties but ignoring economic issues, liberals like me got defeated on both.”

Already, signs of far-right decay are emerging in the United States. In an article in the American Prospect this week entitled ‘The Coup Has Failed’, David Dayen shows how Trump’s approval ratings have fallen (a Reuters poll found that the share of people who think the US is on the wrong track rose ten points in only a month, though other polls showed a more mixed picture.) The likelihood of more economic incompetence, rising inflation expectations, and chaos, will help people across the political spectrum mobilise against the new agenda, undercutting the domestic base for the global leader of the far right.

“It started from the bottom up,” Dayen wrote, “as the governed gradually but definitively withdrew their consent, giving space for those we somehow call ‘leaders’ to distance themselves.” In districts that voted heavily for Trump, town-hall meetings are echoing to “parade[s] of boos and shouts”, and cries of “Tax Elon!” Once-meek Republican leaders are starting to call Trump’s executive orders “out of control,” and fighting back on behalf of enraged constituents. Legal battles are breaking out, all over.

It’s too early to predict a collapse in Trump’s domestic support base - but the far-right’s victories in the US and Europe are more fragile than they seem. With eyes on the right targets, we can join forces with angry American allies against the tech bros and billionaires oppressing them too - and we can win. I’m increasingly optimistic, even confident, that we will.

Nicholas Shaxson is a journalist and author, now writing a book about monopolies and market power.