How populist right-wingers are turning into an undefeatable undead army

It’s all highly reminiscent of the thrill that ran through British politics back in 2002, when Edwina Currie revived her flagging career by revealing the unlikely tale of her 1990s affair with the then Prime Minister, John Major; and although one might hope that the UK would eventually grow out of its childish fascination with the fact that our supposed “betters” actually sometimes have sex, so far we show little sign of it.

All of which is more than a pity because the truth about Liz Truss is that she is not a joke, but rather a well-connected member of that network of hard-right politicians who mysteriously continue to walk among us like the undead, even after catalogues of political and electoral disaster that should, under normal political rules, have buried their political careers for good.

Ignominious fall from power

Truss, of course, is notoriously the UK Prime Minister who – during her 49-day tenure in the autumn of 2022 – proposed a tax-cutting budget so extreme, and so completely uncosted, that it all but crashed the UK economy, leading to a period of rapidly soaring interest rates; a crazed small-state ideologue with the zeal of a convert (she was once a young Liberal Democrat), whose ideas, once brought into contact with reality, not only collapsed in humiliating political failure, but also brought real economic suffering and anxiety to millions, far beyond the Westminster bubble.

Yet despite her ignominious fall from power, and her dismissal from parliament last year by the voters of South West Norfolk, Truss has not vanished from public life. On the contrary, she is doing very well; indeed in the 18 months after she left Downing Street, but was still an MP, she received nearly £350,000 in outside earnings, plus other donations and benefits in kind.

And in recent months, she has surfaced in the news not only as the tigerish lover of Mark Field, but as a regular speaker at gatherings of the pro-Trump, American far-right, where she proclaims the UK’s desperate need for a ‘Maga’ revolution of its own.

‘King over the water’

The American and global far-right, of course, is the darling of billionaires, and not short of a bob or two to sustain the post-ministerial careers of former politicians who are prepared to play their game. Truss is therefore not alone; the UK’s discredited pandemic Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for example, continues to rake in a handsome income as a speaker and columnist, and is lionised in some circles as an unjustly deposed “king over the water”.

And of course, the most significant figure of all is that of Donald Trump, who should surely – among other criminal allegations – have been brought to book for his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s clear victory in the presidential election of 2020, and to prevent his installation as president; but instead – cushioned by wealth, and by the US electorate’s long tradition of deference to it – now sits once more in the White House, offering the whole planet a display of privileged petulance, ignorance, aggression and cruelty, disguised as defence of American interests, that should be laughable, but is in fact utterly terrifying, not least to the suffering people of Gaza and Ukraine, mercilessly attacked by leaders whom Trump views as “friends".

And the question, for all of us who oppose this politics of brute force and ignorance, is just how we can possibly begin to wrest the narrative back from this vastly powerful wrecking cult, whose opposition to the past century of social progress on human rights and equality, denial of the intensifying climate crisis, and clear contempt for the rule of law, should represent the death-throes of the decaying system they represent, rather than some Terminator moment where they constantly rise again from the ruins they have helped create.

Grassroots resistance

Since Trump’s return to power, the veteran Senator Bernie Sanders has been arguing vigorously – at a time of stunned silence from many senior Democrats – that the response to Trumpian politics must be based in grassroots resistance to the sheer human suffering associated with his decisions, expressed through increasingly furious town hall meetings and local demonstrations, and through the work of local organisations that deal, every day, with the real stuff of ordinary lives; and that analysis must be right.

Meanwhile, though, the influence of performatively cruel hard-right thinking is now so pervasive, in public debate, that even Keir Starmer’s UK Labour government, elected ten months ago amid high hopes for change among many voters, often seems to have succumbed to it. The forces now ranged against any decent and sustainable future for our societies in the US, Britain, and the wider West, in other words, are now hugely well resourced, and difficult to escape.

They also, though, have the profound disadvantage of being cruel, humourless, out of time and demonstrably wrong; and they do not have on their side the sheer human resilience of a politics based on truth, respect, love, creativity, and a genuine valuing of the intrinsic worth of each unique human life.

In the age of the brute and the bully, those basic democratic and human values are about to be tested, perhaps as never before. If we can stick by them, though, and fiercely defend every institution and system we have that embodies them, then hope for better times will always remain possible; and may even sometimes be realised, against all the odds.