Unless you live under a rock, you know that last week, the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. As a white U.S. citizen, this vote has no direct effect on my life or at least it doesn't yet, but it still terrifies me. That is because "Brexit" is just one more example of the resurgence of the Far Right happening all across Europe and the U.S.
There are good reasons to reject the E.U. Unfortunately, none of them were articulated by the Leave campaign. In fact, the Leave campaign was almost entirely dominated by nativist rhetoric against Muslim immigrants. Supporters of the Leave campaign spoke of "Making Great Britain Great Again" and "Taking our country back." The Leave campaign preyed on racist stereotypes, painting Muslim refugees as savages with no sense of morality. There was the infamous "Breaking Point" poster in which Nigel Farage, one of the main faces of the Leave campaign, unveiled a poster that depicted a crowd of Syrian refugees with the caption, "Breaking Point: How the E.U. Has Failed Us All."
"Brexit" isn't an isolated incident. All across Europe, the Far Right has made some terrifying gains. Poland is ruled by an ultra-right-wing government, in which 69 percent of the population is against people of color being Polish residents. There is France, where the Front National (F.N.) Party, a Far Right party built on the fear of immigrants, recently led the first round of regional elections, receiving 30 percent of the vote. There is Austria, where the Freedom Party, a party founded by actual Nazis, just barely lost the national election. And there is Germany, in which the Alternative for Germany (AFD) Party, a party that has claimed that unarmed refugee children should be shot and that Muslims should not be protected under German law, has received a huge upsurge in the polls.
And then in the U.S., we have the rise of the so-called "Alt-Right." The Right in the U.S. has always carefully hidden its bigotry, but the alt-right doesn't even bother. You only need to look at Breitbart.com, the place was the all-night's ideology is probably most concentrated, to see how truly disgusting their ideology is. They have run articles like, "Does Feminism Make Women Ugly?," "Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber" and "The Left Choose Islam Over Gays, Now 100 People Are Dead."
Maybe I wouldn't be so terrified if this was just a fringe movement. But it isn't at all. In fact, the poster child of the alt-right is the Republican presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is a fascist who has made nativism a cornerstone of his campaign. He has repeatedly called for a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. and for the mass deportation of Mexican immigrants. His very slogan, "Make America Great Again," appeals to misplaced nostalgia for a time when cis, white men had all of the power instead of just most of the power.
Prediction markets have given Trump about a 30 percent chance of winning the presidency. This sounds comforting until you realize that just this week prediction markets said that there was a less than 20 percent chance of Britain leaving the E.U. Plus, as David Byler of RealClearPolitics says, even a 30 percent chance of a Trump presidency should terrify you.
Neoliberalism, which has been at the center of right-wing ideology for the past few decades, is starting to be replaced by something even worse -- a form of ethnic nationalism that is dangerously close to fascism. These are not fringe political movements we can simply ignore, these are mainstream movements with millions of supporters and political power. If you consider yourself a progressive or at least not a right-wing extremist, you should be incredibly worried right now.