Respecting Reform Voters Means Telling Them They’re Wrong and Immoral

We are living through a global reassurance of fascism. This is shocking. And, when shocked, there is a tendency for people to revert to their basest impulses. 

Every electoral upheaval of our era, for instance, is met with politicians and pundits seeking to ‘interpret’ voters' behaviour as if it were rational—or at least reasonable. People voted for crackpot internet racists because of ‘frustration with the system’ you see, or ‘economic anxiety’, or because they had ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration. These narratives often clearly cut against the data we have, but there is a strong—and deeply uncritical—instinct to revert to them. 

Beneath all these obfuscations and evasions there is something not just inaccurate or unwise strategically, but morally pernicious.

And yet that impulse to sanitize is very much the vibe we're getting from the British commentariat after Reform, the UK’s main far-right party, emerged as the strongest performer in the recent council elections. 

“Frustration”

We might as well start at the top: Starmer, who gave his initial response in a Guardian column in which he acknowledged the frustration of voters. He chalked this up to  a failure of politics to “deliver real change in their lives.” 

I just don’t buy this narrative. Chalking everything up to an amorphous ‘frustration’ unifies groups in the electorate who hold different—and directly opposed—values and views. The Prime Minister apparently doesn’t see it that way: “concerns expressed across different communities have more in common than some would like to admit.” We all want the same things, he tells us—one of which is “strong and secure borders.”

So, first of all, no. If strong borders means—as the Home Secretary has insisted it means—legal migrants having a 15-20 year insecure and expensive legal limbo retroactively imposed on them, if it means functionally ending our obligation to take in refugees, if it means deporting the children of British citizens, then no, we do not all agree on that. 

Because we all agree, Starmer writes, the response shouldn’t be “tacking right or left” but to “listen to voters.” A strange sort of listening, one might think, in which one commits in advance to not changing anything. But this is typical of a type of centrist politician who views sincere values as embarrassing emotionality. If the electorate took firm political stances, he might have to take one too. If those stances were bitterly opposed and mutually irreconcilable, he might have to take a side. He might have to tell the right’s voters that their ‘frustrations’ are wrong. And that is the one thing his deepest instincts are telling him he can’t do. 

One sees a similar desire to skirt around the central problem among more sophisticated political thinkers. Progressive Journalist Adam Ramsey writes that the best way to interpret these results is “people have lost faith in not just our political establishment, but also our whole political system.” He notes that our political institutions are centralized, yet inefficient and unaccountable, filled with “corporate lobbyists, drowning in dark money and whipped into line by millionaire-funded party machines.”

This is a harsh, but by no means unreasonable, characterisation of the current state of play. And it probably is an explanation for some of the fracture on Labour's left: the Greens won over 500 council seats and a projected national vote share shows them even with Labour. But on the right? Reform is—by far—the most brazenly corrupt of the major British parties (no small feat). Barely a week goes by that we don’t hear of financial irregularities, or billionaire backers, or, like so much of the modern far-right, being in thrall to crypto. They get more of a pass for this than other parties would, and there’s rarely any real consequences, but it’s still reported on and it doesn’t seem to bother their voters in the slightest. 

The actual fascist base

Perhaps they’re being tricked? We might say that people have legitimate frustrations, but that these frustrations are being taken advantage of. But even this seems to fall short. Across modern international fascist movements—from the Trump administration's insider trading on war, to its hawking meme coins to its base, to $18,000 ‘boot camps’ to be more manly, to the right hawking utterly bogus health supplements and diet advice, to fraudulent donation schemes—the revealed preference is their core voters actively enjoy being taken for a ride by the most obvious scam artists you’ve ever seen, as long as they validate their morbid pathologies about race and gender as they do so.

How about economics? The US is unequal, but prosperious. Economic anxiety is a poor candidate for the rise of American fascism, but what of the UK? We are, after all, much less affluent. Our standard of living is lower, our social mobility declining, our public services are massively understaffed. 

Again, this is undoubtedly part of the reason for the fracture of Labour’s vote on the left. But it seems strange to imagine that voters are going to Reform because they want a more egalitarian policy offer: Farage was until quite recently a self-described Thatcherite. His party's economic policies, such as they are, are the usual neoliberal pabulum. We should also note that the relationship between far-right support and economics is not straightforward: more of the lowest earning Brits voted Green or Lib Dem in the last general election than Reform. Anti-immigrant fears can be held by working class people, but they’re just as often a luxury belief of comfortable-to-affluent pensioners who can vote their distaste for pluralism without worrying about the economic harm it causes the rest of us. 

Our centrist columnist betters (and some academics who should know better) are so eager to see fascists as reasonable and rational, they ignore the plain reality in front of them and try to manifest economically progressive far-right parties that do not exist and have never existed. 

And if the modern far-right surge were simply the cry of an anguished ‘white working class,’ if Reform voters “aren’t unreasonable – they’re desperate” for “better public services, higher living standards, and real action on immigration” in John Rentoul’s words, would there not come a point where they realised they had backed the wrong horse? In the US, Trump’s core voters have stayed firm, no matter how little their leader delivers economically. Far from being ignored, UK politics has centred anti-diversity demands—in chasing nativist and racist voters over the last decade, we have destroyed the foundations of our economy, our constitution, and our standing in the world. These people are not a consequence of indignity and squalor, they are a cause of it.

Reform is, in fact, a fascist party. They are directly tied to, and in step with, the Trump administration. Their stated plans are to remove all checks and balances, create a British version of ICE, build concentration camps, and deport people at almost twice the rate (proportionally) of Stephen Miller’s (insane and unrealised) daily goals. 

We have to confront reality: if you weren't born here, aren't white, in these election results we once again have confirmation that millions of your neighbours hate you & will prioritise hurting you over their own livelihoods. They will vote away their own rights, even their own life expectancy and ability to die with dignity, for the fantasy of a racially pure homeland. 

That is the basic truth of our age, and any plan for the future must start with at least acknowledging as much. 

Authority and equality 

“You’ll never win voters over by telling them they're racist” will be the response from ‘reactionary centrists’ who insist we appease the far-right.  (See here for my case that this term makes sense in the UK.) It is their only response. Unthinking, uncritical, axiomatic. Something reasoned from, not reasoned to. 

It’s also a slippery and evasive retort: not quite denying the truth of the charge, but telling us we must refrain from saying it. Not quite saying Reform voters are correct, but insisting they cannot be contradicted in any way. Labour MP Antonia Bance summed up the position succinctly: “not sure ignoring the key animating issue [anti-immigrant fears] for millions of voters that they see as an economic issue and the root cause of all shortages and public service quality issues would end well for us.”

So here we have a sitting member of parliament telling us they must legislate based on starkly delusional premises. It is true that many voters do see immigrants as the source of all economic woes, but they are wrong and it matters that they are wrong. If we continue to try and appease them we will simply make the country poorer. If we do so while validating their poisonous views, they will blame this decline on immigrants and demand further crackdowns. This is the national doomloop we’ve been in for at least a decade.

Bance is more sanguine: “once immigration is fixed and hence off the table in people’s minds” then Labour will focus on cost of living and win on that basis. This is delusional. What on earth does immigration being ‘fixed’ look like? Many are increasingly open that they want the expulsion of millions and an end to multicultural society. Naturally for Bance immigrants themselves, or those of us with foreign partners and family, are just a problem to be solved, to appease the “real” people of the land. 

This is not working as a political strategy because, to put it bluntly, there is no way it could work as a political strategy. But beyond this, there is something here that is intrinsically morally toxic and incompatible with a democratic society. 

At the heart of the aversion to directly saying Reform voters are wrong, is I think, an idea of respect. We shouldn’t just dismiss people. If they are angry, we should understand and empathise. We should see their concerns—in a much-used and highly loaded phrase—as ‘legitimate.’ Yet we should note how selective this respect is: When the Green party won a recent by-election in Manchester, the same empathy was not offered to its voters. Far from taking it as axiomatic that their concerns were legitimate, they were very overtly cast as the opposite. Starmer dismissed left defectors as dangerous extremists. The press was quick to label the victory ‘sectarian.’

“Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”” a famous Tumblr post begins. All the handwringing reactionary centrists inflict on us—on the need for civility, for listening, on the ‘legitimacy’ of some concerns—might be profitably reduced to this distinction: they are asking us to respect Reform voters, not as equals, but as social superiors.

Respecting someone as a person, as an equal, must be done on at least theoretically reciprocal terms. If we have an obligation to maintain certain conversational norms when talking to (or about) Reform voters, to show empathy with them, then they have the same obligations towards us. 

But of course the reverse never even occurs to reactionary centrists. The right is open in their contempt for progressives, yet, even after a decade of them destroying everything we hold dear, of expelling us, dehumanising us, and, increasingly, planning to physically exterminate us, I have never—never—read a centrist article lecturing them to consider things from our point of view. 

The demand is functionally that we defer to Reform voters. That we carefully curate our opinions so as not to contradict theirs too overtly. If our view is that they’re misinformed—much less that they’re dangerous bigots—we are expected to simply swallow it. Their demands are legitimate, therefore ours are not. We do not have a right to challenge them. This is not compatible with a true democratic society in which each individual has a right to their views—and to oppose those of others. The reactionary centrist’s project is unreasonable, in both the Rawalisan philosophic and conversational meanings of the term. 

The insistence that we ‘respect’ the right as an authority comes from a predictably stupid place: they are the male-coded side, the straight-coded side, the white-coded side. Even if not every individual in their coalition is such, the coalition itself is perceived as representing those interests. In a moment of crisis, the centrist’s prejudicial gut instincts are activating. Men are the authority, therefore male-coded groups are the authority. The rest of us must “respect” that, and people who don’t must be scolded into submission. This is abusive toxic nonsense in the political case for the same reasons it is in the personal one. Yet all too often people who should know better end up tacitly going along with it. 

This isn’t being asked to fight with one hand tied behind our backs. It’s having both tied, getting the absolute shit kicked out of us, and being told that we have to reassure and validate our abuser between every blow. 

What makes this so galling is centrist pundits never admit—and often seem genuinely unaware of—this stark, gendered double standard. They solemnly preach a marketplace of ideas, while acting as the thuggish enforcers of a herrenvolk debate club. What makes it so preposterous is the people Labour politicians are shouting down are their own voters. Often literally. The Home Secretary recently told “white liberal[s]” to “fuck right off.” Yes, that’s a direct quote. In normal times this would be seen as astounding political malpractice, and it is, yet our current age accepts it as normal. 

Just tell the truth

Contra this moral and strategic death spiral, I would argue that being blunt about the modern right’s factual errors and bigoted motives is not only a practical necessity, it is also more respectful to them. If we understand respect in the first way—as an obligation of equals, a relation between citizens—then this will sometimes necessitate telling people things they don’t want to hear. 

Say you have a family member who is falling deeper into alcohol addiction. They are becoming dangerous to those around them, but also making their own life far worse. You might well feel like you have an obligation to tell them that. They might not listen of course, but you are within your rights to give it a go.

The traditional ‘authority’ model of respect says that if this person is towards the top of informal social hierarchies, you just let it go. Dad gets blackout drunk every night? That’s just how men can be, everyone else must work around it. A more egalitarian ethos correctly demands we consider the welfare of his wife and children—but was this ‘respect’ even serving the alcoholic patriarch? 

The way we talk about the far-right’s voters, simultaneously sanitising them and stripping them of any agency, is patronising nonsense. I would find it insulting if someone talked of me in this manner because I ask that others respect me as a person, not an authority. I’ve been poor in my life. I recall once hardly being able to think straight after having $200 stolen because I could not see a path to feeding myself for the week. I would—then and now—find it a bizarre inference if someone assumed this experience made me a bigot. And if I were saying something deeply offensive to those around me, if I were acting in ways that caused them real harm, I would want them to tell me.

My primary concern with fascists is defeating their political project. I am unapologetic that I have more moral concern for their victims than I do for them. But even if we are to narrow our focus to what we owe them, I would still maintain my approach is better. Validating fascist lies, echoing their values, has—utterly predictably—not worked as a strategy to contain them. And beyond that it is intrinsically offensive to them and us to infantilise them in this way. Prior generations of men were not well served by their families treating them like children who could not be contradicted. 

It is not respecting a person to pretend to agree with them when they spout the most insane, incoherent, and untrue nonsense. In a society of equals it is in fact a sign that I don’t respect them. That I think they are beyond reason or rational conversation. Reform’s voters are not just destroying the country for the rest of us, they are destroying it for themselves. We are all poorer, more divided, and literally sicker because of them. Their values are heinous and their project is delusional.

And we should tell them that. 

Featured image is Nigel Farage, by Gage Skidmore