On the contrary, far too many people are paying attention, and enabling their narrative. This is opportunity is a good one to write about a certain kind of person, who styles themselves a liberal, but advocates appeasing the far right instead of fighting it. 1/
The most famous such person was David Cameron. He thought it was possible to throw some bones to his "headbangers", " loons", "closet racists" and "fruitcakes". It's fair to say he despised these people, but he ended up giving them what they wanted. 2/
3/ He kept attacking them but supporting their view of the world. He misunderstood that ideas matter to fanatics, and they'll pocket their concessions, while using him as a huge bully pulpit to advance their ideology.
4/ Cameron was guilty of mistaken triangulation. Triangulation works (or worked - the 1990s was 25 years ago and things have moved on - *towards* the centre. Triangulating towards an extreme position merely legitimises extremism.
5/ Cameron triangulated on the environment, moving the Tories towards the centre, but he pondered on Europe and immigration.
6/ If the triangulation politician is the first category, another category is the static political scientist.
7/ The static political scientist looks at opinion as if it's an external factor that must be accommodated. But opinion doesn't have to be, it exists to be changed.
8/ Far left and far right movements understand this. They create narratives, promote them, and fight to put sympathetic people in positions of power.
9/ But the static political scientist sees politics as a phenomenon to be studied, rather than a field of battle to take part in. This means their political advice is only useful for the very short term, for which public opinion can be held constant.
10/ in fact public opinion can be changed, with skill, effort and persistence. Look at how extremists on the right and left have recently done so.
11/ To accept the far right's ideas on immigration, national discrimination and protectionism and given is not being sensible. It's defeatism.
12/ If we are really liberals - if we believe that people have equal rights, and the job of the state is to ensure that people are able to exercise them, the first step is to defend liberalism.
13/ The second step is to understand structure. Liberalism is not neutral, it's an ideology with a vision for the good society - again:
We have equal human rights. We're in politics to ensure people can exercise them.
We have equal human rights. We're in politics to ensure people can exercise them.
14/ And that means getting people elected to positions of power, establishing new channels of communication to spread our beliefs, and to become a political movement again instead of an administrative caste.
15/ National populism has a root cause, it's the national populists, their ideology and the institutions by which they spread.
16/Our mission survival and success of a society based on human rights. We achieve it by defeating, not appeasing it's opponents. ENDS
