One of the striking similarities between rightwing populist movements in the UK and US is the way they present a vision of society in thrall to 'the far left' or 'commies' at a time when the left is largely powerless in practical terms in both countries.
They do this by presenting even left-of-centre movements/individuals as 'far left' or 'socialist' when they are nothing of the kind. Thus Biden and the Democrats are described as 'radical', and moderate soc democratic reforms as 'communism/Venezuela' etc
When it's pointed out that the 'far left' doesn't have power in either country, they will throw in the (false) idea that the left has a cultural hold on society to compensate for its distance from government, and uses this power to attack 'their history/institutions' etc
Never mind the immense cultural and political power that the right wields through the press and billionaire-funded tv channels etc. In the right's looking glass world they are the fragile, aggrieved, threatened victims, menaced by the likes of Nish Kumar.
They are the ones who speak up for 'ordinary people' (no one who is 'ordinary' could ever want the left to speak for them, of course. Nothing the left says could ever be relevant to ordinary people).
Why does the right do this? Partly because it's as politically convenient as it once was for their fascist predecessors to find reds under the bed everywhere. The populist right thrives on hatred, fear, dread, and grievance -'the left' is a perfect explanation for all the above
In addition, by breathing new life into the old anti-communist corpse, they seek to neutralise and discredit ANY progressive ideas emanating from the left - in the broadest sense of the term-, whether on race, gender, climate change, women's safety
'The left' also represents the more easily hateable expression of internationalism/'globalism', which is the antithesis of the rancid exclusionary nationalism and stale patriotism that the right uses to mobilise its constituencies
Having embraced all this, the populist right is then free to tell any lie it wants about 'the left' - the latest being that a young woman brutally arrested by the police is an attention-seeking leftwing activist who deliberately staged her own arrest in order to 'hijack Sarah'
This is a disgraceful lie, of course, but no more so than so many we've heard on both sides of the Atlantic these last few years in our new 'post-truth' universe of lies, constructed almost entirely by the right for its own purposes
This is what we're up against - not just the 'far left; but anyone on the centre-left outwards who even dares to dream of a better society, and that is why it is incumbent on all of us to find ways of working together against the rightwing lie machine
and building the broadest coalition and the broadest political consensus possible, so that we can defeat this catastrophic government and drain away the toxic political poisons that sustain it.
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