The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Language of Balance: How the Far Right Hollows Out Democracy from Within There is a particular kind of political theatre playing out across the democratic world, and it requires a careful eye to read. Watch what the far right says, and then watch what it does. The two will rarely be the same. A movement that has spent decades organising against the very idea of pluralism now speaks fluent democracy. A movement whose foot soldiers march in the streets calling for the cleansing of the nation now legislates from cabinet rooms, draped in the vocabulary of fairness, balance, and freedom. The extremism has not gone anywhere. It has merely learned the password. This is the communicative inversion at the heart of the contemporary far-right project, and it is the secret of its success. The street-level violence of the Proud Boys, the dogwhistles of Hindutva cadres, the muttered grievances of settler colonial nostalgists in Aotearoa New Zealand — these have not been disavowed by the ...