Beppe Grillo during election tour of M5S, March 4, 2018 – a "mysterious political object". What do we actually think? NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.Jan Zielonka joins the debate initiated by Edmund Fawcett this April by calling for ‘cross-spectrum cooperation’ to frustrate the hard right threat to democratic liberalism, with a challenge both to Fawcett and Anthony Barnett.
The essays of Edmund Fawcett and Anthony Barnett are music to the ears of all liberals. We are a force for good, and the hard right are and always were a force for evil. We must stop them, whatever it takes. If need be, we should unite with other political forces to stop the hard right's surge to power.
Things get more complicated when we start talking about details. Who are we fighting against? Fawcett’s category of the hard right is very broad and includes a mixture of socially permissive libertarians and nativist conservatives. This categorisation may work well for the US and the UK, but I am not sure it works for many other Western countries, let alone those in Asia or Latin America.
