Liz Truss complaining, endlessly, about the “deep state”. Nigel Farage promising to “make Britain great again” at a party conference (pictured above) designed to resemble an American political convention. Reform’s promise of Doge-style units to root out council waste. “Woke” supplanting “political correctness”. Tories calling on the government to “release the Mandelson-Epstein files”. Kemi Badenoch and Blue Labour warning about the dangers of “DEI” instead of “positive discrimination”. Even the assertion that a national flag is a straightforward emblem of patriotism rather than a potentially divisive symbol, a claim with a more plausible lineage in the US, where schoolchildren pledge allegiance to it every day, than it has here.
There are myriad recent examples of rightwing political discourse making the trip across the Atlantic and taking up residence in the UK. The strangest thing about it is that very little effort is made to explain the more obscure parts of it to a local audience, or to disguise the unmistakably Trumpy associations in a country where he remains pretty unpopular. So why is the right so attracted to a style that turns so much of the public off?
The history
It would be wrong to suggest that a fascination with American politics is a singularly rightwing phenomenon. “There’s been a magnetic attraction to American politics in Britain for a long time,” said Robert Saunders, a political historian at Queen Mary University of London. “You think of Gordon Brown holidaying in Cape Cod, or the influence Bill Clinton had on Tony Blair.” We might add the enduring liberal obsessions with JFK, Barack Obama and The West Wing.
Journalist and author Daniel Trilling told Aamna that as recently as last year, “there was an idea that the incoming Keir Starmer Labour government would be the deputy to this revived US liberalism under Joe Biden. The Atlantic alliance was strong again and they were going to sort out Ukraine and the rest of it. So when the political weather in America changes, so it does here.”
But those habits were really about strategy, and conversations among political obsessives – not the messages they deliberately shared with the mostly indifferent public. “It has certainly ramped up to a new level recently,” Saunders said. “And that is largely happening on the right.”
What’s different now
One obvious reason populists, extremists and their imitators look to the US for inspiration is that their politics are further advanced there than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. “American far-rightism is more developed in terms of actually wielding power,” Trilling said. “So it’s not surprising that it influences the development of the far right here and elsewhere.” As Sadiq Khan says in an opinion piece for the Guardian, Trump has “perhaps done the most to fan the flames of divisive, far-right politics around the world in recent years”.
“That’s the most straightforward explanation,” Saunders said. “It’s just a visible and exciting model of success for the right. The Tories are staring into the abyss after the worst defeat in their history; Reform is on the rise, but they still only have five MPs. What this language embodies is what the right can do not just electorally, but culturally – it’s part of a project that’s not just about winning elections, but reshaping the entire landscape.”
That nihilist streak is anathema to old-fashioned one-nation conservatives. But that group is now a political irrelevance, and their successors find alliances across the same borders they’re so keen to put on lockdown. “They share online spaces in a way that obviously wasn’t true 20 years ago,” Saunders said. “They are radicalised by the company they keep. And in a very concrete way, Tommy Robinson’s revival is obviously linked to Elon Musk reactivating Robinson’s X account.”
All that might point to one reason for adopting a style that is so baffling to so many people: political actors are no longer fighting for a majority, but for the attention of the share of the public who will give them the time of day. That engagement is inevitably deepest among the perpetually online.
The political project
This is not a merely rhetorical relationship, said Trilling. “There are obvious shared aims between far-right populists in the UK and US. Going back at least to 2016, the big populist upsets of that year: Trump getting elected and the Brexit referendum being won by leave – the key figures behind those knew one another and talked about these things as part of a shared project.
“The far-right position then, which is now becoming the mainstream right position, is that globalisation went too far, it ended up weakening our own economies and diluting our national identity through mass immigration, and what’s needed is a restoration and reinforcing of the borders.” Similar trends can be seen in national conservative movements across Europe, whose adherents have picked up the same Maga idioms from Italy to Hungary.
Evidence for that shared project was visible in the appearances by Steve Bannon and Musk at Saturday’s rally, as well as JD Vance’s notorious intervention in European politics, and meeting with the AfD leader Alice Weidel, in Munich earlier this year. But it is also apparent in the financial support flowing from wealthy Trump supporters to rightwing British thinktanks – and which previously funded Tommy Robinson as he sought restoration to the national political stage.
The risks for the right
Even if it gets their supporters amped up, there are limits to the utility of this style for the right. “They should be a bit cautious,” Saunders said. “There’s a danger for any nationalist movement in looking like the branch office of a foreign power, and if you look like somebody else’s mini-me, you have a problem.” He pointed to the example of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s, who was eventually interned because of suspicions that his first loyalties were to Germany. “That’s why Farage is so personally important,” Saunders said. “As a recognisably British character who it’s harder to define as a puppet.”
Then there’s the question of what policy prescription even those who might give the far right a hearing actually want. “The Maga movement is much more ‘let’s just slash everything away’,” Trilling said. “But in Britain, I don’t think most people, including a lot of those who were at that protest last Saturday, think about their relationship to the state in the same way. Opinion polls do seem to bear out that people in Britain, generally across the political spectrum, tend to favour higher social spending from the government.”
The question, then, is whether any branch of the right can yoke the thrill of Trumpy nihilism to a persuasive claim that they care about things like the NHS, in a more authentically British tone of voice. But it remains to be seen whether they can transcend the same thing they deplore in their country: a cosmopolitan, magpie spirit, addicted to aspects of a foreign culture even as they dismiss them.
