Re-Remembering the Crisis: the Common Sense of Authoritarian Nostalgia

From making America great again (again), to taking back control, the populist radical right across the Global North are known for articulating nostalgic visions of a lost past that can be retrieved through authoritarian policies in the present. This Authoritarian Nostalgia seems increasingly widespread among European and North American citizens, with Trump’s re-election, Wilders entering the Dutch government and the impending collapse of Germany’s Scholtz coalition amid an AfD surge. While Gramsci’s theorisation of political action as the articulation of common sense has not been deployed to explain Authoritarian Nostalgia in the Global North, his work has been used to great effect to theorise the phenomenon in the post-authoritarian Global South. In this paper, I suggest that we can theorise the spread of Authoritarian Nostalgia through populations in the Global North by bringing Gramsci’s insights back to Europe, using the UK as a case study. This paper therefore proffers a novel explanation for both the dissemination of Authoritarian Nostalgia and its use by the PRR as a political strategy, in which I argue that Authoritarian Nostalgia is middle class common sense. Beginning from Gramsci’s understanding of common sense as the idiosyncratic, taken-for-granted social knowledge of a given group, I argue that the common sense of white middle classes in the Global North – even those in states that do not have an explicitly authoritarian history – contain sediments of authoritarianism, directed particularly against the racialised, classed (and gendered) other. Moreover, for Gramsci, during such periods of crisis, when a group’s material conditions deviate from its conception of the world, intellectuals are able to create new common sense narratives that produce political action in an attempt to resolve the crisis. To demonstrate that Authoritarian Nostalgia is common sense, I choose contemporary Britain as a case study, as, with Labour’s electoral success, it seems to have bucked the pan-European trend of sliding rightwards. In doing so, I build on Hall et al.’s (1979) chronicle of the authoritarian consensus of Thatcherism, which was solidified as common sense through moral panics over ‘muggings’ during the crisis of the 1970s. I use discourse analysis of party-political programmes and media discourse to reveal attempts by the PRR (and beyond) to use the common sense of authoritarian nostalgia to mobilise a radical right politics in the present. As such, I argue that, in Britain today – as in Europe – the PRR act as reactionary intellectuals, working to fuse existing common sense authoritarian tendencies around race, class, and gender with the equally common sense understanding that the past was better than the present, in order to articulate an authoritarian resolution to the crisis faced by the middle classes. By mobilising the British common sense mythology of a cohesive pre-immigration national identity, the PRR, Reform UK (and its mainstream accomplices in the Conservatives, Labour and across the media) cast the racialised other as the cause of middle class decline, whose removal through authoritarian methods, will arrest the slide.