BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Establishment and Fascism
If We Tolerate This By Daniel Trilling
Published by Picador, 2026, rrp £14.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
This timely book is subtitled ‘How the British establishment made the Far Right respectable’. A great deal of contemporary discontent amongst the public emerges from the huge and growing wealth disparities we see all around us. Much of this is rooted in neoliberal capitalism; deindustrialisation and the emergence of ‘the City’ as a core economic growth area whilst the regions, peripheral to ‘the home counties’ were left to decline; the banking bailout in 2008, which instigated an ‘austerity’ regime designed to ‘balance the books’ by further fleecing the poor to pay for bailing out the rich; and the failures of Brexit.
Looking at this objectively, one might expect ‘the left’, which traditionally supports social and economic democracy, to benefit from discontent. Yet, we are on average very much seeing the opposite. Trilling’s book seeks to analyse why and how, instead, the ‘far right’ has benefitted and manipulated this discontent. Amongst numerous factors behind the rise of extremists on the right of the political spectrum, one stands out to Trilling, which is ‘failure’ of the centrist parties of ‘the establishment’ to pour oil on these choppy waters and cool things down. Some of this failure is down to decisions within our elites, and some is down to extraneous factors, such as, not to put too fine a point on it, foreign interference backing openly treasonous opportunist populists on the right.
The possibilities to control the narrative have been significantly influenced for the worse by online trollery via social media platforms, owned, and manipulated to varying degrees by their owners – who are, of course, billionaires, and foreign, thus not really having the nation’s interests at heart. This goes for the bulk of our news media too, such as the Mail and the Telegraph, who number amongst the most toxic of a bad bunch – but print media sales have been dropping for years, as online activity has grown.
EFFECTIVE ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS COME FROM LEFTWING ECONOMICS
The power of social media platforms grew over the last two decades, but really became the go-to echo chamber we see today through lockdown. During the covid years, millions of us were habituated to an online world that a significant proportion of us remained locked into after we were opened up again. This push to online supremacy was a boon to online markets such as Amazon, and has accelerated dissatisfaction with ‘the death of the high street’. It also was a boon to rich opinion manipulators, and once Elon Musk acquired ‘Twitter’ the potential to queer our politics went into hyperdrive. It is no exaggeration to put at least two-thirds of the misdirection of dissent away from the rich towards minorities, especially those who sought refuge here from resource wars carried out on the homeland by the West, down to platforms such as ‘X’ (and in the last weeks, the Facebook app too). This is a key aspect of why ‘the right’ have benefitted the most: deflecting public ire away from themselves had to be toward ‘the right’, as effective economic solutions for our situation all come from leftwing economics which are another threat to the overweening wealth of the super-rich.
So, much of what we need to control is to a degree out of our hands. Suggestions such as banning youngsters from social media ignore the fact that the majority of toxic right-wing support is from an entirely different demographic, ‘the over-50s’, a wide and slightly misleading category, similar to blaming ‘the red wall’, but nevertheless with more than a kernel of truth. It is doable, though, to block at least the casual onliners, as proven by the block on Russia Today. Yes, of course it can be bypassed, but if, for example, ‘X’ was blocked, most users would probably not bother to tinker with what for many appears to be highly technical IT issues (though in reality they are pretty simple). At the same time, there remains, on the left as well as on the right, distaste for censorship. But, in an increasingly ‘online world’, with the rise of AI, the move away from a cash economy, and increasing surveillance (including hacking, but also spying by the biggest app developers), makes it incredibly difficult to control the misinformation engine. The rise of algorithms, putatively designed to monetise platforms by leading users toward posts ‘For You’, has obviously been utilised by Musk to push a rightward narrative, one where to ‘save Britain’, this week, we must vote Restore; one where ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a ‘freedom fighter’ not a terrorist thug; one where the Tate Bros manosphere is not toxic extremism, but a redress of an overly feminist ‘communist’ leftwing phantom…
A BETRAYAL OF DISILLUSIONED WORKING PEOPLE
Trilling looks in more depth at ways in which the establishment here has failed us, indeed all too often deliberately. It has been a consistent strategy politically to try to co-opt extreme outlier parties and lobbyists by pandering to some of their concerns: a classic example is Cameron’s ‘hostile environment’. Rather than attract ‘moderate’ far-right supporters to the Conservatives, it has led to them haemorrhaging leading politicians, as well as voters, to Reform. This has shoved the Overton window so far rightwards that ‘even’ the Labour Party have moved, in many regards, somewhat right of Thatcherism. A significant part of Trilling’s book is titled ‘Cowards’, and it really can’t be ignored that this, too, has been a very real part of the establishment’s problem containing the alt-right.
Trilling thinks ‘more democracy, not less’ is part of the answer to our problems. Personally, once again, I must say that we need ‘citizens’ for this to work, and one of the things biting the elites in the butt is their past reliance on ensuring our ‘education’ system fails to create citizens. Ironically, hoist by their own petard, but it is the ordinary disillusioned working people that they’ve betrayed who will ultimately suffer the worst consequences: the very people being conned by Reform and their ilk.
As Mary ‘Liz’ Truss brings over to us the very right wing American CPAC; as the likes of Tommy and Trump squeal about ‘free speech’ whilst shutting down left attempts to engage in dialogue since what they really mean is the freedom to spread hate; as Musk bankrolls far right ‘freedom’ marches and appears on giant screens in London to promote his racist agenda; as US evangelical nationalist Christians infiltrate the UK far right; and as Rubio invites 60 nations to a conference on ‘left wing extremism’, it is hard not to conclude that fascism, on an internationally organised scale, is reaching its next stage: the one where they in effect, or perhaps literally, organise a coup against forces that may oppose them. As a student of history, I’d love to be wrong, but all the signs are there.
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