Why we should never debate fascists, racists and other reactionaries
On Thursday, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, one of the most prominent left-wing candidates to the French presidency in the 2022 election debated Eric Zemmour, a journalist-turned-politician, whose ideas on Islam, women or LGBTQ communities have long placed him on the extreme right of the French political landscape. Despite the incredible violence of his politics, he has been given numerous platforms in the mainstream media over the years. In recent months, it has become clearer that he is likely to run for the presidency himself, although it is possible his aim is simply to create a buzz around a potential candidacy in an attempt to shift the discourse further right and position himself as king/queenmaker. I will not spend time here discussing the debate itself as it was exactly as predicted. What I am interested in instead is exploring what the impact of debating the far right is. Needless to say, the points I am making here are hardly original and have been said countless times before and far more eloquently by writers and activists in many settings. The sad reactionary state of affair we live in means that it bears repeating over and over again.
In a context where far right politics are given unprecedented coverage and where most mainstream politicians have toed the line on core issues that were not so long ago considered outside of the republican pact, some have argued that Mélenchon was right to debate Zemmour: after all, his ideas are already hegemonic or nearly so. This may be true, but that does not explain how debating someone who knows TV so well on his own turf and on his own pet issues would help, even if it were to create no more harm than has already been done through countless year of cowardly and sensationalist coverage and hype of far-right politics. Yet maybe it was time for someone to take Zemmour to task and uncover live not only how vile his ideas are but how baseless his argument is. After all, isn’t the best way to destroy bad ideas to expose them to factual truths in the bright sunlight?
Well, not really if we judge by experience. Besides, even if that were the case, why would this require having the proponent of bad ideas themselves there to defend their fallacious argument rather than simply expose it?
A few years ago, I made this mistake myself in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack. The point I was trying to convey at the time was that denouncing the attack and defending freedom of speech and the press should not make us side uncritically with Charlie Hebdo’s politics as had become common in the aftermath of the horrible murders. I agreed to debate someone who was taking a much more reactionary position, arguing that free speech should have no limits and wilfully ignoring the very simple fact that not only it certainly does, whether morally or legally as is the case in France for example, but that the very idea of free speech is moot in societies where speech is so unevenly distributed: it is all nice and well for everyone to be able to say whatever one wants, but if some interests have a privileged access to public discourse, then free speech isn’t so free.
Thing is though, I appeared to win that debate. I felt I did, the audience reaction comforted me in this view as did the feedback I received. I felt that I had done my part in fighting the good fight. Debating the far right is indeed appealing for its opponents as it is generally easy, albeit frustrating to win the argument and allows one to pat oneself on the back and believe they have done their part. Yet this is premised on two key mistakes: that reactionaries are indeed interested in debating ideas and that they are interested in winning a particular battle, rather than the war of ideas. Anyone who has ever watched one of these debates knows that the aim for reactionaries is never to have a real open and serious discussion and reflection about issues: it is about pushing ideas through punchlines, create and/or exaggerate moral panics and divert attention away from real crises onto their own turf. All of this could be witnessed in the debate between Mélenchon and Zemmour. Zemmour was caught a number of times lying, his argument may not have withstood scrutiny and the superficiality of his understanding of the many crises we face were clear for all to see — but this was nothing new and anyone who had paid even a little attention to his very public presence over the past few years would have known that debating or accuracy was never the point.
On these spurious grounds, debating the far right can therefore only participate in the normalisation of their ideas through the simple fact that this setting signals that these ideas are worth debating. In essence, it suggests that the far right may have a point, that they could convince us or that there may be some middle ground. Think of the damage done on a number of topic by the spurious idea that balance in the media means opposing cranks and climate scientists or members of particular communities to those who deny their existence or threaten them, whether it about immigration, Islam or transphobia.
When it comes to fascism, racism and other reactionary ideas, there should be no discussion or attempt to find a common ground with those not only espousing but publicly pushing such views. That does not mean there should be no debate or discussion at all, but these should be saved to discuss how to combat the far right, not whether or not they have a point or whether we can find some middle ground. Our time should be spent organising and supporting those at the sharp end, not engaging in a civil manner with those who are a very real threat to their safety. As the history of no platforming show us, this was never about curtailing ‘free speech’, but about standing against allowing ideas which are a threat to some to be uncritically spread.
It doesn’t mean we should ignore them either obviously, quite the contrary. It means we should organise to counter not only their message, but also what makes their message so prominent in our public discourse. Debating does not only make their ideas more palatable, it also lends what are generally rather unpopular characters a veneer of popularity, respectability and strength they do not deserve. Indeed, it is common to hear that Zemmour and co are popular and that this is what justifies engaging with them and providing them with huge coverage. Instead of taking this for granted, we should question why they are ‘popular’ and what ‘popular’ actually means in a heavily mediated world. Instead of accepting that the far right taps into latent popular grievances as is too often the case, we should instead look at how their popularity is created or exaggerated through top-down processes: the far right would not be mainstream if the mainstream had not let it in in the first place. Rather than blaming some fantasised ‘white working class’ or ‘the people’ through populist hype and giving the far right further legitimacy, we should turn our attention to those who hold more power in shaping our public discourse, what they do and what they can gain by propping up the far right even though they appear to be against it. As disillusionment and distrust grows in the status quo and its clear inability to resolve the many crises our world is facing, we should interrogate what purpose the creation and limitation of a political offer in the shape of the status quo vs the far right serve.
Beyond that, and this should go without saying, we should never accept the premise that the safe and equal existence of anyone can be a cause for debate as far-right politics encourage us to believe. Once we accept that this can be debated, we open the door to far-right politics and become complicit in its spread and mainstreaming.
