senior lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool.
1 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Routledge, [1972] 2011).
Can the Radical Right’s Reductionist Narrative Withstand Real-World Complexity?
Alan Waring
There is a general recognition that major problems and issues of our world, including understanding them and their causes, and proposing remedies and coping strategies, are rarely simple in nature. Complexity theory and the long history of systems science, as exemplified by the work of such authorities as von Bertalanffy,1 Parsons, Ackoff, Checkland2 and others, have demonstrated this truism conclusively. Nevertheless, systems science has always recognized that reductionism also has an important role in conceptualization, theory development, methodology, analysis, problem/issue elicitation, and design of practical interventions.3 However, that role is meant to be a controlled and targeted one, to be used judiciously only when appropriate to a particular topic or juncture within a larger and more holistic strategy, and not to be used as the exclusive quick-fix approach to all “problem solving”. Regrettably, there is abundant evidence that radical right leaders, ideologues, politicians, administrations, opinion-formers and others have an overwhelming tendency to promulgate, often dogmatically and even ruthlessly, simple analyses and solutions to complex real-world issues. Unsurprisingly, these rarely work and often make things far worse.
Characteristics and fallacies of radical right reductionism
The radical right exhibits reductionist thinking and narratives in two main ways: 1) trivializing or minimizing the nature and impact of particular risks (and sometimes maximizing them), contrary to known science or factual evidence, and 2) over-simplifying specific problems or issues, or inventing false and unscientific cause-effect explanations for them. The apparent motives for why the radical right engages in such egregious manipulation and fakery centre on four processes, which they believe will bring their cause political and populist benefits:
1) Authoritarian revisionism
The radical right indulges in the erasure from their narrative of inconvenient or unwelcome facts from the accepted knowledge base of history and science. For example, protagonists pretend that the vast body of knowledge on the complexity of problems and issues relating to society, science, economics, health, social reforms, human rights, foreign relations, and governance in general, as developed over the past half century, is irrelevant, or is fake science, or never even existed. The radical right policies, narratives and actions of the Trump administration provide stark in extremis examples of such revisionism on many fronts and in various forms.
The radical right seeks to regress to the “simple truths and values” of an imaginary past world of the 1960s and earlier, when relatively simple mechanistic, biological or economic “explanations” provided a comforting illusion of order, certainty, neatly stacked “problems-and-solutions”, and simplistic salvation models and “programs” for correcting deviations from their dogma and their assertions of what constitutes the correct normative order. Critiques,4 of the “fallacy of predetermination” and other reductionist fallacies, and critiques5 of the poor predictability of non-holistic programmatic change, have no currency in the radical right world, since these expose their inherent flaws.
Examples of radical right salvation “cure-alls” range from Trump’s Mexican wall and Orbán’s anti-Muslim border controls, to the palingenetic ultranationalist ethno-religious and political cleansing demanded by the extreme right, to radical right advocacy of, or sympathy with, discredited eugenics theories of inferiority of certain races. As allegedly inferior races will be an unacceptable drain on society and the economy, eugenics advocates argue that they should be “dealt with” (echoing the Nazi Rassenhygiene laws and Eugen Fischer’s infamous Aktion T4 extermination program in Hitler’s Germany). For example, Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to apologize for, or dismiss, a policy adviser who suggested publicly that discriminatory policies based on eugenics were warranted.6
Complexity theory regards real-world problems and issues as “messes”, i.e. systems of problems that defy resolution simply by picking off component problems one-by-one or even in groups, because in doing so the “mess” simply adapts itself and survives in a modified and unresolved form. Messes require the systemic whole to be tackled holistically. Despite the overwhelming trend over the past fourty-five years among governments, policy research groups, and academia towards adopting holistic approaches, the radical right have persisted with their reductionist and revisionist worldview. For example, as I’ve noted,7 some of the radical right (e.g. Reisman) seriously argue for reintroduction of minimalist social, employment and environmental policies similar to those of Victorian times, and the wholesale removal of protective legislation for work people. Nevertheless, because radical right propaganda overall offers a seductive “salvation” model, as the 21st century has progressed, radical right salvation ideas have gained widespread populist support among weary and fearful societies demanding “solutions”. Moreover, there has also been a resurgence of reductionist theories and arguments in some areas of academia, e.g., recent scientific papers that airbrush out the body of knowledge on complexity and advocate rehashed reductionist theories on scientific management and salvationist programmatic change models from the 1960s.
2) Manipulation of risk perceptions
US President Trump’s persistent official policy was to deny that climate change exists or, if it does, then it is neither human-created nor a major threat to the world.8 That policy implies a belief that there is no systemic cause-effect relationship between human activity, global warming/climate change, and extreme weather events. Therefore, no special preventative measures or contingency planning are required, and existing emergency response provisions are adequate since extreme weather events will remain rare, unpredictable, and non-catastrophic. In radical right terms, the “problem” and its risks are thereby reduced to zero, as they do not exist. The motive behind Trump’s extraordinary “wishful thinking” position is open to conjecture.
As another example, in radical right terms, MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) is reduced to a set of allegedly relatively minor health threats whereas [quoting discredited quack science from a struck-off physician] MMR vaccine is falsely cited as a major cause of autism in children. The underlying justification appears to emanate from the radical right’s fear of removal of the freedom of parental choice coupled with a belief that scientists who support vaccination (i.e., the vast majority, authorities such as the CDC, WHO, etc.) are part of a left-wing conspiracy to undermine conservative governance and the economy. Radical right supporters are heavily represented among anti-vax supporters, who include Trump. In February 2020, he also contradicted the CDC and WHO on the seriousness of the coronavirus threat, dismissing the scale of the threat as a “hoax” and claiming that his media enemies were using false coronavirus stories as a weapon to undermine him politically. Subsequently, he has persistently sought to “talk down” the COVID-19 threat to public health and has strongly advocated removal of the lockdown restrictions while the pandemic was still raging and before safe to do so, apparently on economic grounds, a belief that health experts were exaggerating the risks, and to avoid damage to his re-election chances.
While
