Stuart Hall and the Canadian Right

In a series of interventions in the late 1970s, Stuart Hall analyzed the rise of Thatcherism and the “great moving right show” he discerned in British politics. Hall’s analysis was groundbreaking both in its substantive explanation of what was happening on the British right, and in its rejection of left-wing orthodoxies concerning class and ideology. In this blog post I want to try to summarize Hall’s argument and connect it to current right-wing events that are affecting Canadian politics (the “freedom convoy” protests and the rise of Pierre Poilievre).

Hall began with the fact of economic crisis. By the end of the 1960s, the crisis of capitalist profits which required (from capital’s perspective) the destruction of the welfare state and the imposition of neoliberalism was in full swing. The oil crisis of 1973 was not the beginning of the crisis, but its culmination. The crisis of profitability took aim at welfare state social programmes because those programmes provided a cushion for labour: worker did not have to accept the usual strategies for improving profitability. Full employment and social welfare allowed them to quit and either find another job right away or live on social services for a while. Salaries rose as competition among capital for workers increased. Gregoire Chamayou’s The Ungovernable Society is a really good introduction to the labour-capital tensions in this period. Fears of the “great resignation” echo the fears of ungovernable workers in the transition to neoliberalism.

In British politics, the Labour party found itself in power when the economic crisis really hit. Consider it: the party of labour and the welfare state found itself having to govern the whole of the British economy which required the dismantling of welfare and the disciplining of labour in order to restore profitability. It is no wonder the Labour party was not up to the task. Meanwhile in the Conservative party, the traditionalists did not understand the shift of class relations, economic power, etc, and so still sought to implement unpopular austerity measures in the name of profitability in a society that was used to the welfare state. A new right-wing of the party arose under Thatcher’s unofficial leadership, which looked at things differently. What Thatcher and her supporters understood was that consent for neoliberalism could be manufactured. Over about a decade, she laid the groundwork for a neoliberal “authoritarian populism” (Hall’s term), by creating and exploiting moral panics centred around what Hall referred to as “folk devils”: immigrants and people of colour (Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech had set the stage for this in 1968), welfare scroungers, labour unions, muggers, etc. Essentially, the social effects of the economic crisis were blamed on a set of people portrayed as exploiting the welfare system, getting more than their fair share, getting something for nothing. This is all very familiar from the vantage point of 2022, but this was all radically new in the 1970s.

Thatcher promoted a version of common sense that the “silent majority” of Britons subscribed to: individual responsibility, fairness, calling a spade a spade. By returning to those values, Thatcher argued, they would “make Britain great again” (echoes of Hall’s work on Thatcher appear again and again in Trumpian populism). By playing to this constructed ideology of common sense individualism, by leveraging the “home grown” racism of British society, Thatcher not only laid the foundation of her own rise to power, but manufactured the consent necessary for the complete dismantling of the welfare state and the turn to neoliberalism, precarity, austerity, and the attack on organized labour. Through the “shock tactics” of neoliberal restructuring, capitalist profitability would be restored.

Hall’s insistence on the ideological work being done by the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party was at odds with much mainstream left and Marxist thought. Theorists like Bob Jessop still prioritized the idea of a “class perspective”: working class people had a particular ideological viewpoint that aligned them with Labour, the middle and upper classes had their own ideology that aligned them with the Conservatives. People could be mistaken, and so it was simply the role of the left to expose their “false consciousness” to make them see their class position more clearly.

But Hall was inspired by his readings of continental Marxists on ideology - notably Gramsci, but also Althusser - who showed that ideology is not simply false, but is a way of living through and with the truth of one’s social and economic position. Ideology is deeper and more powerful than simply an error. It was this that Thatcher recognized in her programme of manufacturing consent, and it was this that Hall saw as well. For Hall, all kinds of social institutions which appeared “neutral” - primarily the media - were complicit in this construction of ideological consent. The relaying and amplification of the right-wing populist message against crime, criminality, and folk devils, the whipping up of popular outrage in the form of moral panics, the construction of the idea that the “common sense” way of life of the ordinary British public was under attack: the media and other institutions were complicit in this. (See “The Whites of Their Eyes”, “Drifting into a Law and Order Society”, and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” for descriptions of how this works in practice). [As an aside, I should day that my PhD research looks at how Canadian libraries are doing this today through Intellectual Freedom and the moral panics surrounding trans rights and Indigenous criminality].

Thatcher promised a return to individual freedom, a crackdown on scroungers, immigrants, and other threats to the (white) British way of life, and a restoration of British common sense. The way she went about this was very new in the 1970s and Hall’s analysis of it was incredibly prescient.

What we are seeing in Canada (and across the capitalist metropoles) echoes the crisis of the 1970s. Since the financial crisis of 2008, economic crisis has been biting deeper and deeper, and climate change and the pandemic have added to the social and political aspects of this crisis. Indigenous protests, Black Lives Matter protests, and the fight for trans rights, have given the Canadian (indeed, North American) right built-in folk devils for a “great moving right show” of our own. Populists like Trump knew how to manipulate the moral panic around both over and covert/conspiratorial targets (e.g. the QAnon conspiracy) to seek greater political power and the imposition of an authoritarian populist social order (in the US this boiled over in the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021).

In Canadian politics, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole found themselves in the position of the Conservative leaders before Thatcher, who didn’t see the political opportunities of a shift to the right, who fought to hold the centre according to the centrist truisms of Canadian politics. In Canadian politics, the Conservative party is best understood as the right-wing of the Liberal party, while the NDP is best understood as its left-wing. Neither are particularly right-wing or left-wing compared to parties in other countries.

What the Conservatives have been waiting for (and indeed, agitating for within the party itself) is the rise of a Thatcherite figure capable of harnessing the energies released by the exploitation of moral panic, conspiracy theories, and aimed at the traditional folk-devils of Canadian society, primarily Indigenous people, the quintessential Thatcherite “scroungers” of right-wing ideology. Maxime Bernier thought he was that figure, but the ideological consent had not been sufficiently manufactured, and the PPC did poorly in the last election. Clearly the Conservative Party thinks the time and ideological moment is now right, hence O’Toole’s ouster, the installation of interim leader Candice Bergen (further to the right than O’Toole), and the (premature? rightly self-confident) announcement by Pierre Poilievre that not only is his announcing his run for the CPC leadership but his bid to be Prime Minister after the next election.

The question is whether, as with Thatcher, the right-wing ideological construction is deep and broad enough for a national shift to the far-right. If so, then we will see skinheads and Nazi flags on the street in the lead up to the next election (mirroring the rise of the National Front in Britain in the 70s and 80s). However, the small size (relative to the whole population) of the trucker convoy, and the widespread condemnation of Nazi and Confederate flags, as well as the violent harassment of civilians in Ottawa - as well as the clear double-standard on the part of state power - may mean that the far-right trucker protest was premature. If this is the case, then even those conservative Canadians who believe in individual responsibility and common sense won’t go along with the great moving right show.

However, it seems clear that the Thatcherite manufacturing of consent and the rise of a law and order society (for all but white-supremacist protestors, anyway) will be the common theme of the leadup to the next election, as Poilievre and the Conservatives seek to exploit pandemic exhaustion, climate change worries, and leverage ongoing moral panics around immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and trans people. However the next election turns out, I think the convoy protest differs from the January 6 insurrection in an important respect: where January 6 seems to have marked the end of Trump’s campaign (he really seems like a spent force, despite his bluster), the trucker convoy likely marks the beginning of racist, far-right attempts to manufacture consent for a shift to the right in four years time.