The Democratic Case Against the Term "Far-Right"

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

This morning I read a New York Times piece about Pierre-Édouard Stérin. I’d never heard of him before. Apparently, he’s a French billionaire funding candidates and think tanks to make France, in his words, “less Muslim, more Catholic, and more capitalist.” I confess, I’m not particularly interested in Stérin himself. I am, however, interested in the use of the term “far right.” This morning’s article used it nine times. That alone wouldn’t be worth remarking on—after all, the term is pervasive. We regularly hear it used with characters like Nick Fuentes, parties like the AfD in Germany, and of course President Trump himself. And yet, I have yet to see anyone stop to seriously consider what our use of the term is costing us.

My use of “far right” as a motivating example need not be read as a failure to see the parallel of “far left” (“radical left” works much the same way). Nor is it a denial that both terms tend to function as a sort of lazy and convenient shorthand. While each may have the advantage of saving us a few words, both need to be dropped from discourse and, more importantly, recognized as obstacles to clear political reasoning.

“Far right” and “far left” trick us, in part because they feel like straightforward descriptions. As if there’s an obvious spectrum of political opinion, and these terms simply locate what falls outside its acceptable range. The Overton Window is likely the version of this idea most people have encountered: the notion that at any given moment, there’s a corridor of sayable positions, and what lies beyond it can be comfortably labeled “extreme.” The terms “far right” and “far left” essentially import the same logic into everyday language. They imply that there’s some center domain, however defined, that contains the natural zone of reason in a given place and time. The implication is that positions outside that domain don’t require engagement—they require a label. But neither “far left” nor “far right” is, in fact, a descriptive term. Each is a verdict—delivered in place of an argument.

They draw a line and declare everything past it deviant—not objectionable in ways we can specify, not advocating for tradeoffs we find unacceptable for specific reasons, but simply beyond the consideration of morally serious people. The label does the work that argument is supposed to do.

That substitution has consequences. For starters, positions that get labeled rather than engaged don’t disappear—they find other channels, other audiences, and often grow. The label doesn’t resolve disagreement. It forecloses it. And foreclosed disagreements have a way of returning, louder and less tractable than before. The second consequence may be less visible but is equally corrosive: the terms degrade the thinking of whoever uses them—and, as with the NYT piece, whoever reads them uncritically as well.

I focus on “far right” because the term is doing more work in our political conversation than its counterpart. In the current context, “that’s far right” does the same work as “that’s racist.” Both convert a position that could be argued with into one that can only be condemned. The argument is over before it begins.

And yet, democracy is built on a specific premise: that reasonable people, weighing real and competing goods, will reach different conclusions. Liberty against security. Individual autonomy against collective welfare. Continuity against change. Cultural cohesion against pluralism. There are genuine losses on every side of these contests. The person who weights them differently than you isn’t necessarily confused or malicious. They may be making a different but recognizable human judgment about what matters most.

That’s not a squishy, feel-good observation. It’s a structural requirement. Democracy doesn’t work if we pre-decide which weightings are legitimate before the contestation begins. It works by letting those weightings compete, negotiate, and produce outcomes that participants can accept even when they lose—because they were heard, because the process was fair, because their position was engaged rather than dismissed.

“Far” short-circuits that. It doesn’t say: here is what this person is claiming, here is the tradeoff they’re making, and here is why I disagree with it. It says: this position has left the space where democratic reasoning applies. And once that move is made, the appropriate response is no longer argument. It’s exclusion.

Consider what the Times piece actually tells us about Stérin. He wants less immigration, particularly from Muslim countries. He wants abortion banned. He wants to privatize education and healthcare and slash the welfare state. He wants to ban Muslim dress in public spaces. These are positions. They involve contestable empirical claims and genuine value tradeoffs—about national identity, religious pluralism, the role of the state, the relationship between culture and citizenship. People who hold versions of these views represent, in various combinations, the sincere convictions of hundreds of millions of people across Western democracies.

Are those positions ones that most readers of the NYT piece likely find objectionable? Almost certainly. And yet, labeling them “far right” doesn’t tell us what specifically is wrong with the reasoning behind them. It tells us the conversation is over. But ending the conversation isn’t the same as winning it.

None of this means Stérin’s positions are beyond criticism. The same standard applies in every direction—his critics’ arguments are no more immune to scrutiny than his own. It means that how we criticize matters. If his case for limiting Muslim immigration relies on a causal story about cultural cohesion that doesn’t hold up, say that. If his position on abortion imposes one set of values on people who hold competing ones with equal sincerity, make that argument. If his vision of a privatized welfare state would produce specific harms to specific people, name them. These are criticisms with content. They can be evaluated, contested, and answered. “Far right” can’t be any of those things. It’s not a criticism. It’s a dismissal dressed up as one—and dismissals don’t constitute an argument.

Now here’s where the predictable objection likely arrives: what about figures who go beyond tradeoffs entirely, into explicit claims about who belongs in democratic life? I mentioned Nick Fuentes earlier. He’s said women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, that black people should “for the most part” be imprisoned, and that white men should run the country, the companies, and the household. Shouldn’t we use the term “far right” to ostracize him? Not only that, but don’t we have a moral obligation to do so?

It’s an understandable concern—but working through it makes clear what’s wrong with this line of thinking.

Fuentes’s statements can be disputed on the grounds that they’re explicit claims about who belongs in democratic life and who doesn’t. That’s a specific charge—and it deserves to be stated with precision. “Far right” doesn’t do that. It buries the charge in a geographic metaphor and lumps Fuentes together with anyone else who has wandered past an invisible, and ever-moving, line. The specific accusation—that he is advocating the explicit removal of certain groups of people from democratic standing—gets lost in the label. That accusation deserves to be made directly: that claims about who belongs in democratic life are incompatible with the basic commitment to equal standing that democracy requires.

That said, a harder objection remains: even if Fuentes’s views aren’t formally about democratic exclusion—even if they’re just about how society should be organized—surely democracy isn’t obliged to dignify them with argument? Surely some views are simply too repugnant to engage?

That feeling is understandable. But notice what it’s asking for: the right to remove views from democratic contestation rather than argue against them. That is precisely the move that makes democracy fragile. The line between “too repugnant to engage” and “uncomfortable to engage” is drawn by whoever controls the labeling. And once we grant that power, we’ve conceded something more important than the argument we were trying to avoid.

This pattern—reaching for a label that condemns when a precise charge is available—has a name. There’s a word for using moral righteousness as a substitute for argument: sanctimony. And sanctimony has a democratic cost. It signals to everyone on the receiving end of the label that the game is rigged, that the contestation isn’t real, that the outcome was decided before the argument began. That signal is corrosive. It confirms, for those who already distrust democratic institutions, that their distrust is warranted.

The left-right spectrum was always a simplification. But “far” turns it into something worse: a sorting mechanism that separates legitimate disagreement from pre-disqualified deviance, with the cut point set by whoever holds cultural authority. The center gets to feel like the zone of reason by default. Everyone past the line gets to be dismissed without engagement. And the actual arguments—the specific claims, the real tradeoffs, the genuine goods in tension—never have to be named.

We’d have more substantive politics and a democracy that earns its name if we did the harder work of saying specifically what we mean—rather than reaching for a label that tells us we don’t have to.