I once believed that you should fight the extreme right and extreme left “at the same time and for the same reasons”. The phrase had a fine sound to it, even if I say so myself, and it remains true enough. Anyone who has witnessed the public shaming of those who deviate from approved leftish ideology will find Boris Johnson’s attempts to purge the cabinet and civil service of all who disagree with him familiar. The politics may be different but the oppressive spirit is the same.
But in this terrible year, it is worth saying that moral equivalence is not the same as practical equivalence. As the world stands, the fight against the radical right is a fight for the preservation of liberal democracy. The fight against the far left is a fight for justice for the individual denied the freedom to express his or, and more frequently today, her opinions without post-Stalinist inquisitors demanding she confesses her ideological crimes or lose her job.
Both fights are essential but the difference in scale is so enormous it barely makes sense to put them in the same category. The best way I can explain why is to imagine an American announcing they were voting for Donald Trump because they were repelled by how the New York Times and US universities had removed journalists and academics who would not bow their heads and bite their tongues. You would, I think, tell them that their sense of proportion was so out of balance it was a wonder they did not topple over. Trump has the power to threaten the American constitution. He has stuffed his administration with cronies and relatives, and damned thousands of Americans to needless deaths from Covid-19. He is hoping to retain power by encouraging far-right terrorism and ballot rigging. Given the anarchic glee that Trump and the Republicans display when they block defensive measures against global warming, his defeat is a necessity not just for the United States but for humanity.
I don’t deny that leftish cultural influence is a form of power. If you are forced out of your job in a university or publisher, or told what you can and cannot teach, think and write, it is a power that can crush you. But political power with the ability to crush tens of millions of people is in the hands of the radical right. And not just in the United States. Britain, Hungary, Poland, Russia, India, Turkey, Brazil and the Philippines are democracies that have been taken over by governments that to varying degrees despise independent checks and are determined to humble any institution that might curb them.
However fond modern writers are of quoting Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, the 2020s are not a reprise of the 1930s. We do not face the equivalent of Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. With the exception of the Venezuelan dictatorship, the anti-liberal movements that control democracies are all from the right. Meanwhile, the rising superpower of China might mouth the old Maoist slogans out of force of habit, like you might half-remember a story from your childhood, but it is nothing like the old Soviet Union. The ideology that drives it is a hyper-aggressive nationalism, not communism.
The nearest any developed country came to experiencing the dead end of 1930s politics was Britain. In the 2019 general election, the choice was between the competing dishonesties of the Brexit right and the Corbyn left. Whichever way voters went, the country would have been ruined. British political culture has changed with remarkable speed since Labour’s defeat. The far left is on its way out and Labour is at last looking as if it would be better at governing the country than the Conservatives, not a hard task, given that Johnson has lowered the bar to floor level. The American Democrats in turn have refused to play into the Republicans’ hands. To Trump’s visible disappointment they chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to represent them.
However vicious it may be, the far left has not overrun the western centre-left as the radical right has overrun mainstream conservatism. Labour MPs were willing to give up their careers to fight against antisemitism and the toleration of totalitarian ideas and regimes. Compare that with the US, where only Mitt Romney and a handful of Republican politicians have risked losing office by fighting to stop their party becoming Trump’s personality cult. British Conservatives who were prepared to oppose the national catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit were either purged by Johnson, in an example of the Stalinism on the right, or walked away from the party in despair at the last election. They showed a courage their successors lack. With only months to go before we could crash out of the single market and customs union, no prominent Conservative politician is prepared to speak for the national interest or even debate it.
The silence from a right that still boasts it believes in freedom of speech is not confined to Tory MPs who Johnson can directly harm. It extends to the conservative press, thinktanks and intellectuals. Their slavish compliance shows that Johnson has been more successful in imposing a party line on the right than Corbyn ever was in imposing conformity on the left.
A defeat for Trump would make the contrast clearer. Conservatives have written with accuracy about how cancel culture and political correctness have moved disgusted voters rightwards. They always forget to mention that the converse also applies. Trump has destroyed America as an example for the world to follow and authorised every reaction against it. Extremism begets extremism. When you have an unapologetic racist as American president, all opposition is legitimate and the most zealous opposition can feel the most legitimate of all. As I say, you should not have to choose. But if you must, fight the power that presents the greatest threat, because once the far right is defeated, it will be easier to fight the far left.
• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist