A Bogeyman Called ‘Far-Right’

Contemporary legacy media exhibit a striking asymmetry in political language. Nearly everything to the right of progressive orthodoxy is labeled “far-right,” while the far left is defined out of existence. Even movements that openly reject capitalism, constitutionalism, biblical morality, and the family — Black Lives Matter foremost among them — are spared ideological description, while their critics are routinely denounced as political extremists and moral deviants.

Donald Trump is routinely decried as a “fascist” (and worse) on MSNBC and by many in the Democratic congressional caucus and the intellectual class. But this kind of rhetorical exaggeration is no accident. It’s a familiar tactic of radical movements and totalitarian regimes; once such movements gain power, they redefine their own ideology as the norm and treat all dissent as extremism.

In the Soviet Union, Leninism was treated as the political center, and anything outside it was dismissed as “reactionary” or “fascist.” In the United States, as wokeness rose to cultural dominance, a 1990s-style New York moderate became, in the parlance of the established media, “far-right.” And in Chile, as revolutionary socialism re-stakes its claim to the rhetorical center, a pro-market family man has been transformed into a “far-right” bogeyman.

This last and most recent case is especially instructive. The BBC’s coverage of the Chilean presidential election shows how far this abuse of political language has gone. According to Ione Wells, that once-august organization’s South American correspondent, José Antonio Kast’s recent victory was a triumph of “the far-right wing” over the forces of “democracy.”

Kast’s opponent, Jeannette Jara, was a member of Chile’s hard-core and unrepentant Communist Party until mere weeks before the election. Yet she is described simply as “the left-wing coalition candidate.” The article even quotes a Chilean supporter lamenting voters’ failure to perceive her as the true “centrist” in the race.

Throughout the piece, Chilean voters’ concerns about crime, attacks on police, and illegal immigration are brushed aside as exaggerations stirred up by the Right. The article blurs any real distinction between Kast’s democratic conservatism and the Pinochet dictatorship through selective framing and insinuation. Kast’s victory is said to mark “the biggest shift to the Right since the end of Chile’s military dictatorship in 1990.” It is duly noted that Kast’s brother once served as a minister in a Pinochet government. To complete the exercise, Kast is described as an admirer of Donald Trump — an obvious effort at guilt by association — and his “social conservatism” is noted and implicitly lamented. His German ethnic background even allows Nazism to enter the equation.

The coverage of the election — and of recent Chilean history more broadly — is one-sided and misleading. The story certainly obscures far more than it clarifies. A reader would never learn why Kast won more than 58 percent of the vote or carried every one of Chile’s fifty-six provinces. Reporting from the AP and PBS was no better, similarly imbalanced and ideologically charged.

By contrast, center-right outlets such as First Things, The American Mind, and London’s Catholic Herald did a far better job of explaining what was truly at stake. As Pablo Maillet noted in The American Mind, the election amounted to a clear choice between the Right and the far left. Unlike earlier strands of Chilean center-right politics, which had ceded nearly all social and cultural ground to the Left, Kast understood that “popular capitalism,” as he termed it, must rest upon a civilized inheritance—one rooted in vibrant religious life and firmly opposed to radical ideological projects.

Kast also understood why the Chilean military removed President Salvador Allende. Allende had wrecked the economy, targeted the middle class and independent Catholic schools, tolerated the rise of left-wing paramilitary militias, and threatened the independence of both Congress and the Constitutional Court. His aim was the Cubanization of Chile. Fidel Castro himself spent twenty-five days in Chile in late 1971, actively encouraging revolutionary agitation.

Even Eduardo Frei Montalva, Allende’s Christian Democratic predecessor and a man of unimpeachable democratic credentials, supported the military intervention when it came in September 1973. He later became disillusioned by the regime’s harshness—a regime under which 3,065 people were killed or “disappeared” over seventeen years. Such brutality cannot be excused. Yet a full-scale totalitarian regime of the Cuban type was avoided, and a market economy was preserved and expanded. When Chileans voted on October 5, 1988, for a return to constitutional government, Pinochet began the transition to civilian rule—an outcome unimaginable in Cuba after January 1, 1959. Chileans understand that political judgment is comparative.

As Maillet further observes, mainstream narratives of recent Chilean history omit “Red October,” the violent 2019 riots sparked by subway-fare increases that pushed the country toward a genuinely revolutionary moment, with the Left dominant in politics and culture alike. Subsequent efforts to impose a radical Red-Green constitution were twice rejected by Chilean voters.

Under the left-wing government of Gabriel Boric, elected in 2021, crime surged, Catholic and evangelical churches were burned—three hundred in total—and economic growth slowed dramatically. Kast’s victory represents a return to democratic norms—and a rejection both of the revolutionary Left’s cultural agenda and of an establishment Right interested mainly in protecting its own privileges.

Economic growth alone cannot sustain a free and civilized political order. To his credit, Kast understands this well. The moral culture of a free society must be actively defended and preserved.

Kast is committed to the rule of law, the integrity of Chile’s borders, and a form of popular capitalism that resists statism while bringing the disadvantaged fully into what Pope John Paul II called the “circle of productivity and exchange.” His coalition is patriotic and anti-revolutionary, though less uniformly socially conservative than he himself is. Governing will require a balance of principle and prudence — the enduring mark of statesmanship. One can only wish him well.

In Chile, at least for now, democratic conservatives have successfully resisted the designs of the revolutionary Left. The lesson is heartening, and not only for Chile. Yet it must still penetrate powerful ideological and institutional barriers. Americans, too, must resist the systematic obfuscation of political language that prevents clear judgment about political realities at home and abroad. Democratic conservatism should not be conflated with a mythical “far right,” nor should the far left’s continuing threat to liberty and decency be denied. As Orwell understood, political clarity depends on linguistic honesty.