Should We Reconcile with the Far Right? The 2024 Race Riots in Britain and the End of Post-Fascism

Abstract This article interprets the pogrom in Southport and the subsequence events of the 2024 race riots in Britain as a rupture in the fantasy of post-fascism, the narrative separating the contemporary far right into violent and non-violent factions. More specifically, the article traces the concrete effects of this fantasy in two influential responses to present day right-wing violence: calls for national reconciliation and Chantal Mouffe’s proposal for a left-wing populist alternative. In the first part, the article analyses a petition for a truth and reconciliation commission in Liverpool, drawing parallels to global justice practices, particularly South Africa’s reconciliation process. It highlights how theories of reconciliation depoliticise violence, treating it mainly from the perspective of violations of the law or a moral code. In the second part, the focus shifts to Mouffe’s agonistic theory, which misdiagnosis these acts of violation as transgressions of the status quo expressing a desire for change, which could potentially be channelled towards progressive ends. The final part proposes an infrastructural study of right-wing political violence (Star 1999, Wilson 2016, Berlant 2022), shifting the scholarly focus on the far-right clows to the entire reactionary circus, or from the “thugs” and the rhetoric of “populist” charlatans to the symbolic and material assemblages which provide what political reaction requires to function. More than a national trauma, Southport is analysed from the perspective of an infrastructural glitch, exposing the inseparability of violence and the so-called legitimate concerns voiced by an allegedly democratic far right.