It’s not difficult to reconcile increased support for the far right with people generally being more left wing.
Centrist is a dirty word among the young. To a middle aged thought leader like myself, it’s just a cop out, not a sustainable ideology, ineffective and conducive to neoliberal economics in a sort of unwitting accomplice sort of way.
To the yoot*, Centrism evokes a similar reaction to whatTory does in my generation. A sort of visceral disgust.
Instead of having 5% each far right and far left, with the moderate left and right splitting the remaining 90% with a couple of % variation, we’ve a negligible hard left now and the right split 50/50 between reactionary fuckwits and traditional Tory types.
Increased inequality obviously plays a massive part but so does increasingly polarised discourse and culture war BS.
Given my experience of trade union membership trends over time, i question the right of a lot of these younger types to claim the left. Resharing twitter posts that embarrass right wing dickheads is not the same as taking collective action to improve material conditions.
Of course any attempt to generalise based on birth dates being in an arbitrary range is bone headed. Some millennials might be actual socialists.
*we’ll go with 45 and under here.