Introduction

This has been one of the hardest chapters I have ever tried to write in my scholarly life. Many times I have lost my way. At times, I truly pondered if community development praxis has any effective response to the large forces underpinning, and the actual phenomenon of, contemporary right-wing populism. There are large national and international forces that have been at work, shaping changes for 30-plus years, and that now manifest in clearly visible right-wing populist forms. And such sociopolitical–economic forces are now amplified by the challenge of climate change. How can such forces be stopped, or nudged in a different direction, and how can the humble approach of community development contribute to any kind of shift at all?

In writing this chapter I have also had to reassess many assumptions or myths about right-wing populism. Data and other scholarly work convinced me that I had made many false assumptions – for instance, that people who vote for national right-wing populists, such as for Brexit, are in a ‘protest vote’ (against the ‘system’, rather than for something). The data suggests otherwise, that most people who voted for national populists knew exactly what they voted for – for example, for reducing immigration, for ‘walls’, for welfare reform that such voters perceived to be favouring newly arrived refugees and so forth (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018: 29ff). However, not all my assumptions were wrong – for example, most of the ‘whites’ who voted for Trump in the USA and for Brexit in the UK were less educated (that is, they did have high school education, but not university graduate education), so there are links between education levels and voting for right-wing national populists (Schultz, 2017: 9).

The point of saying this in the introduction to this chapter is that in my rethinking community development's response to contemporary right-wing populism, I am endeavouring to be ‘data-driven’, rather than ideologically driven, which implies interrogating myths, easy tropes and unsound ideas. But data-driven does not imply value neutrality either.