Fascism Thrives When Critical Thinking Dies

The Far Right's Organised Show of Force at UK Ports

Something shifted in Britain this past week, and it deserves more than a scroll past. Organised groups of far-right activists staged highly coordinated demonstrations at Dover and Portsmouth — two of the country's most symbolically loaded entry points — in what amounted to a deliberate performance of strength. These were not spontaneous eruptions of working-class frustration. They were choreographed, disciplined, and amplified across social media with professional intent.

The network behind the far-right rise UK watchers are now tracking centres on Daniel Thomas, known online as "Tommo," whose followers also descended on the London offices of the Daily Mail demanding — with apparent sincerity — a new house for his mother. The absurdity of that last detail should not obscure its meaning. Movements built on manufactured grievance have always mingled the grandiose with the petty. What matters is the machinery. What matters is that people showed up, organised, and did what they were told.

Historians of fascism recognise this playbook. Umberto Eco, in his 1995 essay Ur-Fascism, identified the cult of action for its own sake as a foundational feature of fascist movements: doing matters more than thinking, and spectacle substitutes for argument. The Dover and Portsmouth demonstrations were not designed to persuade. They were designed to exist — to be filmed, shared, and seen as proof of momentum.

How Short-Form Social Media Sabotages Political Understanding

Imagine encountering footage of those demonstrations on TikTok. Research cited in The Times suggests the platform's users are capable of scrolling through as many as 260 videos in under 35 minutes. In that window, a clip of marching nationalists competes directly with someone jumping off a cliff, a tube station brawl, and a dog that can open a refrigerator. Each receives roughly the same cognitive weight: a flash of attention, a reflex response, then nothing.

This is not a trivial observation about entertainment preferences. It describes the epistemic environment in which the far-right rise UK movements are currently operating, and it is one they understand better than their critics do. Short-form content does not require context. It does not reward nuance. A ten-second clip of men chanting outside a port feels viscerally powerful without any explanation of who funded the coaches, who designed the banner, or what the organisers actually want beyond the camera roll.

The cognitive scientist Linda Stone described this condition as "continuous partial attention" — a state in which awareness is permanently divided, never fully settling on any single input. Unlike genuine multitasking, which implies parallel processing, continuous partial attention means nothing is ever truly processed at all. Political comprehension, the kind that allows a citizen to evaluate a movement's ideology against historical precedent, requires sustained focus. That is precisely what the attention economy is engineered to prevent.

The Slow Death of Deep Reading and What We Lose With It

The National Literacy Trust has documented declining reading engagement among children and young adults in Britain over successive annual surveys, with long-form reading — books, long journalism, sustained narrative — consistently falling as a leisure activity. Pew Research Center data from the United States mirrors this trend, showing that the share of adults who report reading no books in the previous year has grown over the past two decades, disproportionately among younger age groups.

What erodes alongside the reading habit is not simply vocabulary or general knowledge. It is the capacity for what educators call close reading: the ability to track an argument across multiple paragraphs, register internal contradictions, notice the gap between a claim and its evidence. These are not innate skills. They are trained responses, built through practice. And like all trained responses, they atrophy without use.

Fascist and far-right movements have historically been hostile to literacy in this deeper sense. Not to the mechanical ability to decode words, but to the critical capacity those words might activate. Joseph Goebbels understood that a population saturated with spectacle — rallies, posters, film reels, anthems — would have neither the time nor the inclination to read the small print of what was actually being proposed. The contemporary equivalent is a population saturated with short-form video. The mechanism differs. The outcome is structurally identical.

Why Fascism Flourishes When Analytical Tools Disappear

Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the success of propaganda depends not on making people believe lies but on making them indifferent to the distinction between truth and lies altogether. Once that indifference sets in — once the question "is this true?" stops feeling urgent — the space for authoritarian politics expands dramatically.

The far-right rise UK represents precisely this environment made manifest. The claims circulating in Tommo's network — about immigration, crime, national decline — are rarely argued. They are asserted, repeated, and decorated with footage of Dover's white cliffs or Portsmouth's naval heritage. The emotional resonance does the work that evidence cannot. Against an audience that lacks the analytical tools to demand argument rather than assertion, assertion is sufficient.

Eco's framework for recognising fascist aesthetics includes what he called "the rejection of modernism" — not modernity itself, but the Enlightenment tradition of reason, critique, and evidence-based argument. That rejection does not require a formal ideology. It can arrive through structural means: through platform design, through attention economics, through the quiet defunding of public libraries and the gutting of humanities education. The result is a population that is not necessarily sympathetic to fascism but is simply unprepared to resist it.

Rebuilding Civic Literacy as a Democratic Defence

None of this calls for nostalgia about some golden age of informed citizenship that never quite existed. Working-class communities in 1930s Britain were hardly uniformly equipped with critical reading skills, yet many resisted fascism with extraordinary courage. The question is not whether people were smarter then. It is whether the infrastructure for forming independent political judgment is being maintained or dismantled.

Media literacy programmes in schools — where they exist — tend to focus on identifying "fake news" at the headline level. That is necessary but insufficient. What civic education needs to develop is the slower, harder skill of sitting with a complex argument, testing its logic, and tolerating the discomfort of uncertainty. That requires practice with long texts. It requires teachers who are themselves trained in critical reading. It requires a cultural environment that treats sustained attention as a civic virtue rather than a personal quirk.

Public libraries, local journalism, and freely accessible long-form media are not luxury goods. They are the infrastructure of informed democracy. Their decline is not politically neutral.

Can Democracy Outlast the Collapse of Informed Citizenship?

The men who gathered at Dover and Portsmouth this week are not, individually, particularly frightening. What is frightening is the soil they are growing in: a fractured information environment, an attention economy that rewards outrage over argument, and a generation of citizens who encounter political claims through ten-second clips before the algorithm serves them something else entirely.

Democracy has never been self-sustaining. It has always required active maintenance: institutions, norms, habits of mind. The far-right rise UK movements are not creating the conditions that favour them. They are simply being opportunistic about conditions that already exist. The deeper challenge belongs to everyone who benefits from pluralist, liberal governance: to treat civic literacy not as an optional extra but as a first-line defence.

The fascists at the ports do not need followers who can construct a coherent argument. They need followers who cannot recognise that no coherent argument is being made. The distance between those two things — the space where critical thinking lives — is the terrain democracy must defend.

Source: Opinion | The Guardian