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When legitimate concern is labelled right-wing extremism, one is not protecting democracy but the narrative of those in power. The term becomes a weapon against reality, the opposition, and the citizen’s right to think independently without fear.
A recent example is NTB’s description of the late conservative politician Anne Widdecombe as a “far-right politician”. Widdecombe receives that label because she left the Conservative Party for Reform, which the established media detest and therefore describe as “far right”. But anyone who has seen and knows Anne Widdecombe understands that this is a malicious falsehood. Given that she has now been killed, it borders on desecrating the dead.
Another example is Antirasistisk Front’s attack on Jon Helgheim. Ostensibly, it concerns research into right-wing extremism. At a deeper level, however, the dispute is about who has the power to define the boundaries of legitimate political thought – and what should happen to those who refuse to remain within them.
The term “right-wing extremist” has undergone a remarkable expansion. Previously, it described relatively limited milieus: neo-Nazis, revolutionary nationalists, violent racists, and people who wished to replace democracy with an authoritarian state. Today, the same term may be applied to people who believe immigration is too high, that crime trends are alarming, that cultural conflicts cannot simply be legislated away, or that the nation state has a legitimate right to preserve its historical identity.
That is a rather dramatic conceptual shift.
As the boundaries of extremism are expanded in this way, the sphere of politically permissible opinion is simultaneously narrowed. A person who describes problems associated with mass immigration is no longer met as a citizen whose analysis may be mistaken. He is treated as a symptom. He is not to be refuted, but diagnosed. His views are not to be discussed, but mapped.
In this way, research easily becomes part of a political border control.
The crucial question is therefore not merely how many right-wing extremists Norway has, but how the researchers have defined the category. If people can be placed close to extremism because they believe violence between religious groups may become difficult to avoid, or because they believe Norway is developing into a more lawless society, then one has not necessarily measured political extremism. One may just as well have measured pessimism, distrust of society, or experience.
A person who sees Swedish conditions developing and fears that Norway may follow has not thereby embraced a totalitarian ideology. A woman who experiences insecurity in her local community is not an extremist because her experience does not fit the official narrative. Nor does a critic of immigration become anti-democratic merely because he believes democratically elected authorities have pursued an irresponsible policy.
Yet this is precisely where the political utility of the term lies: “right-wing extremist” makes it possible to bypass the entire discussion of whether the criticism is true.
Antirasistisk Front invokes tragic murders in order to lend the label moral weight. The murders are intended to function as the end point of a chain of associations: first comes the critical statement, then the attitude, then radicalisation – and finally violence. In this way, an invisible link is established between the concerns of ordinary people and the most extreme acts a society has experienced.
It is a form of moral collectivisation.
Of course, racist violence must be taken seriously. Of course, ideologically motivated terrorism and murder have particular significance for society. But a crime committed in 1999 or 2001 can document what happened in 1999 or 2001. It cannot, in itself, demonstrate that right-wing extremism has doubled since 2022. Still less can it be used as evidence that people who today express concern about immigration, crime or cultural disintegration are on a path towards violence.
When the same cases must repeatedly be brought forward, decade after decade, an uncomfortable question also arises: are the victims being used primarily to understand the past – or to discipline today’s debate?
Historical crimes are thus transformed into moral warning signs. They are placed before political opponents to tell them where their thoughts allegedly lead. It is no longer necessary to demonstrate that Helgheim’s criticism is incorrect. It is sufficient to place that criticism in the vicinity of a tainted history.
This is guilt through constructed proximity.
The same method is seldom applied in the opposite direction. Islamist terrorist attacks are not normally used to cast suspicion on everyone who wants more Islam in Norway. Honour killings are not used to define all defenders of multiculturalism as sharing responsibility. Gang violence is not used to place immigration-liberal politicians in a moral kinship with the perpetrators. In such cases, it is immediately emphasised that the individual must be distinguished from the group, that the causes are complex, and that generalisation is dangerous.
But this intellectual caution disappears when the perpetrator can be placed on the political right.
Then the individual becomes a representative. The act becomes an expression of a structure. The murder becomes not merely a murder, but final proof of what “hate speech”, nationalism, criticism of immigration or allegedly misguided attitudes can lead to.
The asymmetry is not accidental. It is the system itself.
Anti-racism has, to a large extent, evolved from being a defence of the equal worth of the individual into a theory of collective innocence and collective guilt. The minority is understood as vulnerable, while the majority is understood as the bearer of historical and structural privilege. Consequently, crime committed by minorities is individualised, psychologised or socialised, whereas crime committed by members of the majority population is ideologised and generalised.
One person is confused. The other represents a movement.
One has a difficult background. The other reveals society’s dark undercurrents.
One must be understood within his concrete context. The other is used as a symbol of millions of people who have never committed violence and have never wished to do so.
Thus emerges the political “other”. Not primarily the immigrant, as anti-racists continually claim, but the native dissident: the citizen who sees what he sees, draws his own conclusions, and refuses to allow his own experiences to be corrected by the conceptual framework of the moral upper class.
Formally, he remains within democracy, but culturally he is treated as though he stands outside it. He has the right to vote, but his worldview is not regarded as legitimate. He may participate in debate, but only on condition that he first accepts the premises of his opponents. If he refuses, the disagreement itself becomes evidence of radicalisation.
This is the logic of exclusion by definition: first, the category of extremism is made broad enough to encompass large parts of the opposition. Then the size of that category is used as proof that extremism is growing.
It is a perfect circle.
If ever more Norwegians express the view that society is becoming less safe, this may, of course, be because they have been influenced by right-wing extremist propaganda. But it may also be because society has, in fact, become less safe. If more people believe that ethnic and religious conflicts may become unavoidable, this may be due to prejudice. But it may equally be because the authorities have imported conflicts they do not understand and then labelled those who describe the consequences.
Research that does not seriously examine this possibility is not studying reality. It is protecting a narrative.
Helgheim’s real offence is therefore not that he defends extremism, but that he challenges the measuring instrument. He asks whether the research is finding what it claims to be looking for, or whether it has already defined concern, criticism of the system and cultural resistance as stages on the road to extremism.
That question is dangerous because so much institutional power rests upon those categories not being scrutinised.
“Right-wing extremist” has become one of the most effective instruments of power in our age. It no longer merely describes a political fringe. It marks the boundary between those who are to be listened to and those who are merely to be explained. Between citizens with arguments and people with attitudes. Between legitimate disagreement and moral deviance.
A democracy can live with extreme opinions. It can combat violent milieus, prosecute specific crimes, and keep anti-democratic movements under surveillance.
What a democracy cannot survive is having the definitions of those in power elevated beyond criticism.
For the moment ordinary people’s perception of reality is reclassified as extremism, one has not merely excluded the political opponent by definition.
One has begun to exclude reality itself.