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The far-right turn of Blue Labour and the political ontology of post-liberalism

This genuinely surprised me but it explains a lot about the direction of Starmerism given the ideological influence Glasman in particular, as well as Blue Labour in general, seem to have had over the now dominant faction around Starmer:

Glasman hit similar beats in a January appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, (apparently facilitated by the good offices of Nigel Farage). There, Glasman expressed his long time interest in “MAGA” as “a strategy of coalition building in which workers can again have a voice”, given “the humiliation and degradation of the working class under the rule of the progressives”.

For the Labour peer, “progressives” are “the enemy … they are the enemy because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love, and they don’t even want you to enjoy sexual intercourse with your wife”. Agreeing with Bannon’s comment that progressives work to “sow disunion between the races”, Glasman said that they do this “all the time”, before adding, “it’s a relentless separation of people, victim status, microaggressions, power relationships, they are single-handedly destroying the labour movement”.

https://labourlist.org/2025/02/maurice-glasman-progressives-labour-peer/

Why has post-liberal communitarianism gone in this direction? I don’t think there’s anything in the philosophical sources far upstream of this movement (e.g. Etzioni, Macintyre, Taylor, Lasch) which easily lends itself to this direction of travel. An observation in the article above possibly hints at a mechanism which drives this movement:

There is a world of difference between criticising the left because you want to help it be better able to beat the right, and criticising the left to explain and justify why you are glad that the right has triumphed

Under what circumstances does the former become the latter? I wonder if the political ontology of communitarianism, particularly the tendency to think in terms of Gadamerian ‘horizons’ in relation to which meaning is secured, lends itself to a lazy populism in which anything outside of that horizon is a threat and anything that speaks for the horizon is a friend. It’s a philosophical approach to think about political contestation which obscures the sociological complexity of the cleavages it is generalising hazily about.

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