The far right wants metapolitics to simply go back to the past, restoring a thinly disguised form of fascism in the hijacked domain of contemporary conservative politics. Humans have always tried to understand and live their finite lives in relation to infinite possibilities — what could happen, what if, perhaps. Infinite possibilities are unknown unless brought to… Continue reading “The Metapolitics of the Far Right”
One. Every second article written about fascism starts by complaining that there is no consensus about what fascism is, then agrees with Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as an ideology of national regeneration before going on to prove, once again, that fascism involved an ideology of national regeneration. Two. Scholars stubbornly refuse to separate… Continue reading “Ten Things I Hate About Fascism Studies”
*This was given as Keynote Speech at the 2nd Meeting of the Working Group on the Implementation of the Council Declaration on the Fight against Antisemitism European Commission to the Working Group on Antisemitism & European Jewish Congress December 2019, Brussels.* Antisemitism is not just one form of discrimination among others. It is not just… Continue reading “Antisemitism in Schools”
On August 3, 2019, an armed gunman killed 22 and wounded 24 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Media reaction was swift, naming the act far-right violence due to the killer’s “anti-immigrant screed” and decision to target shoppers in a predominantly Hispanic area. Less than 24 hours later, a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio… Continue reading “The Psychology of Radical Right Violence: Social Dominance Orientation and the Cases of El Paso and Dayton”
In interrogating the far right’s persistent obsession with southern Africa, we can better understand what people like Trump, Hopkins, and terrorists like Roof, mean when they invoke it today. In 2018, the President of the United States Donald Trump posted a rather enigmatic tweet about“farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers”… Continue reading “Why Is the Radical Right Obsessed With Southern Africa?”
Electoral Breakthroughs Following the electoral breakthrough of the populist radical right (PRR) in continental Europe in both recent national parliamentary elections covering the 2015–2018 refugee crisis period and the 2019 European Parliament elections, many of these parties are no longer on the periphery and have become influential. Furthermore, a number of mainstream parties have avowedly… Continue reading “From ‘Challengers’ to ‘Incumbents’: The Populist Radical Right in Government”
The political goals of the New Right can largely be summarized by two central concepts: the intellectualization of right-wing extremism through the formulation of an intellectual metapolitics, and the pursuit of a (right-wing) cultural hegemony. Here, metapolitics denotes efforts to take intellectual control of public debates, shaping them on a theoretical meta-level by coining particular… Continue reading “On the Ideology and Strategy of the New Right”
Belgium presents a “negative” case where the radical right has experienced a downward electoral spiral. The majority of recent research has focused on the rise of populist radical-right parties in contemporary European politics. Recent cases such as Italy (Northern League), Austria (The Freedom Party), Hungary (Fidesz), Germany (Alternative for Germany) and the Netherlands (The Party… Continue reading “Why Is the Far Right Losing Voters in Belgium?”
In the world of political extremism, we often make assumptions about the relationship between extreme ideology and political violence. We assume that extremist views lead to violence, and that those who commit political violence are on the farthest ends of the political spectrum. However, there is strikingly little research that empirically supports this relationship. Of… Continue reading “The Role of Ideology in Radical Right Violence: Lessons from America”
How We Neglect Islamists by Refusing to Pin Them With the Radical Right Label[1] It has been over 70 years since the Axis powers were defeated. The horrors of the German Nazi and Italian Fascist regimes severely discredited fascism as an ideology. An anti-fascist consensus made it extremely difficult for fascism to emerge after World… Continue reading “How We Neglect Islamists by Refusing to Pin Them With the Radical Right Label”