Contemporary Far Right Research Articles

The Traditionalist micro-utopia of Bloomington, Indiana

ABSTRACT Guénonian Traditionalism, sometimes called Radical Traditionalism or Integral Traditionalism, is an important ideological stream within the contemporary far-right. It condemns modernity for its spiritual emptiness and for the way in which proper authority, which derives from the transcendent, has been usurped. This article asks how Traditionalist principles have worked in practice, taking the attempt to establish a Traditionalist micro-utopia in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1980s. The article argues that the Bloomington community’s practice corresponded with its thought in that it achieved a degree of separation from modernity, but that it was less clearly successful in its spiritual aims, given issues with distracting ambitions, strife, and sex.

Humor, Ridicule, and the Far Right: Mainstreaming Exclusion Through Online Animation

This paper critically examines the use of online humor and ridicule to promote and normalize far-right exclusionary discourses. Through a critical qualitative study of the Please Explain miniseries, a series of thirty-four short web cartoons produced by Australian far-right populist party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, we explore the strategic use of humor in the communicative arsenal of the contemporary far-right. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis, we examine how humor is used to soften articulations of exclusionary and supremacist ideas, including racism, misogyny, and queerphobia. Our findings suggest that the frivolity and irony of the online animated genre works to stretch the boundaries of the sayable, potentially making the content more palatable to non-far-right audiences. We argue that the strategic use of exclusionary humor forms part of a wider project of far-right discursive mainstreaming that simultaneously (re)legitimizes everyday expressions of exclusion.

Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand

The contemporary far-right is an extraordinarily complex, diverse ideological and political ecosystem: Christian, atheist, and pagan; violent and parliamentary; nationalist and civilisational; fear- and hate-laden and utopian; individualist and communitarian; traditionalist and accelerationalist; statist and libertarian; progressivist and declinist. Histories of Hate, edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij, and Paul Spoonley demonstrates that such multiplicity is a feature of the history of the far-right in this country.

Gender and the Far-right in the United States: Female Extremists and the Mainstreaming of Contemporary White Nationalism

This article explores gender and the far-right in the United States with specific attention to female actors and gendered ideologies in the realms of culture and media. By focusing on several female extremists, I show how traditional and rigid ideas of home, marriage, family and community bolster the xenophobia and racism of white nationalism in the United States. This article includes a historical overview of the concept of metapolitics and emphasizes its centrality to the mainstreaming of the contemporary far-right. I suggest that the internet and social media have become the far-right's premier metapolitical spaces, which can help to explain both the normalization of white nationalism and the unique role of female extremists. Several case studies of far-right women elucidate how gender norms are performed online, and how they reinforce anxious narratives of white erasure and victimhood, while fomenting antagonism towards feminism, globalism and multiculturalism. This article explores how female actors are galvanizing white nationalism in the United States, as they build on earlier eras of far-right activism and amplify the far-right via social media.

New Culture Wars: Tradwives, Bodybuilders and the Neoliberalism of the Far-Right

The renewed interest in unearthing the structural similarities between neoliberalism’s ‘authoritarianism’ and the contemporary far-right has paid little to no attention to another critical overlap between the two: the deep aversion towards the ‘feminisation of society’. This paper aims twofold: first, I theorise the relation between gender and the state under neoliberalism as a fundamental aspect of its de-democratising project, which underscores a structural similarity between the two. Second, I highlight the role of politicising culture in both neoliberalism and the far-right. Drawing on Wilhelm Röpke’s theorisation of the cultural-symbolic and anthropological order as a political practice mystifying seemingly ‘autonomous’ political and economic orders, I show how the far-right ‘anti-gender’ culture wars are thoroughly compatible with neoliberalism. Despite the former’s rhetorical antagonism with the latter, ‘tradwives’ and bodybuilders are prime ‘authoritarian’ neoliberal subjects. I find evidence in the work of the German identitarians organised around the Institut für Staatspolitik.

Antisemitism, Holocaust Denial, and Germany’s Far Right: How the AfD Tiptoes around Nazism

ABSTRACT This article examines antisemitism and Holocaust denial in contemporary Far-Right German politics with a focus on the party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD). The article argues that the AfD has attempted to ‘tiptoe around Nazism’—a phrase coined by the author, which describes how the party has strategically and haphazardly reacted to scandals as they arise in order to avoid being associated with Nazism and losing moderate voters. The first section investigates how the AfD has reacted to various internal scandals that have damaged its reputation. This analysis encompasses the party’s fraught relationship to the Islamophobic, anti-refugee organization PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicization of the Occident) as well as the ‘Höcke Affair,’ in which prominent AfD leader Björn Höcke denigrated the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as a ‘monument of shame.’ The second section examines the AfD’s proactive attempts to tiptoe around Nazism by portraying itself as philosemitic and pro-Israel and courting Jewish voters as part of its controversial subgroup Jews in the AfD (Juden in der AfD, JAfD). Here it explains how JAfD members, particularly Jews who immigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union, have rationalized their paradoxical support for this outwardly antisemitic and denialist party. The conclusion situates the AfD in the broader transatlantic context of Far-Right extremism, highlighting trends that may signal—yet, more likely, will fail to bring about—the party’s demise.

Introduction: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right

ABSTRACT This essay introduces the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on ‘Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right’. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a metalanguage in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.

How the Contemporary Far-Right Have Popularised their Appeals

This study investigates the role of populism in the growing prominence of the far-right and will address a research gap by specifically focusing on the Australian context – a national setting often overlooked in this field of study. A fresh approach is taken that seeks to understand the new far-right landscape in in terms of discourse, messaging and appeals, rather than trying to group together people and parties. This lens will be used to establish how three components of framing and disseminating far-right discourse have been crucial in the contemporary popularisation of far-right appeals. Firstly, the use of populism to mobilise the ethno-cultural majority who are feeling threatened and hostile due to historical, political and contextual factors. The fluid and pragmatic changing of discourses will then be identified as a decisive strategy in appealing to a wider audience, with specific consideration given to the far-right’s utilisation of Islamophobic messaging. The final component is the evolution and widespread dissemination of far-right messaging. It will be argued that the populist far-right have transformed and achieved mainstream success because these three components have come together at this time in history and provided a great deal of strength to the operation of the far-right.

The Rise of Far-Right Civilizationism

In recent years the rise of far-right politics in North America and Europe has called into question the stability and cohesion of the so-called liberal international order. Scholars and commentators have argued that this swelling configuration of reactionary social forces threatens the future of western hegemony within a 21st century global capitalism. This essay reflects on the role of transnational organizations, organic intellectuals and elite actors in shaping the modern far-right movement. This essay will discuss the rise of a transnational ideology of the contemporary far-right which I call ‘far-right civilizationism’. This far-right ‘hegemonic project’ seeks to challenge the centrist global governance model of ‘neoliberal cosmopolitanism’, which has been dominant in the West since the end of the Cold War. The reactionary worldview of far-right civilizationism represents an alternative elite grand strategy for world order, purposed to refurbish elite hegemony during a period of profound structural crisis.

Neoliberalism and the Far-Right: A Contradictory Embrace

This article examines the contradictory relationship between neoliberalism and the politics of the far-right. It seeks to identify and explain the divergence of the ‘economic’ and the social/cultural spheres under neoliberalism (notably in articulations of race and class and the ‘politics of whiteness’) and how such developments play out in the politics of the contemporary far-right. We also seek to examine the degree to which the politics of the far-right pose problems for the consolidation and long-term stabilization of neoliberalism, through acting as a populist source of pressure on the conservative-right and tapping into sources of alienation amongst déclassé social layers. Finally, we locate the politics of the far-right within the broader atrophying of political representation and accountability of the neoliberal era with respect to the institutional and legal organization of neoliberalism at the international level, as most obviously highlighted in the ongoing crisis of the EU and Eurozone.

Capitalism, crisis and the far-right in the neoliberal era

Far-right political currents continue to occupy a significant presence within many European states and, in recent years, have become associated with a distinct strand of anti-globalisation politics. This suggests that there is a connection between the socio-economic instabilities associated with capitalist development and the political fortunes of the far-right. While some scholars have recognised the significance of socio-economic factors in the (re)emergence and evolution of European far-right movements, much of this work has failed to incorporate the structural context and evolving character of international capitalist development in shaping the emergence and evolution of the far-right. It is the objective of this article to address this analytical lacuna in the discussion of far-right politics. Thus, through an engagement with existing Marxist accounts of fascism, I offer a revised historical material perspective on the evolving relationship between capitalist development and the far-right, with a particular emphasis on how the international dimensions of capitalist development help us account for the paradoxical character of the far-right revival. Thus, while the contemporary far-right has taken advantage of the instabilities and insecurities derived from neoliberal globalisation, its political fortunes have been historically circumscribed by the post-war transformation in the hegemonic organisational and institutional form of capitalist development.

Capitalist Development and the Rise and ‘Fall’ of the Far-Right

This article offers an alternative account of the European far-right from those prevailing in comparative politics and the history of ideas literatures. The article focuses on: (i) the historical evolution of the European far-right from its late 19th-century origins to its contemporary form as a current of anti-globalization; and (ii) the way in which international capitalist development explains the generalized emergence and ‘success’ of the far-right. I argue that uneven capitalist development has been integral to the evolution of the far-right. It has been the geopolitical expressions of capitalist development that best account for enabling domestic political contexts that have facilitated far-right mobilizations. Consequently, whilst the far-right has re-emerged, because of the post-1945 decoupling of uneven capitalist development from geopolitical rivalry, the international and domestic social, political and ideological resources that the contemporary far-right can draw upon are considerably weaker than the historical far-right.